Fog Relieves the Distance

Fog relieves the distance of its weight.
Only the near has clear significance.

Close things are the total of your morning;
everything else is just the sleep that you were woken from.

The sun alone can burn away your dreams
and leave their inspiration.

November 28 2011

The Bones

Throw down the sack of rattling bones.
Let it tear;
let the mandibles and fibulas,
tarsals, metatarsals, and patellas,
pelvises and sacrums,
carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges
clatter loud across the black stone floor
that paves this quiet night.

My soul is not an ossuary;
no catacomb's niches here,
stuffed with the skulls of forgotten men.
If anything, it should be a basement swept broom-clean,
occupied only by the necessary furnace of my life
and the tools and toys and seasonal items needed
for a house in working order and capable
of something close to joy.

This is my aspiration, which I will not clench
in a miserly fist, but will release to fall,
to break,
and from the wreck of these old bones
a bird of peace will fly.

November 23 2011

You Will Be With Us

You will be with us into Winter;
you will taste the snow.
Spring will find you quickening with us,
dazed by the wind and sun.
Summer will stretch you out across the boards
momentarily, until the hunt resumes,
and Fall again will waken memories
of old paths scented and forgotten.

You do not need to notice this circle;
your nose is tracking the moment.
But you may be surprised at the ease with which
the stealthy seasons send their changes in
and deliver to you a subtle prey:
Unmasked, this formerly alien place 
will wear, if Sirius is willing,
the unmistakable savor, ready to your jaws, of home.

November 16 2011

Cathedral

Along the path
the chorus of birches strains to the sky
praising the blue in which they mingle,
leafless,
shriven for winter,
offering their very bodies to the sun
that lights them with a holy fire,
white
in their secret cathedral.

November 6 2011