Wednesday, November 30, 2011

as if in a mirror.

Faithfulness, thankfulness,
a path known well and trodden often,
a gift, a surprise, and the hope
enveloped like a bird
in the mountains,

endless, darting
amidst the songs welcomingly.

wellspring.

Half-awoken, shifting or falling
in the earth; who sighed
with my sigh, near to me?
Darkling world,
you mourn the exhaustion
of rivers who flow forward
endlessly, or end
in perpetual barrenness.
Empty rivers stretch in testament
of movement.

Do we speak
to all that springs forth
green and bright as a friend,
when we people the world
with lore, knowing ourselves
in the swimmingness of rivers?
Do we shy from light with the single desire
to be, desire written intricately
across all else,
folded gently into me?

Nothing was said of this.
Who divides mercy from madness?
Who divides water from water,
light from light,
the endless darkness, hurtling,
from the sweetness of sleep,
when we wake up
deeply refreshed?
I heard you walking near

while I sat near the window on a rainy day,
and someone practised the piano.
I asked about my parents,
the parents of their parents, trying to trace
far back to what cannot be reached
in time, or in evident process.
In a simple step,
a simple way, movement in time.
We fill the pages, finite, almost endless,
all with stories,
synonymity.

Morning wakes
for a winsome world,
who also yearns to wake.
I yearn again to wake
when my eyes see light,
when the light falls sweetly,
when leaves sway inanimately.

A boat stirs the lake,
a child moves in the womb,
and I lie in the shade of the valley.
I lie here and try to remember
under elemented skies.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

cearu.

I strive to understand the words
addressed to me, unknown. Immense
as unread shelves and the minutes
till morning,
robed in silence;

you are more than I've clung to
or imagined.

Lost in the elaborate and foreign gaze,
you are to me
like one who is spoken of.

Under an unchanging sky
and windswept clouds,
you are to me like one
whose words are of more worth
than I'd known.

When you spoke,
I heard, after many days.
You are like one who stays with me
near an unlit fire,
who waits for me, with me,
through seas of restlessness.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

you restore.

I revel not in a dying sun;
my eyes, my feet, lament not western seas,
nor will I sacrifice again the bird that sings,
but cleave my heart, my eyes,
to your paths over me.

To these,
one thing I know;
my heart, my feet,
my hands that grope,
my eyes grown dim,
the crops that fail,
the vine grown sweet.
One thing I've known,
the house I return to.

One lingers on the horizon,
fills the fields, the trees,
the words and the days.
Here is one thing, one hand,
one voice left
at the end of all things,
and your paths over me.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

akin to pleasantness.

Fire-heart,
my words like sharpened stone,
drawn and formed from mercurial soil
to shatter violence.

No small river, your words
like eternity. Waters passing over,
over and over me.
(Had you abandoned me?)

Having no names
they take my stone-heart mail,
rend open the ceiling
to see the sun.

All I lament
this soil, beneath the sky.
My paths wend back for no one
into ignominy.