Saturday, July 13, 2019

Summer Wind



For as far as the eye could see...


Summer wind inside summer light
Enclosing a delicate promise within soft hands
Of summer sky, nothing more...

Bright blue emptiness
Overarching endless mountains of pine and oak,
Their vast fingers entwining mine in yearning

Hundreds of trees upon a hill amongst hundreds of hills,
To build a promise, another promise
A thousand promises of the tension of time and desire

My hand shivering with the tension of desire
Like one leaf clinging to a thousand trees, filling all.
Countless branches stemming into the unseeable

As I stood before a mountainous beauty,
Her hand outstretched in earnest
For she had promised to walk with me that day

In robes I came to her, a supplicant, and said “please, allow me…”
And she followed me into the  hills surrounding this monastery
To take in its historic cynosure, the founder's grave.

And as the sweet, brief gesture of her hand slipped away
Well before we reached our destination
Slowly and uncertainly we made our way toward this attraction

Mostly in silence, she finding a few small words for me
Punctuated by falling leaves
That hot August day, the final  of her visit

Beside his tomb neither of us able to express our feelings
Until she said, “It is nice when you meet someone
And there’s that feeling”

“When I first saw you, I felt it” And I said,
“I felt like a leaf jolted into the wind when I met you”.
 And for a moment again, I was allowed to hold her hand.

Like a single leaf clinging to a multitude of trees
A confusion of needs: branches and leaves
Demanding one another

“But I am committed to another man
I’m already in love”, she said.
I fell like a leaf as we sat beside the founder’s grave.

Your beauty was as this summer wind;
Aflow with all the meanings of strong and delicate,
Your face so beautiful in it.  So beautiful.
Beauty such as yours so rare.

Holding and releasing, of beginning and ending.
My hand in hers beside itself  
Leaves, a symbol of time and desire to me

Desires are as endless as leaves.
Even wanting to end desire
A profound desire.

A single leaf twisting upon a thousand branches
Shining with
What might have been if only

Only a delicate promise
Held out in earnest upon the hands
Of a moment’s gust, a single leaf

Shaken lose in the summer wind, broken
Lose in the summer light
Circling down to the ground through summer sky

Falling continuously in love with love
The heart in my hand held forth
Touching the face of sky

Through the unfulfillable sky of summer
I have fallen in love with so many mountainous beauties
How summers do I have left?

How many women have I held out my hand to
Only to find that her hand already held a promise
To another man

To hold my heart out before it is enclosed
In the softest hands I can imagine
Summer wind inside summer light

Nothing more, held out in earnest
One leaf continuously falling
In love.





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Greetings, My name is Jon Landon. I am a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. I I can write everything from Poetry to Technical Writing, I am a UC Berkeley Alumni ('88)