Sun-born
Into the moonlit calm I fall
hanging on memories of doors
and eyes opening,
sweet smelling fires,
stretching flowers,
hills beyond hills,
old hallways hollowing,
a song from some inner room,
that old man’s tremendous prayer,
swift birds at dawn, the river widening…
I hang on like life to such moments
plucked from the converging clutter
which is closing in and grabbing on
with a thickening of limbs and globular
clustering, a gathering into pools
and throngs, an agglutinative swarming—
everything constrained and stuck together:
cups, cupboards, cars, clothes, cans,
rooms upon rooms
clutching across the lands,
containers and conduits and coverings…
I search in the ruck of the place,
to find you.
But you are not framed in the doorway;
your hair in the light
is not you; your smile, the look
in your eyes I know so well,
are still only pressed against space,
though something flickers through—
your singularity, the flash of you,
which I cannot see
and can never know—
as waves, patterns, fields
of force, feelings without thoughts,
spins of muons and galaxies,
the flows and forms of things,
the charm of quarks and swiftness
of sharks—I cannot see,
I can never know.
The moonlight slowly fades
and the sun glimmers,
lifting the leaf
from the folded petal,
loosening the plant mold of the soil,
reducing the glacier to wild river.
Climbing, I climb the sun,
Up slippery stems, the unclad coral rose,
the spiraling leaf-screened stretching tree.
Flying with the sun’s wings,
I cry at whippoorwills and petrels,
storm-cloud-riding until flung free—
there where no weather is, nor mold of dying,
sun-born on the burning edge.