The Sky Swimmers

The clouds look up to where we are,
We, upon our windblown tufts of sand,
Turning amid precariously hung oceans—
Puddle-ponds weakly echoing the true depths of a shoreless sky.
The old grey guardians must needs wonder at us,
Our strange conceptions of permanence and greatness—
We, who think ourselves unmovable, and therefore strong;
While they, the sky swimmers, are stirred, bound, and released
By the very hand of God.

What taste, that stirs this once so weary moment,
Tempts my heart to stillness ‘mid its blush-like stain?
The sky has filled, unheralded, the veins of hope
That hovered there, winter blue, and wary
Of our fragile, silent, oft-bruised dreams.

The clouds are torn, their oceans spilled and well spent
O’er the green-soaked sprout and slowly stirring plain.
While here, my eyes are pulled to wander heaven’s slope,
And linger, hushed, and light, and airy,
To sew my heart with your smile’s seams.

Carya Illinoensis

O the depth of creation within a single tree!
Bear witness to the full, deep, branch-fraught timbre,
Tracing her graceful sweep into the feathered sky.
Sit, neck folded, thinking oneself beneath her smoke-like, time-placed frame,
As the ripple of a thought finds its way from beneath this, life’s loam-filled stage,
And rises, vast and rumbling, from somewhere beneath your quiet earth-strewn perch.
Into the mind falls the simply-carved vision of the vast, hidden half of her hourglass;
That, like her poet-born brother, fills the heart’s eye with wonder
At the woefully limited scope of its own age and vision.
Like the self-woven plight of we simpleton farmers of the earth,
Who orbitedly cast for ourselves roles of the crouchers
Far below the trunk-raised heights of the truly blessed,
All the while daily ignoring the ground-covers roots,
The twisted veins of the hope-starved that lie beneath us.
Great storm wrinkled maiden, your Maker knew well his craft
When He spilled your mighty arms from His heart.
It was He who filled your rough pages with soft, brown Light,
That we, the hate-blinded children of the dust,
Might bask in your within subtle glow.

The Rain on Her Face

It is but a moment. Soft, intangible, wind-swept: a fallen leaf from the shadowy limbs of time—skittering beyond the boundaries of vision surrounded and jostled by its countless brother-children. She is captured by a rush of swirling mysteries, held captive by a heart still ponderously balanced on newly-formed legs of emotion. Yet, inexorably, inescapably, relentlessly, her heart-fawn presses—is pressed—forward, forced to translate the native language of her skin into the oversimplified monosyllabic tendencies of her partially defined reactions.

Her eyes become the novice baker, spilling the myriad contents of a well-mixed second onto their wide surface, sifting through its intricate recipe and willing her to distinguish one infinite ingredient from the next. Still her heart plods on, held within the tender grasp of an instant, willing her to taste its subtle mountain of flavors as a whole—more fully than well-trained connoisseurs with their inhibited, overly-experienced criticisms.

This moment is hers; dawning on her Eden-heart with rapid, concurrent emotions, collapsing in an ecstatically shivering heap upon her doorstep. Here cold, laughter, joy, fear, and curiosity vault her inevitably still for a small handful of heartbeats. She is lost within the brilliant, bewildering cacophony of impulses and questions, careful to select the correct homage to pay to this sudden stranger.

And when at last she is pulled past this moment by the mere necessity of existence, with which color will she paint her face for the next? What, more than the mere currency of time, will be lost in the picture she will paint there? For, in choosing a response to each moment, we become the ever-compelled merchants of life. Finding a smile, we lose a frown; or, finding the cold, we miss our chance for a moment of laughter amid the rain.

It’s said that hope oft times runs dry,
Amid this plague of tepid dreams;
Yet my heart swells its flesh-dulled cry
Against this solemn, desert-claim.

For here, I find my soul adrift
Amid a well-spilt sea of hope;
Yet I, the time-worn sailor lift
My cup, and drinking, parch my heart.

For this vast sea of liquid promise
E’er amix with salt and sin,
Must tear my palate-heart asunder,
Felled now to these dark planks again.

Oh! Come again, Thou day-bright Shore
That cradles mid Your inland folds—
And to its depths surrender me—
The tear-less pond that Mercy filled
That my dark heart could never stain.

That I, a man adrift at sea,
Might quench my thirsty heart in Thee.

She swims the light at break of day,
Parting chordant melodies
Of hope and sunlit life beyond the night
Floating through the morning, she holds his hand,
Beckoning her brother to awaken
Full and soft and clear;
And when she fades beyond the reach of light,
This side of the half-lit sphere,
Oh, once more let me find her
Before tomorrow breaks anew.

[Note: Actually written some time in late 2005]

Stay near, unchanged, for one breath more
Beneath the fragile tide of leaves
And hearts—that we may still the door
Of joy within their quiet weave.
The strident chords of daylight fade,
And we, behind the entourage
Of light, will feel the burning stray
From mem’ry light a pale mirage.

And, firm between the stubborn days,
Away from kings, and courts, and time,
Here, caught beneath the moon’s bright sway,
We two shall teach our hearts to rhyme.
So stay, that we, like unborn stars,
May wake to find the heavens ours.

Here

And here our words break upon the shores of reality—
Tide-less blankets of liquid thought
Pulled along by our incandescent hearts;
Spilling their force upon the all-too-familiar coastlines of this spinning island.

Here we sculpt with patient letters
The ever-shifting visage of a world so foreign to our gypsy souls.

Here we tap the boundless flow of shivering, shadow-filled ink—
And test the mortality of our fears.

Here we stare into the faces of our spectral longings,
Haunted by their passing,
Crouching beneath the covers of our wisdom
And making ghosts of angels.

Yet here
Oh! here let it be that we find again
Our castles, our warriors, our worthy beauty;
And see these pages, held firmly before our eyes,
Spoken into a whisper
That clutches away the aching dust from the mirror.

She swims the light at break of day

She swims the light at break of day,
Befriending the lonely shadows and
Turning their hearts warm, their eyes bright.
Her presence gently sifts through the dawn
Like a bird’s song at the end of winter:
Piercingly lovely, fragile, hopeful.
Smile! O let your smile touch my face too
That I, like the cold grey clouds of the horizon
Might be touched by the sunrise and lost in its glow.

I placed a stone upon the ground
And waited for the rain to come
To wash away the ringing sound
Of earth against my heart.
I walked away and turned to see
The silence there, that followed me
And hummed a tune of quiet loss,
My heart, a lonely drum.
I waited for the light to dawn,
While sitting underneath the sea
But nothing reached me but the song
And words I tore apart.
I swam away and turned to see
The darkness there, that followed me
And hummed a song of soft regret
That didn’t last for long.

Caught up in this cloud,
The rain washes away your outline
Sending the vagabond colors through the soft earth
To the light beneath.
Somewhere,
More than here.