What is this flesh with us
That beats its chest with us
When death is just a set
Of growing compromises?
The courtyard swims with cocktail napkins
As the movers pack up all the rooms that we were trapped in.
Silence unspools
Backwards from the grave
Opening up the space between words
By one deep breath each day.
In one of the quietest rooms in my mind
There is always a standing column of light
From a bare, open window, scattering gently
Across a gleaming hardwood floor.
I happen into this hidden room
In certain of my dreams, and in between
The scaffolding that offers me
Access to my memories.
The quiet center of a life
May hide behind a turn of mind.
One day perhaps the fish will swim
Among the Lincoln Monument,
Recalling through ancestral blood
The petals in the rose garden.
The wheel turns and the cotton spins—
Words become threads
With which to weave
A net to catch our Being in.
Time is like a two-way mirror—
We are there and also here.
Quick as an inhale, the moment arrives
When we feel time’s sickle
Slice straight through our middle,
Dividing the timeline to before and after.
The basement is stocked for a nuclear winter
But I have nothing to eat for dinner.
Now is not a legal fiction, easily traded for Then.
Tomorrow dwells inside the palace of the imagination.
It’s spring that catches in the throat—
A laugh that’s swallowed in surprise—
The light that peels the shadows back
From trees as they adjust their crowns
To hold their silent bombs, the buds,
That no one ever sees explode—
“This way, this way,” the bird song goes—
They land and reconnect with their shadows.
Some people approach holding flattering mirrors
That warp just a little and scatter
The light that you carry
In ways you can barely detect.
The closer you get, the less they reflect
Your true image, but stretch
A false version of you in a thousand directions
And slowly confuse your self-perception.
The only way to regain your bearings
Is to close your eyes and to reach out your hands.
When that rooster crows
You will remember what you know—
That every loud profession
Is an accidental confession
That the quiet, enduring substance
Of loyalty is absent.
At the break of dawn
The world will see what you have done—
If you can see it too,
Then you still have the power to choose.
Love does not live in the words you use
But in what you choose to do.
