Lift the heavens’ paper screens
When I turn my head
And let the bands of day presage
Roads running blue to red
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Solar-powered raft
What love did I have that
Could ride hawk’s red
To the underside of the dawn?
I sat sipping the dregs
Of the radio connection
Dying in my palm
Some part I must have said aloud
Sky curling in and earth drying out
And I overseeing nothing
On an overturned cracked bucket
Where the road crumbled
And birds forgot to sing
“Mine,” you fuzzed together
The remains of June and December
Which now were all the same
Leaving me to marvel, my co-pilot
Had snuck up on me from within
A more translucent plane
You held a spherical non-circle
And a pilfered sucker stained your tongue
As you held that silver fob aloft
Your laugh sunk or doubled my hopes
It was hard to tell with
The sky turning off
“Now that you’ve found the end
Of the roads, don’t you know
I have a solar-powered raft
To take us the rest of the way”
And I would have disbelieved
If not feeling the downward blast
On board I asked again
About love, and the flightspeed
Of rafts versus hawks versus suns
And about why you’d left me two days
Sitting on that cracked bucket
But by then, we had gone
Faerie lost
I saw your footprints in the moss
Then, but now no longer
Trailing in the brook, ‘cross sunning rock
Then, but now no longer
What canopy could smell as fine
As night clouds through the trees
What bed the moss’ rival
What halls like trackless leaves
We touched hands once below the cliff
That turned the merlin’s head
And I followed you into gullies
Where time rode water’s wend
I saw you perched upon the moss
Then, but now no longer
And loved your naked, dirtied soles
Then, but now no longer
The Camp Years
I slept sleeps in keeping with the thought
That we simply walked two different paths
Rains and autumns unto years through which
You smiled into other faces from farther parts
Forgetting each time the leaves turned again
~
I let that red string lie and yet it had gone
Anchored by imaginings groundless
But for the one thing I never guessed
Even though anything could have been
After I left you
*
Image of the Kettle Valley Trail
When I took a break (snack)
I made burrito bowls and falafels
And protein-type snack
At last a recipe of my own
One point five cups oatmeal
Blended into flour
Point five cups protein powder
(chocolate, of course)
Point five cups bran flakes
(crushed up but still crunchy)
Point five cups peanut butter
(smooth, just peanuts)
One tablespoon of coconut oil
And a dash of salt
Rolled into balls of whatever size
And I just kept on eating
Instead of
Blogging
Red with an umami stripe
The poetry in the spaghetti
Had me coming back for seconds
The First and Last (Farlien’s Meeting Place)
I could have gone on the ether
I could have kissed the hems
Of the cloud-clad gifts of Demeter
Of the jewels in the rocks and the fens
–
I had no seated bounds
No traces wound ‘round
Naked lips, wrists, fingers and ankles
My neck I wore white
And clean as the new light
That broke on the spears of the mountains
–
I knew the birds’ hum
And the sybilline thrum
Of the woods and the heather mist rising
I looked no farther away
Than the next dawning day
‘Til I found the first and last treasure
–
I could have gone on the ether
I could have raised the land
With every step after Demeter
With every note sung a command
–
But I found the green by the water
I found flowers born of the eye
I found the words never before uttered
And here I am happy to lie
*
This poem started with a mondegreene from “Moonlit”, by Villages
Image from Tolkien Gateway
