Long the light stretches
in the bay of our hearts
an open endless day’s dust
puffs
from our soul’s sandal,
the censer swings
evening kindness,
in the swallow’s arc
goldenness of meadows
We rise,
blooms as open as sunrise
hearts as hopeful
as bird cries
echoing echoing
dawn
each to each
in Summer time,
as are parentheses
facing )(
afore.
I stood upon the shore
and there were many ways to be
But then I heard the call -
God will let us be
Lovelier yet upon the sea.
And the winds gathered, from Sidon & Alexandria they came, and from across the Libyan Sea,
searching me out through the
valleys of the White Mountains,
flattening Sieta Bay by night.
They searched me out, saying
“Here is yet
a journey in hiding. No sail like this
should be set and not filled.
Make good the great voyage!”
Only by pressure
is the hard crystal won .
And yet, appearing,
the crystal is quickly
liquid again with light.
Quite nothing in the
dark of night,
it flares
in amber-shouldered dawns;
touched also with delight,
not for being won,
but being
like a glance
that warms the heart
when smiling can be done,
it refracts,
as when,
high above,
a star’s threshold
draws its lonely glitter
to a clock
far beyond form.
Great feasts elide,
the snow crest on the heated
eclipse-touched moon
blazes
to have us learn
that all around us, as inside,
the magic wheels turn
which we call life
as if a knowing thing could reason like that
or our small certainties
won under such pressure
- crystal figures of
finite form –
get half a loop around
‘the known universe’!
No,
the snowfall
hurts our touch
our touch hurts
the snowfall too
but neither snow
nor me nor you
can know, know our limits
touch, for more than passing, touch our form
be in any sense
beyond
being
laugh further than the moon’s eclipse
that is,
we cannot laugh louder
than the deaf can hear
but yet
where does this bursting come
from? Out of the
heart of innocence
leaps
catastrophic love
in kindly form, dancing
dancing to a dream,
dreaming to a tune
this tune’s the thing
wherein
the crystals
and the voids take wing
the beat
of nowhere
catapulted
into
kin…
Came light and licence
on the plains of dust
your heart
the gift
the only star rising
the one thing
glowing
in air that otherwise
thrusts the swallow’s wing aside
that
stirs
& sings without regard
and is all bounty.
…and it true too that this is beauty but
nothing
has the quality of touch
that sets alight
some angel of the spirit
which is not kind.
For kindness
becomes dust and stone, that is, suits them,
suits passion, wildness
and the sleeping child:
it is not of them,
or toward them,
but as a cloak that
comes around the ice
of any other way of them
and only your heart
has this kindness,
and, in being kind, bestows the cloak of
generosity and delight
and silences the silence of
your mind;
Abundance which has not the
touch of kindness to it
is an excess that will
kill,
that is the path of war;
For all sweet laughing eyes
twinkling to the core
- the dancing hearts
breaking solemn jaws
to so fit a smile –
I’ll devote
the burst of a light loving soul.
It thrills my guile
O! give me more!