From the poet’s ready pen comes the

yawning stillness, leaking out

from linen thoughts, stretched

tight upon the hungry loom.

How dear these words come, dear soul,

trading green for our grey. 

Like the pastiche of a late morning sigh,

our tough and torrid skin oft forbids

your trim veracity, always enough

to root it all in the insufferable lightness of song.

 

Tease out the rising tides,

their turning waves run amok.

Oh ready writer, graft our branch to seed,

your root to leaf and banish

all the rotted soil to its brown eternity.

 

Winnow out from worn whimsy,

with your willow-throated pen, our

long-faded hope. You set about

your task, anonymous to none but 

the unseeing ears of deaf brutes.

 

Letters, cast adrift to their watercolor

harbors, dive down, down,

down from brushes, pinched

tight in fingers that point

with precision to everything that eludes.

Paint wide the foraging colors of

dimpling fragments of forest, new.

Tease out our trembling days, and release 

what hides itself in the obvious.