1. soundless*
It left you.
Days go by in different dreams now,
That promise long lost, replaced,
Lost again and replaced and lost and replaced
And each time the feeling getting smaller as it moved away,
Blown along with time like a cluster of white seeds
Drifting quietly, so quietly,
Over a gravel path.
You followed it awhile but there
In the tall, dry grass ahead
It disappeared.
You let go.
Still, the warm blue of an August night
Holds all the world, still,
Enough to bring it into remembrance – we all know that.
We all felt that, the sweet remembering,
The every-breath-an-ache that replaced you
With tears in which you were not alone,
In which you belonged.
But it left you some time ago,
Maybe yesterday, maybe 2 years ago or 10 or oh,
You don’t really know when.
Still, in the silence before a summer storm
You search, still, for the ache,
Search for distant promises
Like a shadow reaching for the dark.
*poem first published in Apeiron; photo first published in Gravel
2. within blue
It’s not the color,
Not the silence –
It has a sound –
A rumble deep,
Present and far,
That weaves and waves toward me, beneath.
An earthquake, a terrible fear
That I felt, then,
That I hide, now,
Inside blue –
Leading it away from expressing
Into me, through me, in me –
In my now,
In my then:
That you are gone, still,
That you were gone already, then
As I laid bare in other colors,
Graying, yes, still,
Green and yellow and white – in its way -e
Wondering where you’d been.
She said: you were gone:
Gone? Gone.
My hand remained,
But the phone, her voice, greens and reds,
Even that gray,
Disappeared in a breath, held, still,
Across all this time:
Suspended in a world above where I went,
That last breath of mine,
As I fell into blue,
To hide from that hu sorrow
Within a color.
3. the forms that mark in their leaving
I have a form
You can see it there:
Call me a teapot,
Squared,
A flourish above as a cap,
An angled wooden handle meant,
I’m sure you see,
More to be seen than held,
The sort of bringer-of-tea
Used only when guests arrive, if then.
I have a place,
Resting, side-view on the bookcase,
The 4th row up from the floor
Where I see people gingerly or
Comfortably walking past:
More than a place, I
Suppose, it is my space
Or was: there was,
There was a day
When you did not pass by
Anymore. I remained
Fixed, became
Dust defined and dust enforced
Until that rumble, two feet
Four feet eight and more,
Ka-runch of boots and men and scraping
And taking
As all around was swept away
Into dark boxes,
Ambassadors from other dusty places, darkened
And taken and wrapped and taken and I
Wondered where you’d gone.
I’m still there, locked away
In the growing wet dryness,
Silent, soundless, blue within,
Trapped within blue words,
Finding solace in memory
Only of your form
That remains passing by me,
Undefined like
Shadows in water
Flowing away,
Waiting, still.