Alight and yang
Alight
(for AG. and TS.)
May it be at any moment
that alights my face
when comes my god, arrayed
in jewels and oceanic metals
deftly sewn in tassels,
long clouds straightening
out above the Catskills.
Despite the rain my god
is coming barefoot,
soles elaborating on the subtle
songs of puddles.
My heart is full of patience,
always found in wait
to hear those quiet
melodies, for only then
can I glimpse the pearls.
--
Yang
(for SN.)
The rowan's leaves are changing shape again
from pill bugs' hundred plates to pipers' dunes,
and I, in iron posture, idly bend
my shoulders toward the source and root
of all that form, the sun returning home
beneath the soil vision calls a line.
I rise to follow shade's unfolding zone
whose riverine proliferating kinds,
a springtail at the boundary of the seen,
what cats we both were raised with's silly names
that flicker into conversation mean,
the presence of the other in the same,
were all dissolved as long as daylight kept
the shores of every shape coherent, wide
enough to hold itself, the rowan's heft,
the grandeur of its crown, but not its sides.