a promise.

My last breath will be given back
to the one who gives it to me.
Every day till then
I will wait, I will see you.

Every morning,
let the words that catch my breath
not fall to the ground empty,
but make me come alive,

and let the brightness
of the likeness of your nearness
speak on my behalf, show me, wake me:
I have nothing else.

sweetly I take thee, obligation dread.

Let these words, printed pages,
phrases, the smell of ink faded
be devoid of beauty now.
Come to these shelves not again,
we who beg because of hunger.
Empty them of sound or sigh,
battered by uncomfortable fits of chance,
finally divorced from dreams
to heal in sullen silence.
The elegy of beauty was stark.

Desolate in endings,
tear them from strength or pallid sweetness,
kindness, longing, choosing, sickness,
disappointment. Hate the length of sounds
and quiet friendship
of syllables, flash of something new,
chemicals and blood.
The next breath; worlds languish,
dying, and the sun burns blindly.
Sky stretches without sackcloth,
clashes all inside with something
and nothing, nothing else;
brutal our mighty steps
through towns where novels spill no light.

Let our words decay and shatter
at the sound of singleness.
Poured in a dry riverbed,
they would shout in their millions
an endless cacophony
of something
and everything else. Turn the lights brighter,
make the music louder. Drown the sky.

Heart, steal not memory
from blood or parchment,
words of any goodness.
Pour your apathy into
the mouth of earth’s darker tunnels.
Surrender cold cynicism
to the hands of one desirable,
the words that speak endlessly
and perplex us
(long nights alone).

Once, I loved you.
More than I could say.
Today I know only
the tumbling leap of my
own mind. In my universe,
your words move the air
scattering resonance,
austere and alone.

The elegy of beauty was forgettable.
We are the ones who desired,
who were satisfied.

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.

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.

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.

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.

a cord of many strands.

As the waking stars slowly emerge,
in the middle of the night
or in sleep like valleys,
in the morning
when the light is sweet

we belong to this day, flowing seamlessly
from week to year, hour to hour
of daylight, inclining
to the words beneath.

Small fires flare, some nights;
vast storms ascend.
In our last rest (last breath),
sunrise, earth, and sky immense
flee from your presence.
Words on our lips
are standing on the path where eyes
find coastlines, never seen before.

We’ve silently remembered
for a long time, turning it over
and over, brighter still
in an ordinary conversation.

Earth and sky are waiting
as the waking stars slowly find light.
Rest, rest in this,
or stand on the precipice of wordlessness.

so much yet lies buried.

Ours are the conversations,
the pages and days of the world,
the shapes of silent music from an unknown
brightness of all forgotten or submerged
voices in a place that appears no longer.

"A voice speaks and you listen:
wondering at the form of what is foreign
or alike you listen, speak in reply and listen."
Why hope that there is something material,
something less like ghosts who slip
treacherously out of meeting
in the words we knit and reach for?

Languages fierce in their secrets intersect
or slice apart the dreams proffered
across gravity, space, time, motion.
The sky speaks and the vacant face
looking up to shapeless face
speaks, unheard and unknown.
So much unfolds to be told.
We stare together at the same spark
and then go home.

What if there were more to give
and a heart to empty into hands,
whatever that would mean,
regardless of how it were held?
Though you've rested in this place
I can barely breathe.

This is the gift that isn't yours to give,
the canvas that isn't yours to fill.

"We could still stand together.
I hope we could walk as if we weren't alone."

to be, to be like.

I've heard sometimes that there are two ways of understanding and defining things. You can either describe what they are like or divide them from what they are not, and these are conflicting approaches. While the first way seems to evoke a primitive kind of cosmology, a tangible world where similitude, meaning and metaphor belong together, the other is linked more with Western rationality. The whole idea seems to lament the responsible necessity of dividing logic's desired Reality from the countless perspectives known by experience.

I'm not sure that this is right. The fullest and most resonant ideas seem to approach their subjects according to their shape and their substance simultaneously, working through the relationships and differences between both aspects of each thing as we see them to be. The universe is varied and yet it's real; it's not a homogenous field of feeling, intense yet irrelevant to the nothingness outside it. It's not a mass of shadows or echoes, and certainly not a cold shell of categories.

Logic stands strong, but never stands alone. The further you travel into understanding the layers upon layers of what the world is (independently of us, except for ourselves) and is significant as, this grows: feeling and meaning stand together in a highly natural way.

Knowledge like this can be surprising and intense. It can be familiar and ordinary. That's not the point; there's something deeply right about handling what defines and what comprises a thing in the same breath. Even if you won't and can't pin all things down like dead moths, they may not be elusive to reason.

Even when it feels like the sense of sight has rarely, if ever, existed for us.

faithful.

As warmth rises in the afternoon
of what has been winter,
I stand and face the west.
It’s weeks now since I stood

and months, years long
since I spoke, but I’ve learnt songs
and I anticipate the morning,
morning from behind the hills of sunset.

To have words and not the heart
or to have the right heart and yet long
to be filled with the words
you spoke or speak.

To hold what is not apathy
but is numb to the voice
that spoke or speaks,
to stand, to move,

simply to be in a place
and understand the warmth
of the sun over us. Oh agitation
of beginnings, of costliness.

I stand facing the west
with eyes closed because colours are perceptions
and I ache for the real, because sunset
and sunrise are too deep a lake.

I can’t help but listen
to what is not silence,
join the songs from somewhere
in the past.

friend.

How could I hide the morning? Even my home I’ll shift
to find you, show you a field with treasure marked.

I felt your hands tremble. Friend; smallness adrift
among strangers, your brother, the oracle, the anarch.

How can I share a life that he will sift
like flour, how tempt you to embark
and give yourself to him, your life the first gift?

Let the steel storm of questions build to lift
and unveil my decision. Would I bury the first light’s spark?
Or choose to see that night, responding swift
to give myself to you, my life the first gift.

day or night.

That moment when I closed my eyes
and was hidden,
when I stopped speaking
despite poetry,
despite friendship
and welcomed every breath as a stranger.

The breath when I yearned
and vowed to have no rest,
no rest
until the fire returned
(with little hope)
but hoped,

perhaps, not to be neglected
or like one desolate.

If the sky would wake and stir
and see the raging water,
there might be footsteps then.
Stirring of shoots
and the dry earth melting
with a shout
just beyond reach.

into the open.

I might be buried
with your pages folded neatly
in my mind.
I might be called to recite,
translate old ink.

The caverns of your essence hold
your shape;
your mind is here
and mine not far away.

A meeting,
moment of something true.
Something like proximity
or life,
or bright words striving with a void
outside our time.

universe.

For the marriage of simplicity and truth,
sing these songs.
Bid trust bring us all her gifts
till the allegory fades
and we, remade,
are caught into the sky, the breath we come from.
Rest, restored: one is here
who knows us, knows us well.

Soon we’ll speak exactly as we feel and think and are, yet be well. See how our faces glow with the grace of it. The hours flow by, word of simplicity like water.

We’ll hold onto them like a treasure. Soon we’ll be eye to eye, heart to heart, and held under the poetry that wakes us gently—so well, by the fruit of these trees. The words that grow slowly, stand strongly. The cold, blue sky, the light of full sun and clouds, these gumtrees and even the homes and roads will catch their breath at her splendour (coming up from the desert).

To the light that rises for us, piecing together what was scattered, that holds my face, that catches my eyes, that holds me; whose silence speaks quietness to us here—
I love you, we love you here. The depth of what we hold.

Not broken. Only sleeping, if you still create.

Whose wisdom, whose words arrived (in our hearts, in this song):
let it now be like it will be.
Never leave for a moment, in your promise.

Beautiful and perfect, the weaver of all things.

another.

Better I were without words
and learnt to speak again,
words that are found.

Let me, sometimes,
wander your wordless roads
and rest.

as if it were again.

For what was hidden:
not for fear of light
lest the pages wither,
but knowing how precious the words are
and how they were given;

for this I walk
and my heart touches the lines
and the ink, almost bursts with this.

With a wax seal,
with a hidden world.
For this I speak
and my face becomes pale
for this, for you.
My love unseen.
My mornings are shadows,
sincere one, to you;
the world shivers;

the early morning
and the soaking dew on grass,
my dress cold from it
and my shoes,

the bright sky,
the purity of eyes
so gently kept closed.

Or else the wound,
your eyes that drift
so deep,

perfume of sleep,
the murmur of its darkness.

everything is here.

No wonder they love you,
no wonder they come to see us
in this light,
in the morning with dancing.
The scent of the gardens all still
and the voices that carry through dusk
on the paths of these hills.

Yours are the words that draw me,
yours is the grace that I praise.
Yours are my songs
and yours is the glance of my heart.

because you answer me!

Yours I come,
frail in my love.
In my eyes
you are everything
when you call me.

I am blind,
inclined to other things.
You pursue me
and you have called,
your voice has called:

I love you, with all that is mine.
I will give all of my days to you.
Is there a light other than yours?
I could lose all my ways in you.

You who take nothing away,
whose song is deep and strong,
I stay, my face unmasked in you.

By your nearness I'm kept close
to stay here,
hoping to be unified in love for you.

wherever you.

When we’ve said too much,
let us meet silence
for a time,
deep river of moments
under the afternoon light.

You fill each day to the brim
according to the rhythms of your own house.
We could explore them forever,
understand them among friends.
I love each note,
however brief; I lose myself in the sound
and the uniqueness.

Time tells his stories more quietly
in the language of earth,
the words we will incline to
and by which we are remade.
Emptied of the old ways,
taught to be real;
we lack nothing,
delighted by what you have made.
We enjoy your house with silence in the afternoon,
contented and delighted by you
whose reality precedes us
and whose love upholds our breath.

Every morning rises with a new sun,
a light unseen before and newly made
yet of one kind
with the faithfulness we rise to each day.

In the evening
when stars appear,
then we are stirred
and we race over the sand in the cold breeze,
watching you,
arriving to find you in your promises.

Let our hearts be quiet before you again now
and watch. Then we will follow
wherever you go.
You have spoken already.