among the many silences
like prayer – like pause,
or the collected moments
between the movements of symphonies
there are none like this –
these seconds before sunrise,
the light of someone else’s morning
still and swelling,
gathered just beyond the dark.
The forest having wept
The trail is framed in ice -
Tears frozen -
Glazed across the granite face
While weeping spruce
Silver-green and shuddering -
Shoulders crouched
Look the other way
As if guiltless,
Pulling the quilt of snow
Across arms outreached.
The black brook frozen
As a vein along the trail
Now soundless in long sun
And secret sacrifice
To winter’s meditation
All sadness blown away
By the sound of your boots
Across fresh snow
And that laugh that lingers
Like eternal spring melting -
Moving ice-sent floods-
To rush over me.
i read that it is gravity that binds stone
across the field and woodland
but I know it to be
now
and then
held in awkward embrace
and separated only by
our poor efforts made
without this understanding
as if all it was
and all it is
might be gravity that binds stone
across the field
and across the woodland
and not now
and not then
sealed in
perfect
eternal
embrace.
Fallen morning -
the sun bleeds across the blistered ground
wraps the strip in its shimmering shawl
as if it might burn the whole idea away
like it never was.
Snowcapped, the mountains loom indifferent
but you know they can take it back –
take everything back
with a snowless drought that would crack
the ground like glass.
Blue buildings like stones in translucent rivers -
red roads reflecting in the polished granite
like an idea, like a dream somehow gone bad
in the smoke, lingering like a white fog
over the false hope burning.
It rains and the ground shines -
the cooled air returns as breath against the glass
when the night screams back
and all you can hear is the noise
until the mountains whisper in spectral light.
Another morning falls – the sky silvered
and the ground embraced by the
shadows of the great Sierras and the blue glass
and the red roads pale as the desert sun
leans across the ground until it weeps with light.