Past Regards

As if memory were the night sky

For weeks I had been living in the auroras
Of past regards

Walking each evening through the expressionistic
Negatives of what had been the album

Of my life
Each of those negatives made boldly present

By the rush of colors along the sky—
I‘d always held to the propositions of escape

To those theorems of growth & departure
The way new foliage weaves along the trellis of desire

I had always hoped that I would rise like a phoenix
Into the halo of the perfected

Self & now with the patience of an archeologist
Who has discovered the fierce weathers vibrating
Along the high proscenium of some distant past
I stepped into its pale archway & discovered I was

Able to unfold the crumpled origami of memory
Frame by frame & print by print & canvas by

Canvas to find the articulations of those auroras
To recognize the fragrances of recollection

& the resurrection of each aspect of what God-
The-Animator had set in motion filling Michelangelo’s

Cartoons with such liquid color pouring into those shapes
All of the force of blood & circumstance

Along those ever-drying frescoes—
It was as if one day walking through a second-hand shop

Just off the beach I’d discovered an over-sized pack of cards
In a wooden case raw with age & rain & there within

Lifted out all of the scenes of my life
Each one valued not as Ace or Queen nor Jack nor King
But instead by the gilt borders of what “had been”
Each episode framed by the precise rendering

Of a fence or a street or the edges of an old house
Or the trees rising at the boundary of a farm

& each silver card of that miraculous deck
As I lifted it into the light

Reflected not only what had been & whom I’d loved
But also there I could see myself at every age

Released into those shifting mirrors
& I saw not only how I’d once seen the world

But also the many ways my own past regarded me
& how the world when it sees us is also—simply—seen

As our own hopes & in our own auroras of past regards

David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled The Auroras. He is also the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.