The difference between
I am here
and
I was here
is delicately slight,
and not really a matter of tense
but rather one of plaited tenor
and climate,
in which degrees,
separating our ghost from our dreams,
keeps us shivering warmly
between rippling sheets
of ephemera,
and the audacious
memory of longing.
In the darkroom
of your own solitude
the slowly developing
photographs
of your life
can be recollected
forwards,
as if chronology
were a fugue,
and you
its vigilant timekeeper,
twice removed.
You can,
if you wish,
file a million and one
embittered complaints
to the Universe,
but none will bring
the strange and mysterious
results that a single shred
of glimmering gratitude can,
its kiss the tenderest seal
upon symmetry’s origins.
I miss you already,
the sun-kissed daisy
whispered to the migrant
flake of snow,
which clung
like a hopeful bead
to the daisy’s
delicate petal
before dying a lover’s death
and melting.
A red balloon
says so much about the sky,
and the weightless wonder of children,
when desire, bated aloft by the sun,
gives free-spirited chase
to the play of light
on basking reams
of nimbus and lore.
Where were you last night,
my dreams asked of my silence—
Between worlds, I longed.
Inspiration
is not a matter of chance,
or waiting, or a magic spell
that demands bated breath and fretted suspension—
it is the fact that you pick up a pen,
your fingers growing warm and intimate with its weight and feel,
the slow almost dumb beautiful realization that you,
or someone like you is holding a pen, an instrument aloft
and hovering above a blank page, and some kind of strange ceremony,
half-marriage, half-divorce, is about to take place,
in which you, or someone like you, as a form of expression,
is both the effect and the cause.
The pen, through good times and hard,
accounts for dreaming,
and inspiration runs through your fingers
like an unschooled course on being.
Between worlds,
vying for merger,
the reigning glacial celibacy
of stars,
and the marvelous frisson
of pure mortal throb—
Where you are not,
find your ghost’s
bluest breath of want
upon a mirrored caste
of longing.
John Biscello 