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‘There are things we live among’
arrangement & division
of ourselves
precarious in the light before dawn
pink then white as the blurred
edges of trees
move against a grey background—
‘You are tender my Love….’
vestiges of moral regret—your last
visit ‘infinite tracing of our voices’
when you had stirred my mind out of dust
at an hour far from any other
‘agitante calescemus’
with the difference that the light
came through the window at the back
eighteen months from when I first
entered your life& saw the
moon cut into an angle above the door
& heard you call out my name
through rooms faint with odors of paint
& lemon-seed oil.
‘The autumn leaves blow from my hand’
as compassion acknowledges these
________‘veins in the stones’
Principles of feminine and masculine
each hour ‘the sleight of words in isolation’
as what was proffered
from the sea caves
blackened flakes of fire
copper shells
lay untouched at daybreak.
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And the words
‘of the dead past that I bear in me
& that has never been anywhere Pessoa
but in me’
so that you too would become
part of the objective lesson
in fatefulness
‘A hint of what was going to be’
caught in the fault tides—
‘wave upon wave catching the light bodies’
Of our companionship. ‘The waves
rise, and the waves fall—
But you are like the moonlight’
I heard the dislocation of your presence
understood more than knew
penitence must be made here.
*
Habits of a lifetime concealed—
‘And if I see her not, no sight is worth
the beauty of thought’
compassion instructs the hand
weighted by seed
to hold over brass
root of basilica, a plate of copper
saved from the fire.
Yet when did you see
that the blade is part of the process—
that steel will cut into
your outstretched palms
until the blood soak through.
*
In passing
‘the lives of absent flowers’
a blaze of lapsed – or perhaps it was ‘collapsed’–blooms”
set along the table’s left margin
I wandered without word
cyclic soul I saw the return
of Her
abandoned in the green
deep of an eye
firework of the mind’s creation
‘And the stone eyes again looking seaward’
you have aged in the year since
these stones arranged inside the plastic container
aloe & cactus in lowmoving light
And now sunken
as where you & I attend
movement’s drift
returns us to its birth light
seabreak of crystal sun
that you come to us
bathed in light
femina of the mind’s circuit
earthly pallor of our one flesh
as we kneel in wet sand
‘O lady we are without resources…
help us move toward the light…
O teach us
over harm…over hate
to build anew
in the light flowing, whelming
the stars.’
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