Here, the light blows past my eyes

like breezes of sapphired memories

imploding into smallest beauties, personified.

* * *

Here, I escape Neptune’s icy breath

and settle in pillowed wonder

to gaze into the eyes of God.

* * *

Here, the small becomes greater

than the expanse of all

that seeks greatness above all.

* * *

Here, the silence sounds as one

the bells of never-ending music,

symphonic scenes of peaceful song.

* * *

Here, Heaven’s whispers are louder

than the screams of hell.

Among many voices, I hear but one.

* * *

Here, there live the deepest things,

their freshness, drained of dark and ill

point my seeking face toward Another.

* * *

Here, I’ve learned to stay and sing,

to sing the Day of days

when night, abandoned, disappears. 

 

* * *

Still not moving a muscle,

her musings take a different turn.

Her thens and nows merge

into what thens? what ifs? whys?

She digs into chambers of stillness

yet untainted by too many wrong questions

and finds enough echo of

the questions once most prevalent:

why not? How?

* * *

Timelines soon give way

to time’s lines wending their way

through the groves of memory,

the pastures of her being

where placid, daytime scenes

of yesterday’s yearnings

force their way upward

and sit on the floor of her conscious heart.

* * *

Is the ideal and the real

a good place to struggle?

“How long?” she thinks, must this

place elude where

boundaries crave margins,

periods demand commas

on statements crying out to be questions?

“Isn’t this story old enough?

When do I get to narrate what

seems so uncontrollable, characters

unrecognizable, a plot unyielding?

* * *

“Birds don’t sing because

they have an answer,

but because they have a song” they say.

Who is “they” and what do

“they” say when the “song”,

already oversung, becomes a mockery

in its lack of answers?

Sometimes the ready breath

of silence with neither song nor answer

brings more life than

a song that is merely a

kitchen without windows.

Painting: At the Kitchen Window by American painter De Scott Evans (1847-1898)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She stands

gazing out her kitchen window

with that expression

that says too much.

Her eyes betray

the meeting place of

her head and her gut.

It pulls at the need for space

with the space for need –

a balance long lost to her.

* * *

From the kitchen window

she sees her, a robin, full-throated

and proud.

Her song is persistent, ragged

and rough around the edges,

but sure, notes as they were meant to be:

bloated with joy,

brushed with pain,

saturated in the sound

of summer winds

unconcerned with propriety.

No careless, garish squawks

from this dear throat – only love.

* * *

Revealed in the ruffled folds

of her dress, a life,

though less ruffled,

still cries out for ironing.

Uneven pleats and

mismatched colors bleed into

unsecured hems.

* * *

Still, as she waits

and stares at nothing,

it says everything.

And at the place where a robin’s song

threads itself like a needle

along the coastline of uncomfortable garments

there is in her a missing reconnaissance –

like the bird feeder lacking birds.

* * *

This messy business

of life’s lovely entrapments:

friendships in the guise of interrupted

moments too bright for sunny afternoons

meant for more eyes,

the song of birds

meant for more ears

than hers.