Tag: poetry

Unmapped, the Way

Discombobulated am I,

but matters it not.

The wind knows no grammar;

the rain has forgot.

Unraveled the morning,

unmapped, the way—

yet onward the light moves,

indifferent, the day.

Return to Morning

Hairs in the damndest places—
Sticking out of ears and nostrils,
Sprouting on shoulders too.
Yet suddenly sparse
Upon the summit
Where once the forest stood.

The trees that remain
Fade in color,
yet glisten pure and bright,
Catching light,
the darker growth once swallowed.

The forest thins.
The dome beneath
Opens to sky—
as if return to morning,
the bare crown
lifted toward first light.

Caught

The brevity of life catches one short of breath.
We thought there was time to inhale once more, only to discover a final exhalation.
Was it a dream, a hallucination, or merely the meeting of the circle?
Stars. Dust. Return.

Night Reading

The poem finally opened itself:
after readings enough, I saw
how the line broke, why
that word and not another.

The pleasure—self forgotten
in attending, briefly lodged
in someone else’s precision,
language doing its work.

Book to shelf. Poem to page.
The body turns to its ablutions:
water, soap, the day undone.

I glance up at the mirror—
it will not hold image.

Water still running. My hands, still wet, suspended.
The book already distant on its shelf,
the lines loosening, unheld.

Genesis: The Creation of Adam

He formed him
from the ground—
clay still wet,
clinging.

He bent close.
spent breath passed—
spittle,
the damp of earth
at the mouth.

And the man lived:
warm,
hungry,
leaking already
what he would lose.

This was not corruption.
This was the gift.