Lightheartedness

Intensest heavens –
And there’s no more meaning
Between close lying faces
-It cannot be said-
There is no word
For the darkness overcoming
Every white flower –
Delicate and separate and cold
- Tell me one thing!
Something dull and common
I won’t forget -- before
The world leaves in echoes
Of remembered tears

The daisies in the bowl have shrunk
Like my eyes and heart
And the walls of my room –
Everything familiar is crushed
- The gnomes dance in terror
Over the wilting lilacs
The house has no welcome
-Swallowed by lethe –
I’ll drink your wrists
And forget – Oh blind!
Lie and forget and drown
In bottomless afteryears
Of drinking your lips
- The shade rips mirth
Back to the ecstasy of disquietude
Cross, recross,
One, two, four, three
Talk to me. Sh! They might hear.
We’re alone on this road –
Where the dogwoods drive us mad
-- In terror –-
and the black soil whispers, “hush.”
It’s the shape of these things.

Jasmine Field Dream

Inhaling the quality of transience
From earth to fiction sweet dalliance
While in sleep a soft, long dream
Of you and you and crimson steam
In jasmine fields sweet feet trod
And arms and arms and you your bod
Four wax candles long and drawn
Silhouetting windows evaporating dawn
I spoke in whispers clear and strange
Proud and moved your eyes did change
The rumpled sky dared not sigh
Oh breathless stars the moon did cry

Orange, October, it and you
Above the air an instant too –
Streams of laughter shrouding light
Through a bright flame of flying night
Suddenly one syllable broke on through
Time immortal nowhere new –
Pouring wonderful hours: distant tea
Thundering heavens moving swiftly
Words incomprehensible a ghost so fair
And you and you sugar floating air

The day began to break. A cup fell.
How not to shake brilliant night’s spell?
Bodies move and questions sound
Petals flutter unconsciously to ground
How timelessness lends its teasing hand
How the light glints your hair, every strand
Eternal holiness of dumb, mad eyelash
Where a sparrow and the horizon clash
And the lines of houses, the backdrop white
Stillness yet and the symmetry of delight
The witchery of a dream, the sky falls apart
Thistles whispering I woke with a start
Stretching an arm and fingers long
Leaves shrilling breezy in a song
My agony made the blueberries quiver
A ghost, she was there, in rippling river
I clambered for sleep to no avail
Her flowers in glamorous white did sail
Into eternal boughs of dream sublime
Shattering exquisite twilight of mind.

Walking at Dawn in October

As the sun crept quietly up,
I felt inspired by a recent taste and a recent perfume.
Beyond early mind-strata where nature can be dull as ditch water,
memories and emotions coalesce as to provide a semi-gloss of geological magic.
Here one’s veins are filled with a certain streak of light or a certain pebble.
And here I felt famous among the ducks – A prince happy as the grass was green.
While walking I learned fierce tears as I sang and shattered the sun in flight.
Suddenly the light wasn’t so simple,
And my heart grew long as the shadow of undying breath.

I walked in the castle of stinging white apple blossoms,
And was honored all my days by the ripple of water,
As a heron dove through winged trees into the semantics of the pond.
The waking town was but a paradigm of ecological usurpation, as fluid as liberty in this most natural elemental state, and suddenly I longed for a gate to walk through -
To remember this morning like that of a long dead child who never stopped singing.
Every blade of grass whispering truth and the still water condensed into a single substance for the marvel of a memory,
As tall as a legend and as brown as the owl.

Stillbirds in singingwater piercing my eyes,
As the dawn broke beyond my mind and the glowworms of the moon.
I cared nothing for the mutiny of the night, and wished
My legs would take me to many lamb-white days greeted by dark eyes at dawn,
As angelic as the stretching of limbs and as easy as the first yawn.
How behaving like the wind could be less solemn than the birch swinging into quiet window panes, newly ornamented with a face, a hand and toast.
I hoped to not disturb the universe and the politics of coffee spoons measuring the morning into bottomless mugs of life through a French roast.

As simple as a cucumber was my imagination while walking back,
Not owing to any talk of you or me, but prodigious beckoning of tea and cake.
The morning felt like marmalade smiles, perhaps she’d spread it on toast, and
Tasted the dawn in another direction while wiping her mouth roguish as a rake.
There will be time, time for revisions, time for hope, and time to meet a face,
But that’s for another day when traveling free-spirited up the ridge of a sea-lined coast.
And would it be worth it, and would it be worthwhile, I thought, to go someplace else,
To satisfy mad poetics of wild farming, sweat dripping from yellow hills to cheeks.
And would it be worthwhile, and would it be worth it, I thought, to go back?