And So, In this Sea We Drown and Drown Again.

 

Long rays of starlight  

Overstretch... 

Strain...fray...unravel... 

 

Shredding fibers of distant suns 

Too brittle to be remembered 

Snap

In a dream,

And the strands of our breath braided together 

Like ship cables

Come unlashed from cleats of flesh 

 

At the opposite end of the expanse 

Of hundreds of millions of years

Of light 

These cables

No longer tie us to a slip of time 

But an argosy of wandering love

That drifts off

Into the night sea,

Into restless dimensions

Where time and space drown and sailors

Such as we,

Overladen with treasure,

Cry our little deaths

And are reborn. 

 

Knowing that, like seagull wings,

I cannot touch your hand

Or kiss your lips

Without dipping into the wind in spirals,

I look deep into your eyes, upward into them,

Into the foam of vision that crashes there upon the shore

Of your irides

And disintegrates into cloud wisps over the horizon

Of your eyelashes.

One last shivering smile and we sink,

Pulled down

By the starlight that plunges like anchors

Wrapped around our breath,

Wrestling in love and death.

Speechless before the deafness of the depths

That sounds in fathoms of unknowing,

Why speak now, my love?

Time cannot hear you, nor can the dead.

 

Just cry, cry inside

Waves of undulant mirrors, their profusion 

Of faint moonbeams that slash like a sword 

Across the warring surface

Where tragedies of love and fortune abound

And the oceans loosed on Earth

Are loosed in heaven. 

This is all a fragment of eternity 

Too vast for the eyes of mortals

And so, in this sea we drown and drown again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Syllables of Steps

Delicately 

Along the breast of shore, 

Steps beget steps, syllables 

Beget syllables, 

Syllables of steps speak 

One by one, slowly 

Forging the long sentence 

That shadows your journey.

As words disappear and 

Are replaced by others,

The footsteps of your thoughts 

Wander peripatetically behind you.

 

Inner words on the winds 

Like seabirds and clouds 

Punctuate the language of sky,

And so too your footsteps 

Together with the wrack upon the shore 

Write a language in the sands, 

A living lexigraphy of things,

An orthography of time and vision

Integrating silence with meaning,

A soundless communication 

Permeating all things.

You unite in conversation

With the deep blue

Of sky and ocean.

Your eyes receive word from the horizon. 

You speak to everything with your eyes

And they to you.

It is a long question your gaze asks

To the jelly and star fishes

Washed up on the shore

About the nature of their existence,

Of what they briefly experienced,

About all the millions of years of evolution 

Embodied in them, now dead. 

 

And you move on, 

Always moving on...

 

The crush of sand beneath your feet

Informs you, step by step, that

There are more stars 

In the universe than grains of sand 

In all the world,

And you argue that it's just not possible.

It's simply too inconceivable.

 

And you move on...

All these syllables of steps speak, 

But what do they say to the melting sands?

They say the walker is walking.

They say that both

Are subject to change.

They say that beneath it all,

Where all things meet, 

Visible and invisible,

The silent witness

Who will never be seen

But will always see

Breathes. 

 

And you move on...

 

Beneath your bare feet, 

The beach rusts away and dissolves. 

Jutting rocks and cliffs rust away, 

The whole world rusts away in this swirling solvent 

Of salt and oxygen.

 

You stop to glance back

And see that at your heels

Millennia unfold

Upon the winds,waves, and sands 

And reside in every speck

Of stone.   

 

Beside the huge ocean 

You hug 

This slender breast of shore 

As waves of change

Chase relentlessly after your feet,

 

And you move on, 

Always moving on... 

Forasmuch as the blade of a knife 

Cannot cut itself, 

So too the mind cannot grasp the mind.

 

And you move on, 

Always moving on...  

 

With something greater than the eye

You see.

With something greater than the mind

You understand.