ancient texture….

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash

In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,

Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,

Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving

From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,

Have run their course? O parents, confess

To your little ones the night is a long way off

And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them

Your worship of household chores has barely begun;

Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes,

brooms and mops;

Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,

That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;

Explain that you live between two great darks, the first

With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest

Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur

Of hours and days, months and years, and believe

It has meaning, despite the occasional fear

You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing

To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,

That your search goes on for something you lost- a name,

A family album that fell from its own small matter

Into another, a piece of the dark that

might have been yours,

You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries

To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear

The careless breathing of earth and feel its available

Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending

Small tremors of love through your brief,

Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

….Mark Strand

we feel it in our bones, memories of ancient ties and the unfolding lilt of time….gentle and terrifying in its passing…..what we desire is to hold on to the stars, to the leaves in their falling….to become something as beautiful as the night sky….

may you lean into the dark and feel held

My Empty Cages

Longing for dazzling skies

in forests, wild and deep-

brightly hued birds of the aviary

give in to restless need. Opening

bars, a release as subtle as a sigh-

the steady rhythm

of sun-tipped feathers glide up

and away, flecks in the clouds.

I keep on feeding,

slogging, and cleaning,

unlocking those bubbled cages

one by one, humming

freedom in their wings- lift your bones!

Each exotic neck, papery like origami tissue

preens and tucks seamlessly

under willowy, distant tree tops.

After the emptying, the air, winged and colored

no more, shifts in silence. Without the mimicking

rhymes and morning song, shame settles

like down. I sulk behind their bars,

sweeping up my loss. Adrift in a dream,

visceral and delicate, I ache with hunger

for the powerful drumming of wings

and the graceful confetti of my birds.

…….In Blue