Monday, November 11, 2013

The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory


We flow into this world in a river of tears
Over whitewater rapids of fury and pain
As though dragged from our home, now a memory’s glimpse
That floats on the surface, breaks the skin, and then sinks.

And thus we dive into a long-dead sea,
Or so it seems despite the blinding light—
But cold, so cold, it bathes our naked flesh,
It flushes out our newborn innocence.
And yet our eyes are cleansed and truly see
Until the bitter waters of this timeless sea
Of mortal blood collect like cataracts, and years
Occlude in filmy, salty, stagnant tears.

So how can vision ever penetrate
The blinds upon our senses sealed and shut?
Or hope?  What hope can warm the darkened hearth
That chills within our chest and gathers dust?
The vision fades.  The womb becomes a tomb.
The endless Earth seems but a coffin’s core,
From mountaintop to valley, buried all
Within a claustrophobic, airless, shrinking space.

But breathe, just breathe the air, expand these lungs
That fill to feel what freedom might remain
For angel-minded beings bound in human skins,
For birds at heart who walk with crippled wings.
“Awake! arise! or sleep and farther fall!”
Each breath and burst of heart commands and begs—
But have we sense enough to hear and to believe
What every thrilling nerve and sinew sings
In every second always vibrating
With every other one in wondrous harmony?

For all the darts that seem to pierce our hearts with death
Are yet the pricks of hungry bumblebees
That enter in our blooms and work the spell
That fructifies another season’s miracle.
The atmosphere that shuts us in and holds
Our field of vision to the stark horizon’s edge
Is yet the greenhouse that allows our shoots
To grow protected from the wintry night beyond.

And the power of life is a heart that is broken
As the world shimmers softly when seen through our tears,
And the glory of life is a heart filled to bursting
As the world shimmers sweetly when washed with our tears.

Monday, November 4, 2013

River Flow Through


River Flow Through

O, were I at one with the River
flowing and winding through time and space—
not floating above
like a fractured auburn
oak leaf, cast off in the process
of seasonal change;
no, not a rider on rippling waves,
nor a stone who watches petrified
from below, mortared in mud
as the world wanders by,
always something going past
and wearing this surface smooth, away;
I must now somehow de-solidify my-
self, release these clinging
molecules, free these lusty electrons
from their compulsive whirl—
or circumambulation—
around the protons they desire;
but simple disassembly
can never wash it all away;
no sparagmatic frenzy,
no bacchanalian ecstasy,
can ever wear these stones away:
as Orpheus forever sings,
though scattered here and there,
until no single piece remains
no peace can ever come to stay
(true, I am no Orpheus…
but can I sing a different fate?):
let there be no surface, no tactile
barrier to break through,
and no sensation of the world
upon this stubborn skin:
by some profound osmosis,
let the River permeate
and absorb this ailing body
picking up and dropping
                     pieces
       of     itself
upon a dusty trail of tears
that fall as grains of sand;
irrigate me, soak my roots,
and turn these yellow fronds to green,
quench the fire that only dies
when all the kindling is consumed;
I must now somehow throw wide my pores
like windows in an April rain,
become transparent, forget opacity,
no longer occlude—send my shadow away:
let me shatter these stained-glass
relics of a crumbling temple,
tear down this weeping wall, seeping from
wounds old and new, wailing in the desert sun,
its tears drifting off to drown
a sad and stinking, stagnant sea;
there can be no shards, no remnants
glinting as they catch the light
and sink into the River
as it catches them but will not hold;
I must now somehow dissolve, aquify,
rewrite my chemical formula
to hydrogens balancing oxygen
in this great mathematical entropy,
this lawful chaos, this graduated flux
that pulses and shines phosphorescent:
let my color, my taste, be that of
the River, the water mingling all
yet always the same, its flavor
forever too subtle to place;
the tastes on this tongue are sour,
spoiled with poor storage,
this liquor an ichor of bitter lees
futilely swirled through a leaking skin—
O, I must somehow allow it to flow
through, flood through, wash through and be
the blood, the life that bears me up
and gently fills me day by day:
let me open up and drink until
I am as one with the River.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Poetry, etc.

Poetry, etc.

the sea does not try 
to ebb & flow & find the shore 
it can it does it will 
it simply is 
and washes over you