The Immortal sat on a tree stump,
His long, sloping forehead, a pinnacle of rock,
Robes of faded vermillion, a petrified languor,
Carved into the lineaments of his face,
An ancient parchment whereon was writ
A depth of sorrow unknowable to man
When you live forever,
Your eyes become portals sick-glutted on suffering,
Fortitude the only friend keeping you up-propped,
Crossing interminable wildernesses, clambering
Over the serried dead in their wormy trenches,
Bones powdered into rocks,
Rocks compounded into worlds,
Where new wars may be fought,
And the ugly process repeated
Unable to die, you cannot separate from it,
It lives in you, and you in it,
Passing before your eyes – a dream of dust –
An illusion cast – a spell unbroken –
Like Sisyphus, every time you think you’ve broken through,
The vapours of illusion swell up from the lagoon,
Leaving a simulacra in its place
The oak stump upon which The Immortal sat
Was the last relic of an ancient wood,
Over which he’d presided for ages uncountable,
Having tired of the tortures and endless wars
Of the stars systems through which he travelled,
He withdrew to the relative quietude of planet Earth,
Then little peopled, where he could hold converse
With volcanoes, and meditate in mid-air above
Lava fields, reigning in tranquillity aloft
The times and tides of Creation,
Where the serenity of all-pervading ocean,
Could be suddenly thwart into torment by storms,
And abruptions of equal duration, jungles sprouting
Up in the passing of a year’s breath,
Then eaten up by swamps anon
My imagination does me more credit than my pen
Can express – or so I tell you as The Immortal passed
Gently through the birth throes of pre-history,
Swimming beside giant trilobites – by ambitious
Lifeforms with spiralling flagella, and other spawn
Worked by infinity’s ingenuity, radially proliferating
In a concourse of unlikely ways, to secure their time
Upon this uncertain world – creatures some of us
Still spy in dreams and visions, long since re-housed
In the Earth’s magma core, never to be seen again
After the last Ice Age,
When the world began to take a shape
We might recognize,
The Immortal settled in the wood aforementioned.
He kept watch over the birds,
Returning fallen chicks to their nests,
He knew the names of every new bud,
And kept in discourse with the elementals
Who performed their office in these woods.
Leaf-growth, sap-rise, wing-shuffle, and silenced
Preen were the notes of his flute;
Bird call and bush-rustle were scratchings
Within his throat. He was the sacred storehouse
From which all birds gathered their songs;
The unseen muse from which robins
Derive their twelve-month rhapsody
For thousands of years, these woods went unhaunted
By unwanted men – an enchantment spread from tree
To tree to keep the peace of the place in humble perpetuity,
Preserved in the amberous damask of unfading twilight,
Enwombed in a glow, fireside lambent,
They remained in a state of ceaseless merriment,
Boycotting all seasons but Spring.
Lute, harp, and merry bells jangling
To keep the goodness in – an unpunctured yoke
Of log-snug warmth, where no tree was felled
But by the consent of the wind,
Or The Immortal’s wise sense of order
But this Golden Age could not remain forever.
As violently inconstant as the molten mountains
That gave them form, the Earth grew ripe,
Grew dizzy for change. Man spread like small-pox
Over its once fair face, carving up the land
To prostitute it to their wants.
All around the wood,
Landscapes were tarnished to suit their ways,
Land-fills, quarries, the thoughtless proliferation of waste,
Garbage everywhere man was,
And even where he was not,
Lakes gave up their dead,
Vomiting amphibious refugees,
Newts and frogs, fish fiercely hungry for legs
To escape the toxins eating into their scales,
Mountains mined, the whole world suffocated
Beneath the carapace of cement – skies criss-crossed
With fumes – rivers red with copper and rust –
Every creature and thing now marketable and priced,
Life only worth the telling of its death-hardened function,
The pleasure it can give to the luxury-fat rich
The Immortal knew the wood’s days were numbered,
The encroachment of machine and saw not forestalled,
The spells could not stave off the men
Who lacked mind enough to know magic existed at all
The Immortal did all he could,
Pleading with interdimensional councils who might intervene:
“Take me!” he implored. “Let me sacrifice my immortality,
And infuse it in the soil of this wood,
So these trees will be axe-impervious as diamond flesh,
And the birdsong as though music from an eternal book
Inked Akashic upon the sky. Let there be at least one place
Upon the Earth where man’s murderous fingers cannot pry.”
But The Council would not give their consent –
Too much Karma and interdimensional red tape.
“An immortal born must immortal be,
Quitless of time or the tides of the sea.”
And so he saw it done:
Every tree cut down –
Every bird unhoused –
Every spirit cast out to be reborn
As a curse upon those diseased enough
To quit them
Which is why you see him here now,
On the un-uprooted stump of the last remaining oak,
And as grief runs proportionate to the lives its afflicts,
I don’t know if I’ll ever have the comfort,
Or the sadness,
To watch The Immortal move on
