In the midst of a day full of other objectives
of thoughts and distractions that keep the mind active
a quiet, small strain of something old recollected
slips by in the background, almost neglected.

At first it confuses, familiar but not
quite familiar enough to place into it’s spot.
Warm like the brush of an old worn fabric,
its presence is kind and makes you feel whole,

Like the rhythm of time gone past has a soul
that recognizes the place you have come
is one you were meant to be all along
and this little reveal in the form of a song

is to let you know you can keep walking on.

Feel without reason.
Without being
By any definition.

Sadness like weather.

Don’t hide;
The clouds wouldn’t.

The air is heavier today;
It doesn’t need explaining.

Raindrops fall
When it is rainy season.

Don’t wonder why.
Another “why?” would follow.

Observe
This season

As part of what you are.

Feel because feeling
Is your only hint

To a presence
That lends nothing.

“the Rockies may tumble
Gibraltar may crumble”...

All our ideas will fade.

You are feeling these senses
In a vast silent pretense—

A mistake of tumbling matter.

Where energy passes
As soon through the stars

As through the passions below,

And all looks on
At all opposed
As it passes from this world.

I love watching the seasons here,
The sycamores in fall,
The sakura in spring,
The colors that mark the passing of everything.

When I first came to wander here,
I stole a leaf for my own
As big as my hands in green and brown
And patterned all in home.

I pinned it to my door
For one long lonely year
And drew upon my wall
The sunset I had left.

Before I found my way back under
Those boughs of paisley gold,
I’d sail half a world away
And work and wait and grow.

By several hundred days and nights,
Flowers bloomed and missed,
But in full season’s time I would
Return to meet alone.

And these fine days we spent together,
In warmth, or rain, or snow,
Breathing in our 1%
As the sun’s rays dusky glowed...

Now again the seasons turn,
We cannot hope to stay
Where once the light of purpose
Has faded clear away.

Though it offers little comfort
And we cannot see the port,
We set our eyes to sea
And prepare to take our leave.

I dearly love the seasons here,
I will remember them from afar
And call to girls beneath fallen petals
who never dreamed they would part.

Time is falling fine-grain dust
That gathers underfoot

And must be ever trodden down
Else turn to suffocating soot.

The lungs of those who cease to move
From worldly long exhaustion

Freeze up with gently longing groan
For some hope to warm the frost in,

And those of younger, stronger heart
With old and weathered faces

Who spent their years in diligence
To learn of all life’s races

Gaze back at them in sympathy
Though time steadfastly separates

Those who would love and who would sing
From those who hesitate.

Call me the wind,
Call me the breeze,
Call me the river
That winds through the trees,

For that is how
I’ve lived my life,
Going where time
Seemed to say was right

With no promise made
To foreign tradition
That rose from voices
With which I had no connection,

But trailing after
Ribbons abroad
That seemed tied
To some more perfect thought

And left their tails
Streaming after
As across the wandering
Minds they roamed

Leading the whispering
Listeners home.

Hands at work
But soul unmoved—
Hours spun
Without reflex

The same thought
That bore me up from dawn
Holds me still
As life goes on

Thru busy streets
Or silent rooms
My body walks
With soul removed

Watching from
Some farther place
wondering at time
Irrelevant

It first visited me many years ago,
When I was only a girl.
I didn’t know then what it meant,
Or by what name to call it.

It made me feel as though all the world
Were distant from my thoughts.
Alone in my room where I would turn
I dove in to the feeling of loss.

As though I were waiting for someone far,
As though I’d forgotten my purpose,
I’d sit on the bed, apart from the world,
And wait to understand what I’d crossed.

I offered some names, to see if they fit:
Loneliness, memory, abstraction—
But nothing I said disturbed that distraction
That kept me alone and apart.

It comes to me now,
Some twenty years later—
Now and often between.

It still takes me away from the moment,
All that I’ve heard and seen.
As though gazing across the pages,
My eyes connect with selves that have been—

Looking from the past forward to now,
In questioning misapprehension,
Unable to find a reason to feel
That either time could matter

But watching it surely pass by.

We didn’t yet know ourselves,
How could we have known each other
At that young age with empty minds
And no reason to look beyond?

The world we knew was all we had,
A bright and narrow valley,
Where change was but a fiction
And the seasons never turned.

Or, never had that we yet knew
And so was bold our faith,
Our patience fixed on the hands of clocks
That swung the same slow day.

To run and meet in that shaded street
Was the sum of my ambition,
To fill quick hours with stories and flowers
Before the night could come,

And then away to forget our own threads
And write them anew tomorrow,
Toward dinner plates and familiar shapes
That kept this sky aloft—

The sky of that unchanging day
When we were unmade forms,
Tied close in our simplicity,
Without wonder that else should come.

The illusion of conformity,
the lifestyle wars,
the lie that your lifestyle will last—
even the traditions you cling to are not to you
what they were to those who made them.

We cannot find the lock
on the door of the history house
and cannot claim to know
what passions and pains our own forerunners felt,
having left those emotions at the roadside
and chosen to chronicle the pulses of power
and nationhood over those of personal strife.

Like dust in the wind,
like the clock unwound,
your sense of time
has no bearing on the passage of it.

Change is the texture
of the morning sun on your face,
so why not open your hand
and appreciate the sensation—

absorb from it the value of the feelings we share,
the humanity that sends us all running
in search of a reason, in search of a prayer,
in search of each other, just not knowing where
the feelings connect us beyond our trivial affairs.

Spheres of life
We gaze back through
As one might lift a concave lens,
Casting images in an outward spiral
That reach farther than they should—

From the shard of glass between your fingers
The colors of another world,
Of a time when you were happy
That could not have existed
Without casting aside the world before it,
The other lenses in your pocket.

The shaft of light that filters here
Is only wide enough for one
And to cast these pearly memory stones
The active part of that place and time
Must be consecrated as finished and done—
The cost of new experience
the loss of a previous one,
Life’s exclusive velvet table
With rules for every hand
Where time attached to one bright chip
Can not engage another.

Treat them gently,
Or draw what you see
With feverish intensity;
One harsh clash by will or miss
And all the glass will shatter down
To shuffled colors on the floor,
Senseless even when adored.

Watching eyes
Beg explanation
Where none exists.

The pride
Of silence
Refuses to dissolve.

Reasons
That never had root
Are imagined in place.

Don’t—!
Don’t speak a word
Outside the rounds
We usually fall through

Don’t let yourself
Realize
The hours have grown few—

Put your steps
In time with mine,
Let’s wonder at the stars

And talk of life and love and risk
And things that are not ours

And overlook that day by day
Time has taken the hours away

For as they left, they left behind
A space that friendship filled

Memories that folded themselves
From the paper we tread upon

And wrote in tiny, scrawled hand script
Letters only we can read

That rise from the pages of our maps
When we wander back that way

And give the places two-fold depth
When we retrace our steps

A new world before our eyes—
An old one in our living breath

For the things we did together
Creased the maps we carried on

And directed the tumble of our lives
As we stumbled forward on

Turning us round certain corners
By instinct innumerably built

From things we did and said
When we were young and still

Hand in hand beneath the trees,
Beneath those chilly stars

Thinking only of the songs we loved
And the dreams they’d begun.

It’s this same old nonsense
I want to remember as our last—
No talk of change and parting
And commemorating things gone past

For that would steal away the chance
To have five minutes more
Of us together in this falling world
Just as we were before.

So blink away the facts of time,
Ignore its heavy power,
Steal back from it the moments few
To be we and us and ours.

They belong to you and me,
And time cannot have them.

The door snaps shut,
The trees fall in,
I’m reaching out
For you again.

The moment that
My warmth meets yours,
The fear they stoke
Misses a chord—

The road may twist
Far out of sight
Through stifling fog
And moonless night

But a glance at you
As we drive on
Confirms you’re here,
Where I belong,

And nothing else
Can break the pulse
Of healthy human certainty
Kindled by minds alike to this degree.

The forest is not empty then,
When you who also do believe
In open palms and honest eyes
Count the minutes of concurrent life,

A blessing more than
Could be achieved
By any act of self-sympathy:
The bracing breath of calm solidarity.

And it was our movement
That made the color—
That gave the light some place to cling,
Some form to cast in fraction
As through the waves it dove,
And leave behind some ghostly trace
Of where our breath escaped
Before it broke those chilled blue depths
And all returned to slumber.

A million throes upon the sand
And voices that had whispered
To each and every merging wave
Before their time was spent—
Believing those eternal beats
Would keep their secrets safe,
In memory unpredictable
Of ceaseless reaching fates

But deep beneath those shadow shapes,
The drops that caught the light
And cast it into fleeting forms
That matched our moving flight,
There were not souls to hear our words
Nor lovers to remember
The history we entrusted there
And soon forgot ourselves

So none remembered what had passed
Or that there ever were
Lashes closed beneath the moon
That prayed for something more—
That cast out to the space of night
As though there were in waiting
Some purpose that was more than life,
Someone out there to meet,
Some hope yet left to gaze up to
Or seek within the hush.