I feel like I’m in free-fall
a regime of tiny plummetings
impossible to overthrow
floors slipped away
or dispersed into a vague oblivion
so many imperceptible plunges
so close together in time
it feels like unrelenting free-fall
irreversible retreat
(continue reading…)

“The boat’s slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious.”
— Joseph Brodsky

& you were with me
strong evanescent
looming up from dreamplay
with solid destination
nesting sable in your gaze
following the path
of slow comets
flitting silver over the waters
we moved
as if charged with rhythms
too old to name
we remembered
multitudes of passing instants
coloring the dawn
of this circuit of awarenesses
dancing around each other
you were with me
& everything shifted
from knowledge of that fact
that lone perfection
tripping elegant over the complaints
of a tired teeming world…

What we are
what we might be
the charging resonance
of the clock
the surge and retreat
the streaming
inconsequential landscaping
of desire…

I could hold a thousand ideas together at once in the awareness of you, in a deep listening for pulse and context, or a single thought that keeps expanding to allow all your cherished places and feelings, all your aspirations and doubts and dreams of consequence, to take root, a thought that is fragrant and is all colors and is love wanting a geography to cover like rivers and lightning, a brave springtime ripe with melody…

I sit surrounded by glass and rain
ruined but for glass and rain
hoping for something warm and visionary to emerge
and settle on the splinters of a monumental clarity
knowing how to touch and heal them

a world built on past decisions
on the stuff of wanting
on principle and disorder
at once my own and all that there can be
breaking over the rocky edge of time
speaking wanting comprehending

one telling silence shades the meaning of all else
hammers out a problematic melody
against the glass and rain
and sits swirling in the inauthentic warmth
of the cup that shares this wondering with me

liberty is flush exposed
proposing justice come to her breast
& remember there were ideal beginnings
even clutched & smothered in time
& remember that peace can only be
their daughter & is otherwise inviable…

This our first step into the light
all heavy slinking mists aside
the waking secondary
a vigor made of grasses and gains

these the untiring mighty threads
of a song unwinding through thick woods
where a spirit skiff
on evergreen and thistle brings

an offer of wholeness
and the air is spent in somersaulting
half-made heats and sluicing rains
that tell an ancient legend

rains that reinvent the shape
of the audible world
regressing to first principles
erasing inventories

forgiving the investigative
indiscretions of reason
rummaging under steep battlements
after the sumptuous ache

that is significance unpossessed
or a struggle with thunder
kept in preserve deep within
the saturations of the mind…

everything is at once
much more and much less
than it pretends to be

the romance of place
the need to know
the inner life of another

the whispering sea deep under the night
hints of failure lightness & resuscitation
falling together behind the glass

I think to myself in quiet excursion
you cannot be what you are
as you cannot be what you are not
because the world is too brief & teetering
& the sense of self is too constant & necessary
you cannot empty out the hollows
& the high sierras by mind or hand
nor heat the agency of despots
to a curling winnow
unless you speak clean & free
& detail the beauties everywhere roiling…

a quiet gaze, a constancy
going further into the imperfect
mystery
that word
the whole spanning lightness
of the single memory
the beginning
to overcome
the seeing novelty
where there is timeless remaining
the scent
of having connected
with other kinds of radiance
and awakened