I went back tonight
with shadow and and the rush of the river.
I let myself be drawn
by that old magnet
and a lilac-like nostalgia.

In the dapple
made even darker by leaves
who heavy, reach across the streetlamp,
I stand at the fence. Its nightshade clad arms
square nine-hundred hours and hang humid
in the after-storm air.

We are familiar,
each to each other,
still.
They smell of rain.
I smell of longing.

The slim row is fertile.
I know it all in the blue-black,
even without stepping in;
wilds of raspberry
over a carpet of smiling straw-bonnets
and a riot of yarrow,
so outrageous that he's had to put a picket fence around.

Time curves in
to kiss itself
and I'm standing here,
again,
feeling loneness so large
it's as if
I'm the only living child in summer.

Solo and map-less
at an empty crossroads
unfurled in unnamed arms;
both opportunity
and a fist of roads not taken.

A traveler could fret,
doggedly determined
to sort one from the other,
when definition eludes,
determined only with a first step.

Fear not the path,
nor those that will not walk it with you.
Be yet a way-maker,
whose two feet cannot suffer true loneliness,
if only for the having of each other.

Early spring comes after a misplaced winter
in crocus fingers,
impatient to point to the warming sun.

I look up, at their insistence,
tipping back my fervent face
to gulp the liquid light.

I will soak it in. I will carry it in my freckles
and in this blood orange
that you brought me, across four hundred miles.

When you return,
I will offer it all up to you,
in lips, sugared with citrus and a star's promise.

Last night
as the crowd began to quiet,
settling in like bees for the second encore,
I heard those first chords
floating above our buzz and shuffle,
and knew that she would sing “Amaze Me”.

It made me smile
and remember myself,
in front of the too few eyes of your memorial service;
how I played your black Guild for the first time then,
my nervous fingers and grief-thick throat
competing to overwhelm me.

Such a tune
that your living ears never gathered,
which hung from my heart like a hammock
holding flickers and flashes
of things that I’ve imagined
of the father that I didn’t know.

So I listened, as though dying myself.
Full of a rich and poignant grief,
I opened up my soul like some great bowl.
I made myself a megaphone
letting longing and sound move through me,
to resonate with every particle of stardust
and find you,
whatever and wherever you are.

Some storms roll in
like pewter waves,
spurred by dream fragments
or a ripping of melody.

So swift, they yank the tide
from ankle kissed foam
to a green-fingered despair,
grasping even to the hip.

Such squalls can catch the wader up;
toss them high upon a shipwreck’s arc,
drag them lone and low
beneath an undertow’s heel.

Some, dawn will roll sandward again,
melting blue from lips and deeper places;
leaving them shaped and shaken
but grateful for each brackish breath

The waking she-dreamer spoke always in qualities of light;
in champagne sun, effervescent in a winter-day’s flute,
in the shimmered orbs of haloed candle heads
that are shaped and re-shaped by the night’s gentle hands.

She sang me the light of morning, rising lilac from a misted field.
She danced me the light of evening, sinking red into a cooling sea.
In whispers, she shared the language of the moon,
her white words echoing up from a thousand mirrors of dew.

She’d scoop up brightness with a wooden spoon,
pouring it slow, like amber syrup, upon moments
now preserved and sealed in Ball jars
that she’d line up on the kitchen sill, just above the sink.

She’d capture starshine in her mother’s flour sifter,
turning its handle twelve hours long to grind a romantic dust
that she’d shake into pillow cases, sprinkle silver in her old brown shoes
and mark upon my eager, learning brow.

She wove her work into my skin; chiaroscuro’s one-eyed student.
Eloquent in my education of ephemeralness,
I'd never been still in the arms of a mote-filled beam,
being present to the presence of light without seeking to keep it.

For the light learns that in keeping, there lies a deeper losing that denies all now
and eyes made full of only what is passing
no longer have room for the shining that is
or for the qualities of having.

"Metamorphosis" by M.C. Escher


Revolution,
welling up from the bedrock,
rumbling under foundations,
tumbles structure to build anew.
It rises in smoke,
in gyres of emotion,
blazing in spirals
that scream skyward
to grasp at gods’ ears
or some divine justice.

So we tear the present
to purge; to bleed a beautiful blood,
unsure what will be gained…
what lost?

And cost?
That we’ll pay in tears.
We’ll pay in joy, in work, in war –
for love.

Metamorphosis moves in me;
moves within this tender body,
within tens of millions of vibrant bodies.
It bursts up and out
like a murmuration of starlings,
each spark-made and wild.
It whips across the night,
feathered with fear, with worried hope,
ripping through what was.
Becoming.

The view from a place for sitting


I work in a very mundane cube,
within a larger mundane box,
all sectioned and hemmed by rows and streets
that follow a tree-denying grid.
The concrete of this place does not believe in magic;
forgetting that it was ever rock and burnt lime
but I have not forgotten.
I move through these halls, along the inorganic lines,
a witch in sheep’s clothing;
my eye ever beyond the glass.

Within this box I’ve found a room;
a quiet room on the fourth floor
whose window cheeks face west and press against the river.
In morning it is unknown,
not yet made corporate by a florescent stare.
It is a nook where one can kiss center
and listen.
There, I wear the rumble of trains
rippling across water, across breath
as the river slaps against my roots, whispering.

Today two ships cut through my peace,
calling out to one another like succinct whales,
courting a brusque love.
Something moved through me
and the wanderer lifted its head
to wonder at soaring.

I am leaning to learn you;
coming to love the awaited communion
of the space around you
recognizing the space around me.

I am learning to learn us;
coming to feel how our planets fit
in the orbits and configurations
of this ever expanding universe.

I am learning anew to learn me,
in so many surprising constellations.
I shine. I stumble, messy. I fall.
I stand again, taller and even more willing.