Nothing But the River

(for Jena)

Nothing can stay in this place you made
for we are all larger,
in thought,
in quark and motion,
than space could ever hold.

Nothing can live in this sameness
where breath is stopped
and change is choked back,
for every particle of us
moves
and becomes.

What was, what is, what comes
is not more or better,
is not lesser or dead.

See the water of your hands.
The truth is that.
There is nothing but the river
the rocks
the water
the white capped rapids
the seemingly placid depths.
They all travel
from this place to that place:
stream to sky,
rain to bush,
back again,
but never still.

Entrainment

I know of a silence
between hearth and wood.

It is tacit agreement
in the compounding math
that is the movement
between you and me.

The threshold cradles
5,000 acre cuts
of russet shade,
a creeping, liminal breath
and newly birthed facets
of ever-expanding matter.

It is the belly of stone. Mother.
It is that series of eternal moments
between heat
and ignition
in which rest the whole of our existence.

It is choice.
It is entrainment,
a willing burn,
contained
and radiant
inside fragile thought.

A Paid Genealogy

As the hazy dusk of twilight falls
and folds
into cathedral corners
of wing and bone,
all that you rend from me
is a pittance,
a paid genealogy.

The winter asks much more than dues
with its inching fingers
and sharp bites.
The call of the geese from the field,
the path to family
and away,
all these exact a more punishing price
than the memory of you
does
anymore.

And I do not know how to worship
that revelation
more than in this moment.

This Liminal Place

I do not know
what it was that shattered me so,
errant breath
whose will would overtake my own,
only that I closed
as morning glory in full night
when Seeing
should have saved me so.

The world gave name to him,
the one who sawed the chord I would sing,
and instead silence was the price I paid,
a score of years
without breath to become
that which ether and submission
had borne.

In silence, then,
it is not surprising to note,
is release undertaken once again.
A stillness in which no weight is carried hence.
This liminal place
in ever-stretching hands
holds every damaged salve
in conflict no more.