Tag: life

Of Bones Beneath the Branches

There were cypress beyond the city wall
With cones like eyes upon them
And I tended each for long until I felt
They saw far too much of me
And showed far too little of themself
(Those leaves with their whispers and those roots with their secrets)
So I did not water come the summer, I did not water come the winter;
And the leaves, they yellowed and fell,
And frost took the roots
Slipping needles of ice into their breaths
Till decades were laid silent
Like sand beneath the ocean.
I walk beyond the wall now and then
Dressed in nothing but the evening
And stand under the cypress
And watch the antler twigs sway
Hiding nothing now but melancholy motion
The sense of sleep
And I wonder at the difference, if any, between our shared nakedness

Dewdrops in the Ocean

I close my eyes
And the dewdrops upon my palate
Rise, like an ocean left unattended
On hot stove
Left to seethe and boil
Fold and uncoil;
Echoing towards an inconsequential eternity
Where nothing rhymes
Beneath the repeating waves
Washing themself at the shore
At the feet of a silent, silent kingdom
Rooted in reminiscence
Of a homemade horizon promised
Upon an unpromised path
There the shriveled hearts sprout as mushroom
In an endless cortege
Moving in stillness
Like taste upon the tip of tongue
And snail upon the lips of spine
An ode to the essential
Both the dirt and the divine

Through The Lips Of Living Ghosts

I live my life
Through those who lived before me
And triumphed,
For mine are eggshell victories
Inchoate brush strokes of the blind
Left behind, listening to the faceless sounds
Dreamt by dead branches and wayside stones
Alone in their darkness
Wherein all ashes intone
The pleasure of being burned alive
Only to never feel, another touch of life.