The mist rises from reeds
cold and perfect still.
The heron stands there patient to its creed,
Grey senator presiding on the sill
of water. Here I seek my quietus,
The dark's deliberate answer and its gift,
But beauty rises and won't argue thus:
It simply will not give my grief its drift.
#vss365
roots tangled beneath an ancient forest,
invisible to one another,
but drinking
from the same deep water.
separate colours
find themselves belonging
to a single sky
Year by year
moss lays its soft mouth
against the cold face of stone,
and the stone,
ancient and indifferent,
slowly yields,
slowly blushes green.
This is how love works
across a distant field.
#vss365
#vss365
~~~~~~~
Love has no quietus in the rooted world;
It is the river running under ice,
The final oakleaf, copper, cold and curled,
That pays its staying at diminished price ...
I laid my darkness down in furrowed rows
And left it there for morning light to read;
The field would neither answer nor foreclose
But held it, as it holds a buried seed.
dark is only light
we haven't learned
and grief is love
that hasn't found its door
The bulb that hoards its fire through the long dark,
The spider-thread that fashions, from the dew
and empty air, its unimaginable arc,
For love is what persists when all falls through,
The warmth the frozen river hides and keeps,
The one flame that its own diminishment feeds.
Mountains seem divided
until dusk arrives.
Then shadow joins
ridge to ridge,
and what appeared as many forms
becomes one long sleeping body
beneath the stars.
