Greater flow dictates–
let it go, let it all go,
respire in wonder.
Photo by Philipe Hugonnard
Time slowed,
and I carefully studied
what amounted to a
prophetic X-ray,
showing me the void within,
her future ghostlife,
or perhaps mine,
grinning at me
like a black hole,
an atomizing tantalus
with a ravenous appetite
and pearls for teeth.
Beginnings
are never just beginnings
but endings and middles
all at once,
Time, that slippery procreative
eel, siring its own gospel brood,
leaves us with a charge
of options from which to bond
and choose
in a stream unending
in its roundabout turns
toward the infinite.
Touch me
where I am not,
where the fade
meets the form,
where the furtive scent
of glisten
perfumes its own root cause
and fable,
give to me
the dirty dinghied
secrets of the center,
the storied core,
which, in onrushing
tidals of prickly light
will wipe away
all history and identity,
and leave us amnesiacs
with a flair
for the pooling memory
of skin.
It is in the dark,
the wild opaque frontier
of scent and missive,
where the thesis of glimmer
bares recognition
upon who
and how much
we are not
when touching,
the run of love
a gradient quicksilver
etched
in pulsing granaries of Braille,
in spirals turning dreamwise.
In the necklaced orgy of stars,
the molten bandolier, I found one,
blatantly cursive and blue-hot,
calling to my center of gravity,
my throbbing crisis, and I fell
in love, purloining the impossible
to give the heart its silent crush,
and fading due.
Through winter’s icewalk,
the heart, a lonely hunter,
dares to prey on light.
The slow, long walk home,
across a frozen tundra–
The sun smiles, faintly.
By turns,
the sworn blue tenor
of lyric and charge,
a few simple words
warmed over in holy bask
and offered to the close-knit
belles and folds
of slow-felt darkness,
a writer’s pinkish interior gauze
to hem the silvery saying of grace
in the smallest hours,
to pay heed
and praise
to the raw crafting of light
into humble trembling hymns
and violet vespers
founting.
You don’t need a ship
and exile,
or filial fate
and distance,
to qualify homesickness–
the odyssey is a cellular trip,
always has been,
its bounds limitless,
its lyrical content
specifically tailored
to your individal
course and movements,
and so I say:
May your voyage,
rogue, flagless, and uncharted,
be a blessed one
as you carry your secret name,
and its sired calling,
into the wondergiving wilds
of the heart’s hidden countries
and islands.
