Tenacity’s Trust
by Odin Roark

One’s waning dusk is wise,
but…

Even as bright colors from the past,
so distant yet so immediately tearful,
struggle with the fading light,
respond to the within
of one’s ebbing tide,
threats abound.

Shadowing one’s inner shores
lurks that irascible scoundrel,
his pale visage in black,
his scythe of time reflecting
the last glint of a fading sun,
his knowing smile temperate
and calm.

He is patient.

With little left to offer,
memory, reverie’s distant ancestor,
rides the enigmatic winds,
accepting that elegiac details of long ago yesterdays
may have conceded to the mist.

Yet…

With patient repose,
one’s subterraneous innards,
spread salty tributaries of experience,
and like a pink-scaled ancestral migration
needing a “last hurrah” of spawning adventure,
purges its upstream arcs of life,
desperation bathing one’s remaining vision
with a survivalist’s remembrance,
a brine-and-sting challenge,
creating another current,
tenacity’s thrust to catch a remaining wave.

Above the wash…

The quietus image
its ghostly insistence sitting atop its perch,
rests its scythe,
checks his smart watch,
and accepts.

“Maybe next time.”