The coldness of the days between
Measured by degrees
Equaled by the miles
Separating desires
One from the other
With the freezing of the hours
Marking time and distance
Comes the ache of body and heart
Between the leaving and reuniting
To wake in a landscape filled with you
And the world I see within your blue eyes
Rather than a barren bed
Would warm and soothe
The ache of body and heart
Month: November 2015
At Sunrise Over Water
At sunrise over water
Remembering a dream
Within tears
Things neither given
Nor ever felt
Linked by all the fears
To form decades of a life
Lived like a stranger
In my own skin
I have stood
Since dawn
At this ocean’s edge
Waiting, waiting
To hear something of a siren’s song
And now at noon
The rain begins
Fierce pelting blows
Washing me clean
Of all I know
Or dare to dream
And I will know no song
For living continues
As a stranger
Within my own skin
(Provincetown 2015)
Broken Stone
The edges of a life chipped away
Breath not taken, suffocated
Heart stilled until
Walking dead through the days of life,
Playing as if alive,
So onlookers believe the pretense they wish to see.
While I,
Struggling for air,
For the beating rhythm of life,
Finally accept the coldness of the stone I’ve become.
Any warmth is as transitory as the sun
In its travels from
Season to season
From rise to set
And only coldness will I know
After any fleeting glimpse of warmth.
Such a bitter coldness,
Until a hand,
Holding the lost secrets of a forest under skies of brilliant blue,
Should touch long dead embers,
.As if in possession of some long forgotten, ancient magic,
And in touching rekindles flame,
Swirling within, spiraling outward
Warmth that does not die
Upon the withdrawal of touch.
A lingering heat, warming still,
Stirring hunger once thought dead to life.
Sweetness pounds a rhythm out—
Starting a heart to beat again,
Blessed breath returns
To suffocated, deflated lungs.
The shallow breath, the weak pulse hold ancient power,
Shattering stone to shards
Leaving flesh and blood and bone
To move in life again,
A life reclaimed from the stone stillness
Of gray grief filled years.
Carefully, hesitantly, I step
Over the shards of stone surrounding,
Making my way toward the touch that broke through
My stone encasement.
There trembles within,
A longing I never sought to find,
Fear and hope linked, hand in hand.
I smile,
Extending my hand
To the warmth
Of you.
Counting
Wanting the days to move forward,
I am impatient with seven,
a cat stretching after sleep
too lazy to jump to six,
a caterpillar crossing a continent of a day
in no hurry to cross to the edge of five,
and I feel closer to joy when it arrives
yet bells drone throughout the day
too slow in tolling the coming of four,
a tortoise with no urge
to race into three,
a wounded thing limping along as if too tired, too exhausted to hobble
into two,
a sloth with a grip too secure to drop from the tree
into one,
a glacier too slow to carry me
into zero
and to your door
Moment of Destruction
In the moments before
The destruction of a life,
The slow breath
And calm heartbeat,
Without hitch or skip,
Do not warn
In those moments
Before the devastation hits.
The volcano’s eruption,
The tidal wave’s wash,
The comet’s smashing,
All apt metaphors
For the destruction
But for the warnings
They give.
For the destruction of a life,
No warning is given,
No alert, no alarm
Blasts to ring in the ears
Before the crash
Before the hit,
Before the strike
Of a doctor’s news
In a sterile
Waiting room.
Words blasting away
Futures planned
For years yet unlived,
Routines lived
In the present,
Day -to-day.
All thought
Exploding
Fanning out
Like twisted metal
In rolling clouds
Of cement dust,
That is
The instant destruction
Of Lives.
In the Flutter of Wings
In the morning light
I watched the hummingbird
In the butterfly garden
When a monarch stopped by too
What a spectacle and spectrum of wings
These two do present
Feeding upon the nourishment here
The Monarch, a slow, tender flutter
The hummingbird, a battering blur of the air
In this spectrum of movement
Is there some secret knowledge,
A truth they seek to share
Differing by vast degrees
Of the same elemental force
Against the air
The aloneness within the movement
A thing that cannot be shared
For I have never seen
Either fly in tandem
With another of their kind
The journey to this garden
Each one took alone
Each seeking the same nectar
Each hungering
Yet alone in the seeking
Is there something profound
They wish to say
With each flutter and flap of wing?
Or is the message simple and concise?
Yes, perhaps it is just this—
We each journey in the seeking
Alone.
Brand New
What it is
To hold
Such a delicate thing
With ten tiny fingers
And ten tiny toes
So new
So fragile
So strong
In the cleanness
Of mind
Of heart
Of soul
All sweetness
Of smell
Of soft touch
Knowing nothing
Of life’s grime and dust
Let this one
So small
So new
Teach the wonder
Of being human
And having life
