Love has passed me by like a stream at a miller’s side
Who has store of grains and grinds and little else.
A bird is the mill wheel that spills out
Small buckets of splashing trills in these woods
~Whose heart is the great spiral tragedy of a tree
that lessens itself by load of leaves~
Love has passed me by like a road for the dusted hoof
Of a pack horse whose rider is a daze of coin-pursed eyes,
And a saddle of dry distance for fortune’s miles.

Love, how you pass me again and again,
In your madness for grain of coin and its too many roles.
Sometimes the giver is more gift than the rose.

She is the typesetter’s “e”

The once-rounded uncial script,
Unbroken like the solemn vow of a monk,
His whisper, a shepherd of words under the cowl,
Murmurations of the Holy Mother to the lambswool shroud of candlelight.

His candle-flock of dreams to some hill of penitent towers, war-cowed
And broken open like faith-unfended helmets, littering the ground,
With their unspeaking tassels in babbling pagan sound of wind,
That hill too, once-rounded bare under the glittering apostles of twilight.

In the abbeywork of air, calligraphy was a cipher of souls,
He unwrested demons from an inkwell of sunsets, smothered them in blotting paper,
Freed the incarnate whole to the book of hours, nib-pointed in quills and illuminated in gold,
Line by line, in Carolingian winding sheets, he returned the misshapen to the fold,
To the carpet page of home and the warm ligatures of their waiting women.
So the shutters of the heavenly house could blow light in slanted rays to a wilderness in storm.

But he never tamed the aero-elongated, descender of Troy in a “t,”
He never knew the unholiness of the underscore or fonts as ******,
Or the world unwilling to know itself in serif robes of ancient lore.
His life was a simple rounded-out syllable of one man,
Left in the muddied, unintelligible text of faith and war.

She is the typesetter’s “e” and now belongs to any hand.

Loneliness is a sketchwork of pen and ink of iron gall,
Brushed over in brown wash of wood soot from oak,
Disguised then under tempera of golden-ratio of yolk,
Flared over with fiery oils to the smoke-blurred brink, sfumato,
Or pigment of the fresco, a shade of off-life, languid as watercolor,
Or from the too-fondly-felt impasto knife.

But bares its bones in the light-dark cleft of Caravaggio,
With diminutions of death and the storm’s dark imbroglio,
And sunlight as flesh made into soul,
The skin stretched whole around the world.

Each sky is just a sketch
Of loneliness, left unsigned,
By every hand.

Death is a fluttering bird unnested from one mind
To bring its twigs and mud to the next, startled mind,
Where it dwells, Death and its brood, silence.  

Death is the fractured self, once removed from the mothering mind
~In journeyed sadness~
To its own end, fully aware of the whole and of its own disrepair.

The Trojan dead are whispering
Indecipherable secrets to sodden-eared earth.
The wind has eyes and sees beyond, Titans outremembered.
Ajax and his oft-turned back
Carries again the fallen from the fields:
     The ******-slept clouds, unsuspecting;
     Slumped Achilles of disbelieving-godless eyes,
     Flinging the final spear of his own blood.
     Soldiers all now of the green husk.
Titanic silence engulfs sound,
Except from those who mourn.
The storm is only a storm
As long as the leaves are lost.
Such is the untimely, timeliness of war.

A snowflake is when life and death
Touch lips~not to kiss~
But to breathe unheard words
Into each other's hollowed mouths,
Like a dark, unending woodlands.

Death is a flowering inward,
@— the cleistogamy —@
Like lips to our own souls,
Drinking ourselves to florid nothing.