Yes, it is true
I once believed that I loved you
Just as I once believed in faries

I cannot sleep
It's rainy outside
Pitter patter pitter patter
Is all I hear

So I close my eyes
And listen carefully
Pitter patter pitter patter
A song I can hear

The trees are growing
The flowers are blooming
Walked on pavements
Now washed away

Now I'm asleep
And it's still rainy outside
Pitter patter pitter patter
No rain I can hear

I kneel in a field of wheat grass
catching grasshoppers.

I scoop underhand into my jar, another
at the height of its jump, a third.

I put my jar by the stream, pull one
out and I grab it, force my barbed steel
hook through the belly still trembling.

I cast long loops of line into the drift
below rocks where current
froths and whirls.

I stand mechanically slightly ashamed, uncomfortable on that shaded bank
where trout strike hard.

I let them swim, then hold fast, reeling one, exhausting him, wrenching him
into air, his tail drumming against the sky.

Hanging  from the line
his fat belly flinches.

All his life of riding rapids, hiding
in flats embraced by waters’ fast flow,
by red rainbows in his scales.

I didn’t expect that open mouth,
that whiteness, the gills stop twitching,
the eyes caught in that open stare.

If all the beauty of existence
were put within a song
Would it not be
the heart of woman
for it then
to be written upon?

Then all the choirs of Heaven
would sing as one

I might then hear the beauty
of the chorus as they sing
And marvel in amazement
from the deepest darkness
of this lowest place I'm in

So never quiet
an hymn of sorrow
nor despise the tears of joy
For those who
from the darkness
yet remember how wonderful life was

Memories awaken
and hope is again reborn
At that melodious
first moment
of a woman's heartfelt song

Hers is in the singing
as life is once
more renewed
Hers is in the song
as is the Heavens
eternal truth

Yes if all the beauty
of existence
were put within a song
Would it not be
the heart of woman
for it then to be written upon?

-R.

11.22.12
-SC