4 posts tagged “poem”
Cars pull up to a stop light, idling over blacktop.
And over that, a concrete median - the layers of man-made skin
...trying to shape, to tame the land.
By a lamppole, you see a few shoots.
The post leans just slightly, the rust shows the evidence of battling the inevitable.
And the simple root raised by the base
...stubborn in its placement.
What right does it have, this tiny obstinant force of nature,
...to place itself, amidst man's handiwork.
Presumptious.
And then you smile, laugh to yourself. Admirable.
The shoots of the weed know nothing of why... of rights... of debts and due,
... oughts and should have as much to do with it as the discarded wrapper that flutters by.
It knows only to reach for what nourishes and lets it persist.
The robin's alarm and the crow's rude cackle are all to be sensed...
The world still sleeps, except for the birds of pre-dawn...
So complete is the darkness here, no laws exist, no rules of thumb...
No principles that explain.
Line these windows with heavy canvas to keep out the expected sun...
The chairs, table, books on shelves all melt and blend into this dank space...
The sense of nothingness actually humbles...
Movements are tentative and groping...
When the sun rotates high to bathe us all, we will move fast and graceless...
We will make our lists and finish tasks, greet others....
Humans in motion.
We will raise money and steal it, we will find lovers and reject them...
We will sing and sob...
We will wear down the already trodden paths, and avoid others...
The existance we have constructed lays exposed, calls us with a familiar tune...
But now, here, assimilated with the dark brown humps and shapes of the room...
Here the mind runs free, unwilling to feud with imagination...
The lightless place gives possibilities a chance to fly...
There is no order and the chaos has no shape...
We all dance.
We swing in a quiet flow that defies the conventions of the lighted time...
Only the chattering noise of perched birds intrudes, actually dominates...
But it's fine, as we float on a sea of unknown form and time.
He's quite certain that his parched throat, his squint means no disrespect to the sun.
Morning breaks and with comes the bravery of songbirds seeking food
It humbles him ... the wispy clouds... the brilliant blue.
The smells of the day make him reverent... the heat from the grass... the saturation of growth.
Why does he feels these measure so strongly... the rhythms of people around him...
What's so powerful?
Peers listen, but do they want to know... they care, but are they willing to allow...
For happenstance?
When they rest... when they finally square up and claim the ground they want...
How will they -- care for it...
Communicate about it...
Tend it...
Laugh over it...
Earn a living from it...
Give in to it...
Praise it or master it...
Cry on it...
Make love within it...
Breath their last breath lying there.
What repayment do they all make, he thinks, when the marketplace comes for its due?
Fire in the hearth and a place to make sighs... where the mind can linger from a depth within.
Help, he asks, to recognize that space for growth, for failure and more attempts, for rest and querying.
Help to speak to power as you would the feeble... and smile just the same.
See the sly boy's face...
Between the thicket of two pines...
Look up, see the sunshafts...
Busting through branches, through leaves and tangle...
Of maple fronting elm fronting maple...
Move and the whole damn show changes...
The light hops through new gaps... made for you only...
The boy is gone...
And what charges this display?
The hard and solid forms we know by name? Or the gaps in between?
---
See the sky beyond... on high, lines of snaky clouds...
Their bellies painted orange by the sinking sun...
The spaces between those misty, moving formations... they, they are the artists
---
The boy runs with a bit of bark...
"It's rough," he says... the devil boy and his comments...
Yes, yes it is... see the grooves and the cuts of it...
The spaces animate the touch of it...
---
Water tumbling down our throats...
Filling then fleeing that otherwise empty pipe...
On warm days you feel the cool down to the core...
Now in tighter... beyond the discernment of the eye....
The space of our body cavity... of our gaps atom by atom...
What's our animator? Our place in it all?
Our space -- within and beside you.
---
What every composer knows - note by rest by note...
What the philosophers use as a rule to learn by...
What charges mother and newborn between the gaze...
The pause before uttering the truth...
The charged air between bodies attracting...
The knowing without the mind thinking...
The settled grass after the breeze dies...
We are not taking space as much as
We are space...
---
We are ruled by a vastness unnoticed...
See it... see space... offer up to it...
Lose it and regain it... ride on it...
Space creates the living... and, yes, suddenly death has purpose...
The exhale to the birth breath...
