Today’s song is hushed- 

almost to the point I can’t hear it. 

Morning’s mist throws a veil over my eyes. 

My body is hungry for something 

I’ve not yet imagined. 

Memory and fantasy are a muddled soup. 

I’m aging like a rusty post holding up a circus tent.

I like the idea that 100 years ago, 

he sat at his table and carved 

a nonsense beast and people 

exclaimed, “it’s an illusion” 

but he knew it was a self portrait. 

I follow the lines of his anguished face 

and hunched posture and I imagine 

smoothing my hand over his 

as he put down the tools and block 

with the imprint of his inner demon 

in relief for all to see. I know, 

I would like to tell him, how that feels. 

And he may turn to me and see 

nothing and say, this is us inside.

If water if constant 

when nothing really is, 

then what about flight 

and the world’s slow swivel on its axis- 

what is slow, by the way 

because I can’t figure out 

how minutes creep patiently, 

prolonging agony when it suits 

yet I lose hours daydreaming 

about flight and various shades of blue… 

I think I have questions 

that I don’t want answers to 

since imagining all permutations 

of falling is better than actually doing it.

The color bled down the canvas 

in the most beautiful blue sliding cry, 

I was overwhelmed 

by a feeling of unity 

with all the copulating stars

and resulting storms.

The red-tailed hawk pierced my 

section of sky. He was strong, 

focused, deliberate. Like a sky sculptor. 

He may have power over his currents 

or it may be the wind gives up 

in the face of stern beauty. 

There’s no replacing touch, unseen. 

Lights are a distraction from the wind 

slapping me in the face but 

I don’t notice the pain really. 

She’s lingering like a wounded firefly

somewhere amid the hedges 

but I don’t think her wings ever worked. 

Choosing to stay still is a myth. 

I’ve taken to wearing moonstone 

more frequently than pearl 

and I like to dream about trees. 

Like soft rock in a cool climate, I am 

shaped, turned, colored by incessant 

banging of sunbeams on mountains. 

The softest parts haven’t worn away. 

They had trouble keeping pace 

in a wood of succession, not quite 

understanding they were lost. 

The horizon is like a make-believe friend 

when deep in the forest; a gust of 

comforting warmth a welcome mystery. 

Endings are life-affirming and rhetorical.