Everlastingness

(Father George Beesley, drawn and quartered in Fleet Street, London, 1591, and beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987)


Having been for your own reasons
alive once

won’t you homilize to me about 
just how living happened
to cease   what Fleet
Street came to mean
to you          In Bliss
your Time must not be
as constrained as mine

by notions of simultaneity
as when Meister Eckhart says
It will not be now 
that God refuses you,
he has refused 
you in his everlastingness

having decided before the cosmos was born

to deny a supplication I might make day after tomorrow
Turn his ear away
billions of years ago from what
I might pray this Thursday
Lord Thy will 
be done

Do not
you in your Everlastingness
refuse me, Blessed George, but turn

to me as when Beethoven
conducted full unhearing his Ninth Symphony’s premiere
and the chorus and orchestra ignored his furious 
waving of the baton

as he was out of their time 
and the symphony already
finished

till a soprano came, gently, to turn him around
to face the final assessment 
he could only 
see: palm slapping palm.
Will you
who are already through

talk to me in my dreams sometimes
of your everlastingness
and the overness
of the part of you that only lasted
twenty-eight years on earth

Quarters of your body
hung from the four bridges

Will you soothe my frenzied
self-conducting 
in the wrong tempo
as a witness said of Beethoven as though
he wanted to play all the instruments and sing
all the chorus parts before it was
too late will you
turn me

to face however minimal
those visible 
ruptures of terminal

applause