Violet III

She has

Always been empty

Of aught but herself

She built her own airships and

Sailed westerlies most calm

The interchange of futures

Distant marks upon her charts

And periapts of the exiled

Things she eagerly lost

That said

Inconturnable

Her tailwinds cannot keep

For a beetle in a prism said

There is nothing to be

Without being

And so the drifting vision

Composed of stories

Near to flesh

The rudder of imagination that

Has been mainstay and reflex

She will drift to earth

And leave it

Where memory grows

Dearer than truth

Believing grass will cover sails

And new flowers bloom

*

Violet II

Now eviternity sounds

Although I would stay alone

Where the warm impression

Of company has yet to fade

My friends I do not know

From one EEG to none

From one fear to one obsession

From one night hawk to the day

But I could bring a new round

Each glass to their taste

And I could tell in summer that

The road might take us east

I may previse a world

With scale and mode all changed

But I won’t forget how I knew them

And knew them never deeply

*

Always watching over you

 

Violet I

Where the

Hours played shadows’

Games better than hollows

Ever made holes of

Of a heart or a tree

The sentinel stood tall

And let darkness make all

Our steps move us forward

Five hours apiece

I kept drawing away

The more I tried to stay

Walking beside you

In your sundial’s shade

And what you mouthed to me

An astrobleme’s mystery

Will forever compound me

By factors of three in

Longing and hate

Whilst

The sentinel

Sighed

Canorous and deep

Just before the daybreak

*

Adamantine Dreams

Haesel’s Denu

Not in chary haesel’s beak

The nest that failed the hart to keep

But in the bracken grey below

Dappled youth still breathing slow

Yet to see the denu’ s ridge

The sorrows’ run or forest’s fringe

Meek to suffer the arrow’s fly

And still in tender ways to sigh

 

Where we last vacationed

They had come for the morphology

Of an old-new city down to its heart

For the light intensity and ground temperature

For the bass of urban noise and art

The attic rooms that I had chosen,

Their pictures aspiring to a hotel

Had pleased in price only to disappoint

Age gathering on sills

But I leave them to their complaints

On the other side of these thin walls

Mixed with debate as to where to dine

While I listened for your footfalls

They had come for the engineering

Of life and speed intertwined

But I came hoping to see your ghost

And sit together like old times

*

Image source

A Stay More Exotic Than a Treehouse

An underwater nook, arcing

Glass and steel telemetry

A wetsuit about my ankles

But no tank to breathe the sea

I came with a flock of parrots

Where I expected to be alone

To hide and write and miss you

Stranded where the coral blows

Instead feathered cacophany

Around neck and wrists and feet

While the fishes flicker silent

Outside my enclosure, watching me

The weight of blue is astounding

And among the parrots I cannot speak

I sit and wait for this glass arbor

To surface from the deeps

–

Image by Julie Dillon

Castle Rabbit

You built a wooden castle

Where pool fell into pool

And the trees clambered into sanctuaries

Where no one could stay for long

I caught a black rabbit in those halls

A baby, nothing more

Than the length of my palm and delicate

Breaths through trembling fur

It had been on the doorstep

Of your haunt of wild cats

Of the hall of hawks and owls

Of your ego left ajar

And when I lost hold I did not wonder

Any longer how to leave

I made doors of your wooden castle

Until the trees lifted me free

Aging despite yourself

Find her in the heather downs

Bright noise of your school days

And lose her in the moors beyond

Once promises turn grey

On Earth

She laid her head upon my breast

And interrogated the concept

Of Infinity

Atoms nor stars had the right

As if they were born to show us our

Frailty and scant drops of eons’ seas

The least her mitochondria could do

Would be to marry her more deeply to

Mirrored lives unfolding, compact

If brief and imaginary

Because the stars and atoms’ stubbornness

Would never see them move, she said

We should dismiss them for stars made instead

On Earth, in Finity

Once more

An afternoon turns to honey

Warmest as it fades

The sun retreating from rooftops

Waited to see you again