This Course of Grace

I do not know what hand
stays this course of grace,
slow as I am to move through this life.
With dim eyes, indeed, did I see
the true movement of love.
Though separated by the heaviness these bodies contain,
present and waiting it has been.

To field and ocean and back again
my patience runs
yet you sit, ever gazing at this progress.
You are my sea, my land, my rain
my sun,
my endless graces.

A Garnet Weight

I am always, always looking for you.
Down streets and stranger's faces,
in the rain
in the beating of my heart,
I'm searching.

Knowing I will not find you here
is relief,
a garnet weight that lightens
to jet over time.

Fires In the East

There are fires burning in the East
where the mountains seem unlikely mothers
to bear such heat and flame.
Still, they are alive inside you.

The showers of ash blow thick and cloudy
slowly creeping the sun from its roost
to reveal a new lush land
where the shadows of beasts are broken,
shed into gravel quarries
for our tears to make dust.

The River and the Axe

There's a river that rises within me
swift waters make fallow the ground I hold
and bring an ocean's tempest inland
to this world.

Great magic has held these banks,
floods pressed low beneath the levy
and confined by ignorance,
a necessary amnesia.

But rapid waters in this embrace
have lost not their alacrity.
With an unknowing hand we have bound
that which will remake our bones.

But now, now - our grasp loosens.
And as the waters rise to eat our shores,
the Great Axe has begun its cut -
from above it shears blindness away,
descending to meet these waters.

And what of man will be left
when Axe and earth do meet?
Some newer form, perhaps -
with new sight? a truer voice?

Even as I press my eyes to know my fate,
I feel only unabetting land,
rising tide,
and the wind of god's descending hand.