On this, the shortest day of the year,
I have journeyed to the Great Plains
to build a fire for you.
The night air is cold like a cellar
cut from ancient stones.
But I found some wood among the deserted plains
buried under the grasses and dirt,
hidden away like leaves
that had become the soil.
After I cleaned the wood by hand -- its dirt beneath
my nails and the fabric of my cloth
I sent a flame
combusted by the mere thought of you.
And the wood became fire.
There were hermit stars that gathered
overhead to keep me company.
Your spirit was there as well
amidst the fire's flames.
We laughed at the deep meaning of the sky
and its spacious ways.
Marveling at the flat mirror of the plain
that sends so little skyward,
like the hearts of children denied
a certain kind of love.
You played with spirits
when you were young among these fields.
You didn't know their names then.
I was one.
Even without a name, or body,
I watched your gaze, unrelenting to the things
that beat between the
two mirrors of the sky and plain.
I believe it was here also
that you learned to speak with God.
Not in so many words as you're now accustomed,
but I'm certain that God listened to your life
and gathered around your fire
for warmth and meaning.
In the deserted plains he found you set apart
from all things missing.
Dear spirit, I have held this vigil for so long,
tending fires whose purpose I have forgotten.
I think warmth was one.
Perhaps light was another.
Perhaps hope was the strongest of these.
If ever I find you around my fire,
built by hands
that know your final skin,
between the sheets of the sky and plain,
I will remember its purpose.
In barren fields
that have long been deserted by the hand of man
I will remember.
In the deepest eye of you
I will remember.
In the longest night of you
I will remember.
On this, the shortest day of the year,
I have journeyed to the Great Plains
to build a fire for you.
Someday the messengers will arrive
with stories of a nocturnal sun
despondent, burning implacably
in the deepest shade of a thousand shadows.
They will tell you of the
serene indifference of God.
They will draw you by the hand
through bruised alleyways
and prove the desperation of man
rejected from the beauty of an unearthly realm.
The news will arrive
as a tribute to the death of oracles.
Sparing words of purpose
the messengers will announce the
cold fury of realism's cave.
Someday, the messengers will send their thoughts
through books that have no pulse.
You will be accused of weakness
that drowns you in servitude.
A queer rivalry will beset you
and your life will crawl like an awkward beast
that has no home.
And you, my dearest friends,
who are truth -- who were all along,
will renew your devotion
to a powerful image in a distant mirror.
You will listen to these stories
and tear at your silent heart
with animal claws that are dulled
by the stone doors of time.
Where the unattested is confirmed
your vestige-soul is stored.
It will strengthen you
and cradle you in the light
of your own vision,
which will be hurled like lightening
through twilight's dull corridor.
The messengers will cry
at the sound of your rejection.
They will scream: "Do you want to be a
lowly servant and lonely saint?"
Mutants of the light
are always tested with doubts
of a swollen isolation
and the promise of truth's betrayal.
Listen without hearing.
Judge without pardon.
The grand parasite of falsehood
will prevail if you believe only your beliefs.
Someday, when all is clear to you --
when the winds have lifted all veils
and the golden auberge is the locus
of our souls --
you will be tested no more.
You will have reached destiny's lodge
and the toilsome replica of God
is jettisoned for the pure and perfect.
Who will find me
in the morning after
the winds rush over the barren body
that once held me like a tree a leaf?
Who will find me
when mercy, tired of smiling,
finally frowns in deep furrows of ancient skin?
Who will find me?
Will it be you?
Perhaps it will be a cold morning
with fresh prints of snow
and children laughing as they
lay down in the arms of angels.
Perhaps it will be a warm evening
when crickets play their music
to the stillness of waiting stars.
Perhaps it will be the light
that draws me away
or some sweet surrender that captures me
in its golden nets.
Who will find me
when I have left and cast
my line in new waters trickling
so near this ocean of sand?
Listen for me when I'm gone.
Listen for me in poems
that were formed with lips mindful of you.
You who will outlast me.
Who linger in the courage I could not find.
You can see me
in these words.
They are the lasting image.
Soul's photograph.
Space is curved
so no elevator can slither to its stars.
Time is a spindle of the present
that spins the past and future away.
Energy is an imperishable force
so permanence can be felt.
Matter flings itself to the universe,
perfectly pitiless in its betrayal of soul.
You can only take away
what has been given you.
Have you not called the ravens the foulest of birds?
Is their matter and energy so different than ours?
Are we not under the same sky?
Is their blood not red?
Their mouth pink, too?
Molten thoughts, so hot they fuse space and time,
sing their prophecies of discontent.
Listen to their songs in the channels of air
that curl overhead like temporary tattoos
of light's shimmering ways.
Am I merely a witness of the betrayal?
Where are you who are cast to see?
How have you been hidden from me?
Is there a splinter that carries you to the whole?
If I can speak your names
and take your hands so gentle you would not see me,
feeling only the warm passage of time
and the tremor of your spine moving you to weep.
Space is curved so I must bend.
Time is a spindle so I must resolve its center.
Energy, an imperishable force I must ride.
And matter, so pitiless I refuse to be betrayed.
So I stand naked to the coldest wind
and ask it to carve out an island in my soul
in honor of you who stand beside me in silence.
Lonely, I live on this island assured of one thing:
that of space, time, energy, and matter;
nothing matters.
Yet when I think of you in the cobwebbed corner,
hoveled without wings
like a seed planted beneath a dead tree stump,
I know you are watching
with new galaxies wild in your breast.
I know you are listening
to the lidded screams smiling their awkward trust.
All I ask of you is to throw me a rope sometimes
so I can feel the permanence of your heart.
Out where the ocean beats its calm thunder
against grainy shores of quartz and sand,
she strolls, hands pocketed in a flowing gown
of pearl-like luminance.
I can see her with hair the color of sky's deepest night
when it whispers to the sun's widow
to masquerade as the sickle's light.
This is she.
The one who knows me as I am
though untouched is my skin.
The world from which she steps
pounces from mystery,
announces her calm beauty
like a willow tree bent to still waters.
In this unhurt place she takes her body
to the shoreline listening for sounds beneath the waves
that tell her what to do.
How great is her dream?
Will it take her across the sea?
Does she hear my heart's voice
before the translation?
She scoops some sand
with her sculpted hands and
like an hourglass the particles fall
having borrowed time
for a chance to touch her beauty.
Her lips move with prayers of grace as she tells
the wind her story;
even the clouds gather overhead to listen.
Her gestures multiply me
with the sign of infinity,
disentangled from all calculations,
adorning her face with a poetry of tears.
I am summoned by her voice
so clear it startles me.
I watch her because I can.
I know her because she is me.
I desire her because she is not me.
In all my movement, in the vast search
for something that will complete me,
I have found her
on this shoreline,
her faint footprints,
signatures of perfection
that embarrass time with their fleeting nature.
I am like the cave behind her
watching from darkness,
hollowed from tortured waves
into a vault that yearns to say
what she cannot resist.
A language so pure it releases itself
from my mouth like long-held captives
finally ushered to their home.
She turns her head and looks
past me as if I were a ghost unseen,
yet I know she sees my deepest light.
I know the ocean is no boundary to her love.
She is waiting
for the final path to my heart to become clear.
And I am waiting
for something deep inside
to take my empty hands
and fill them with her face
so I can know the rehearsals were numbered,
and all the splinters
were signals to her heart.
I once wore an amulet
that guarded against the forceps of humanity.
It kept at bay the phalanx of wolves
that circled me like phantoms of Gethsemane.
Phantoms that even now
replay their mantra like conch shells.
Coaxing me to step out and join the earthly tribe.
To bare my sorrow's spaciousness
like a cottonwood's seed to the wind.
Now I listen and watch for signals.
To emerge a recluse squinting in ambivalence
inscribed to tell what has been held by locks.
It is all devised in the sheath of cable
that connects us to Culture.
The single, black strand that portrays us to God.
The DNA that commands our image
and guides our natural selection of jeans.
Are there whispers of songs flickering
in dark, ominous thunder?
Is there truly a sun behind this wall of monotone clouds
that beats a billion hammers of light?
There are small, flat teeth that weep venom.
There is an inviolate clemency
in the eyes of executioners while their hands toil to kill.
But there is no explanation for
voyeur saints who grieve only with their eyes.
There is only one path to follow
when you connect your hand and eye
and release the phantoms.
This poem is a shadow of my heart
and my heart the shadow of my mind,
which is the shadow of my soul
the shadow of God.
God, a shadow of some unknown, unimaginable
cluster of intelligence where galaxies
are cellular in the universal body.
Are the shadows connected?
Can this vast, unknown cluster reach into this poem
and assemble words that couple at a holy junction?
It is the reason I write.
Though I cannot say this junction has ever
been found (at least by me).
It is more apparent that some unholy hand,
pale from darkness, reaches out and casts its sorrow.
Some lesser shadow or phantom
positions my hand in a lonely outpost
to claim some misplaced luminance.
The phantom strains to listen for songs as they whisper.
It coordinates with searching eyes.
It peels skin away to touch the soft fruit.
It welds shadows as one.
I dreamed that I found a ransom note
written in God's own hand.
Written so small I could barely
read its message, which said:
"I have your soul, and unless you deliver --
in small, unmarked poems --
the sum of your sorrows, you will never
see it alive again."
And so I write while something unknown is curling
around me, irresistible to my hand, yet unseen.
More phantoms from Gethsemane who honor
sorrow like professional confessors lost in their despair.
I can reach sunflowers the size of
moonbeams, but I cannot reach the sum of my sorrows.
They elude me like ignescent stars that fall nightly
outside my window.
My soul must be nervous.
The ransom is too much to pay
even for a poet who explores the black strand of Culture.
Years ago I found an
Impression -- like snow angels -- left in tall grass
by some animal, perhaps a deer or bear.
When I touched it I felt the warm presence of life,
not the cold radiation of crop circles.
This warm energy lingers only for a moment
but when it is touched it lasts forever.
And this is my fear:
that the sum of my sorrows will last forever
when it is touched, and even though my soul
is returned unharmed,
I will remember the cold radiation
and not the warm presence of life.
Now I weep when children sing
and burrow their warm presence into my heart.
Now I feel God adjourned by the
source of shadows.
Now I feel the pull of a bridle,
breaking me like a wild horse turned
suddenly submissive.
I cannot fight the phantoms
or control them or turn them away.
They prod at me as if a lava stream should
continue on into the cold night air
and never tire of movement.
Never cease its search for the perfect place to be a sculpture.
An anonymous feature of the gray landscape.
If ever I find the sum of my sorrows
I hope it is at the bridgetower
where I can see both ways
before I cross over.
Where I can see forgeries like a crisp mirage
and throw off my bridle.
I will need to be wild when I face it.
I will need to look into its
unnameable light and unravel
all the shadows interlocked like paper dolls
and cut from a multiverse of experience.
To let them surround me
and in one resounding chorus
confer their epiphany so I
can hand over the ransom and reclaim my soul.
When all my sorrows are gathered round
in an unbroken ring I will stare them down.
Behind them waits a second ring,
larger still and far more powerful.
It is the ring of life's warm presence
when sorrows have passed
underneath the shadows' source
and transform like the dull chrysalis
that bears iridescent angels.