i oft wonder    when i stare at you
(& seeing how you live like sweet morningdew)
if perhaps, you are the work of athena–
or instead, pantheons altogether
          painstakingly threaded your body together.
          i touch your skin and i feel the weather.

did they toil over parenthetical curves
in your eyelashes, so? did they, in fact,
          under faintly ambered nightglo,
paint soothing hairline melodies into your soul?
          it was they!
          who carefully composed       your ballet!
     betwixt your brows and your lips
lies the aria of your kiss,
          and your murmur: the solemn swell of viols.

call me daft and sound your drums!
i think it had to be the ones who
          mastered the craft,    endeavoured to create,
who fired in kilns the earths to bake;
          who designed the bold mackerel,
          its iridescent scale, the peach, how
                    malt can turn into ale;
the celestial potter who sculpted the stars,
        and Jupiter
                 and Saturn
                                and Venus and Mars;
the ones who spun all into creation,
          and could undo infernal damnation;
who weaved you from threads cut by the fates
from the months and years we celebrate.
          from flowers sprouted from the dirt of eden
turned into watercolour, your colour, it deepens.
          as designed how grapes
          may blossom to wine,
the specks on your skin birthed from the divine.

i oft believe    when i stare at you
(& think of how you light me anew)
that i’m a curator given an exquisite delight -
trembling in awe of your beauty and light -
          to treasure and love and care for and feather,
          i touch your skin and i feel the weather.
          i touch your skin and i feel the weather.

Let my hands be the pages
That hold your unspoken words
Let my voice be the letters
That refills the pages once burned

1434

Go not too near a House of Rose—
The depredation of a Breeze—
Or inundation of a Dew
Alarms its walls away—

Nor try to tie the Butterfly,
Nor climb the Bars of Ecstasy,
In insecurity to lie
Is Joy’s insuring quality.

We pity those mortals
who have tasks at hand,
who, if they turn the leaflet,
must do so within the lap of an hour.

For the gods who abode in wilderness
attain the aspects of midges,
and fruit that strikes the barren floor
must return by way of mold,

And the idyllic breath of trees
is tainted by those of spiders,
who pass the day by hanging web
and small talking with their cohort.

Water, which does run its course
in magnificent reprisal
of the solidity of dust and mornings
that come crashing down on morrow,

Must take its penitence in life,
locked by pen and reed,
in its return trip to the sea, it meets
all possibility.

All foolery turns to error
when sung within a hymn,
we mistake that grave thing, Time
amidst the company of ghosts.

Bobby the cat sits in the yard outside,
with a ****** of crows on his mind.
Seven to be exact,
perched in a tree up high.
As Bobby,
down below in the grass where he lies
never flinching an eye, just stares wishing...     Wishing he could fly.

I,
made my bed.
I put prickly pear jelly on toast,
with an egg.
I ,
get me a coffee with lots of sugar,
and roll a cigarette.

I smoke, and watch,
and write and think...
And I see,
A little too much of Bobby the cat
sometimes, in me.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest ******* made aware.