Poem: The Death of Narcissus by Spencer Johnson

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The Death of Narcissus

Look, the spring has come in this florid, fertile valley!

Hear the morning’s song recited from budding, reaching boughs

by flitting mouthpieces of creation;

feel the cool fog wet your lashes and dissipate into the warmth of blue-gold day;

breathe in a fragrance once known, yet altogether new,

of growth and fecundity, of vitality and promise—of blossoming life;

wet your tongue with a draft of the harvest past,

pay homage to the vines now bare and sprouting.

Yes, the shifting seasons carry me and send me forth into oblivion—

but to me I draw only farther from what was left behind.

Once, there was a light came in this world and shone on me its splendor;

once, she looked on me and smiled, and her eyes gleamed in the summer sun.

What truth can words tell that might in verse portray

what lived in every sunrise of those days?

The perfume of the innocently budding flowers

remembers nothing of the air we breathed;

the bees know not the sweetness of my rose—

how then, in rolling syllables, might I pronounce what lived

in my heart and what walked in this world?

If I might hold you, trembling, whisper earnestly,

so that you see the fire of my eyes, then, even then,

you would not believe what teems at the abysmal bottom of my words—

unless, as I both wish and lament,

you, too, walked the path at sundown where the sea swallows the sun

and the pearl-enshrined heavens swell heavily,

and all the world sings in harmony for the love it brought forth.

Maybe you, too, once lay trembling at night,

unable to sleep for fear you may wake up.

Maybe you, too, saw that the sun had once again risen,

and that this alone is a miracle worthy of many lifetimes of gratitude.

But the sun, imparting in the leaves the while its golden hue,

did play the harbinger, the very bringer, of darkness.

What can I say was lost in the autumn lull?

Does one lament what might not have been,

or does one sing to its impermanence?

That she was once mine, I to spring proclaim,but the coming of the world now brings no substance;

no nimble fingers play upon my strings, save hers,

in the play of memory and illusion.

The scene of her departure I most readily possess,

and many a cold night since have I perceived dissolved and transfigured thereto:

called on, she was, westward, where the sun went to rest;

over the blue expanse somewhere, above the world and below the firmament,

a halcyon from the shore to be loved.

Loved, yes—the crawling, desolate world is nothing

but an expanse of fuming waste unless in temples of blessed artifice

we fall to our knees before an altar of patient devotion.

Look, the spring has come all the same.

All around, the fog rolls heavy off the quiet, leaden sea,

advancing its groping fingers through our valley of blind and blanketed wonder.

A gnawing hunger recalls me to myself and I perceive

that I yet am made of flesh, that I have hands, and feet, and hair,

and all of this withers but slowly, in time not with worries but with trees.

My palm, I see, is wrinkled, but scarcely more so than this summer past,

for all the long stretch since, in which, in the ageless temple of my mind,

centuries passed unheeded and scorned.

How simple, the desires of this machine, yet how complex, its functions.

My stomach does not mourn, though it desires.

I wonder if the birds perceive their bodies, or simply sing from them?

I think I’ll have a warm meal and think more on this strangeness,

and offer something of myself, so that, if it will have me,

I might not see this world turning,

but once and for all walk in it.

Spencer Johnson is a poet and novelist living in the Napa Valley with his wife and three boys. In 2023, two of his poems were published in the Napa Valley Writers Club’s anthology, Opus IV. Having been raised in a forest in Oregon, nature is never far away in his writing.