An Absence Surfaces With That Thought

That Wavering Point Of Balance

Far Below The Veritable Calm

A sapphired blue starts to shift

as a restless tangle of thoughts

promptly dislodges in silhouette.

Emotional interchanges surge,

chasing after words unwritten

amid swells of empyrean blue.

The kinetic dance of the sea 

teasingly seduces perception,

igniting a visionary turn of mind.

Furtive strands of pale silver

entwine arbitrary elucidations,

caressing an infinite shore.

. . . . .

…all this while the body lies curled,

embracing the deep torridity of sleep…

. . . . .

A swell of insight saturates the scene

as the moon slides in lulling the tides –

the ocean’s indigo silk quietly settles.

Little enough remains of the dream

as the senses awaken to new dimensions –

crashing, knocking, colliding against the day.

Re-envisioning: The Pointed End Of A Pen

Standing at the contours of your handwritten verse –

its ink glued to the fair-skin of an earmarked page.

I take pause at first to browse, to enter it briefly.

After a while…

At length the eyes pace across each line of thought

that progressively strives to liberate a singular voice 

intent on expressing some kind of imperative logic.

Little by little a raw transformation presents itself

as the stark natural state of the poet is revealed –

his rich reflection unearthed in each turn of phrase.

Barely Legible

Stepping Out For A Breath Of Air

A patch of untouched grass

invites you into its noiselessness.

Traipsing through its gush of green

your spirit soars toward a brilliant blue.

Elsewhere…

The simplicities of summer

push on through opened windows,

awakening the still surface of things

abandoned to a lackluster world of grey.

. . . . .

In summer, the song sings itself.

~ William Carlos Williams

February dawn – frost on the path Where I paced all winter

This circumvolving world, forever undulating in darkness and light, 

becomes an elixir of sorts, coaxing narratives out of life’s terse solicitudes,

where the poet listens appraisingly to its impeccable pulse of poetry before writing 

page after page of ambiguous speech that labours to convey things oftentimes hidden, 

things weighted with vocabularies that advance toward an hypothesis of reason

thickened with silence in pursuance of some sort of humble translation.

. . . . .

Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.  

~ Plutarch

. . . . .

February dawn – frost on the path Where I paced all winter ~ Jack Kerouac

Something That I'm Watching

Sleep, baby, sleep

The day's on the run

The wind in the trees

Is talking in tongues

~ Leonard Cohen

What We Turn Away From Before It Arrives

Here in the country

barbed wire fences snake

toward old neighbourhoods.

My eyes follow their meander,

always searching for clues

tacked on to peoples faces,

on to objects and things

that speak their version of

memories not yet faded.

Just as my pen goes dry

a robin flush with pride –

its kindly spirit intact,

shuffles quick, quick, quick

through the ancient grass,

and with an altruistic ease.

prudently starts pecking 

at a few lines of this poem

prior to it gently landing

atop the highest wire

of a barbed wire fence.

And: In This Time Before

Devoir

The body's gaze

sinks its teeth into

the pour of the sun

balanced perfectly

beyond the darkness.

Shifting shapes and colours

progress secretly still.

The world lay hushed

with the exception of

a seagull's cry of longing,

proclaiming in full sincerity

an impressive display of concern.

Moved, we listen –

ears pressed against its pitch.

Fresh Phrasings

For an occurrence to become an adventure, 

it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

For It Brought A Touch Of Opulence

I went there often as a child to count the lupins on the hill. Those hours, so alive and free of intent, filled my time as I playfully wandered in the fresh morning air – feeling crazy good, almost giddy inside. Going there now – sleepily, sleepily at first they come, a sequence of coloured spaces that help articulate the omnipresent moments arising always from somewhere out of nowhere. As the mind courses through childhood’s visionary gaze, it draws on its aged recollections whose reinvention come purposed with a flicker of joy. Remembering ones childhood, that world without order, emits for some a kind of radiance that shines against the darkness. Why, even at this late hour the monarch butterfly flits among the lupins and does not let me sleep. Looping ambitiously overhead, I am absorbed by its mystery of exchange. Unable to shake its spell, I almost forget where I am.

. . . . .

It takes a while to settle in to this now, to find my bearings and resume again…

Yet, I cannot resist the lupined hills of those yesteryears, where immediately my mind travels

back to that spirited beginning, where only Mother Nature seemed to impose its law on things.

. . . . .

Its silvery hairs are attached to a soft grey-green leaf,

its open whorls climb an erect spike,

its  fruit is a pod containing several seeds.

The Glint In Its Eyes

Expose the vitality of the mind,

unearthing its power, its passions,

whose imaginative energies

will ardent expression,

chock-full of creative resolve.

Find again

the design of

its words,

the elasticity of

its language.

Capture its immediacy

before its charm is spent

like particles of time

that no longer drift

in a florid flood of light

AS IF

Tomorrow nothing remained

of its fortitude – no blush, 

no bloom. no blithesomeness,

only its frail impression

postured in a pallid guise.

I Try Uncovering You By Means Of An Alphabet

A woman, reliably kind

and of an undetermined age,

routinely reflects upon the

tacit and explicit assumptions

held in a memory now liberated.

. . . . .

In the process of mulling over its spilled vocabularies,

perception blossoms beyond the tedium of her current situation.

. . . . .

Poetry becomes her driving obsession

as she reflects on the life she once knew.

Spent stretches of time, common to us all,

lead to threads of love, of loss, of revelation,

as charitable dramas of self disentangle.

Father and mother / behind my eyes / I pause with you in mind /

cleaving, always cleaving to the commotion of memory.

. . . . .

Somewhere within that affective inner space

the child comes out – but it is there that I had to let her go,

incapable of expressively maneuvering the words to continue –

those which her reasoning might well have discerned.

. . . . .

The past that made her who she is no longer exists – its alphabet disappeared
with all the other disengaged components of my present concentration.

Enormous Dimensions Are At Work

Hymn Of Hope

In the egression of a single second,

time – the carrier of everything,

ever so gently talks a sacred hush.

Its pulse, a rhythmic hymn of hope

to those who listen, like clockwork,

to the tick, tock of its eternal passing. 

As it shapes our world it offers us

an inspiriting invitation to be engaged

amid its timelessness held in every click.

The fire of its measure is planted within –

consistent its prophetic pulse as it flows, 

circling with simple incremental inflections.

As its pitch is articulated, the heart sings – 

its impulse exposed from behind the eyes,

where it breaths as a melody lost in movement.

It aches to concede its omniscient narration –

still another beginning, as it delicately wraps

us around its impatient philosophical mood.

Nothing Changed Except The Place Of Things

Gathered in the central courtyard, he gazes toward the setting of his youth – its lifeline leading always to the heart. His outline deepens even as the old ideas wear away. Intimations of love transfigure the poverty and humility his voice so sweetly implies. Forgotten images laden with dew are summoned to the forefront of his mind. It is peaceful there in that well-proportioned darkness. As awareness works its lively trick, burrowing deep into a mind of contemplation, his words become steeped in a heavenly peace. He skips along amid the weathered seasons, humming his lullabies with a kind of grave excitement, while unearthing a quick lighthearted smile sure to appease. Shadows sway as the melody plays while overhead his doves gracefully soar, becoming a blustery deluge that slowly crowns the horizon. A nakedness hangs in arbitrary space of the rhythms rise and fall. His wise technique remains steady and sincere, touching souls with words so sensuously voiced. We adore the passionate intelligence that underlies each of his songs. We, the meek and the mild delight in the pleasure of his sentence, each intimate disclosure rote with an honest bearing in the soul. They say this man of vision living in a suit is going home now, to where it’s better than before, he’s going home sometime tomorrow without the costume that he wore.  

. . . . .

O see the darkness yielding


That tore the light apart


Come healing of the reason


Come healing of the heart

~ Leonard Cohen