Encounter Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

In the caverns and deep recesses of your eyes
I could see the prints of pain and care
that guilty Time had run across the shutters,

Within the winding darkness that's your head
my stealthy soul had felt the scars and weals -
campaign trophies of the battle to exist;

And I longed to heal that cratered mind,
to bandage up that sickened heart
which pumps such fuel to the brain;

But, sensing my design you clicked
the latch on my researching gaze,
and offered me instead that coral meadow

quaking to draw oblivion from my mouth:
And so it past;the one authentic
track not cut, just never laid.

What was I to you?
A sort of sour hotel, encountered
on a pointless pilgrimage?

... you to me?¿one more statistic
in my troubled casebook of humanity:
poignant to enter but painless to erase;

both of us tho, perhaps pitiful
in our own way.


8 March 1969