At night rise, to the buzz of my son’s blood,
I wake and blow aboriginal dust from my lungs,
Get up and take a turn around the house.

The place has gotten cold.
This ****-eyed family – good God, they are helpless.
I tried to help by leaving things behind,
Like this prayer on the wall
About the timelessness of beauty.
And did you find the poem
About Freud and mountain climbing?
All they do is wail privately
And try to pass it off as singing.

My son sleeps like a chessmaster,
Shocked into resignation.
He dreams about me,
And his dreams are riddled with light
And longing for the past.
Such nocturnal naiveté.

But he knows the stars
And because, like the ancient Greeks,
He can follow them home,
He will leave this place before it leaves him.

This house gets smaller all the time.
Still, the furniture breathes quietly,
And the dancers in the tapestry sway
Though faded by the sun.

The dust from my breath settles down in layers.
Pale light silvers the living room mirror.
My steps leave footprints before each foot falls.
The footprints lead back to my door.

It is time to lie down.
Soon my son will wake up,
And shake off the ashes of sleep.
I don't live here any more.
My death will begin again.

4
Through pinpricks
In the vault of night,
The desires of sleeping souls
Seep upward into a second sky
Where they flare into infinitude
Like our longing for God.

moon of mist
and blue-edged
cloud,

bends to the floor,

as if the skies
dreamt
of slumbering streams.

god made stars
for starving poets

when they look up
they forget
how hungry they are

    ~mce

But
Yes I live in the South Country
Where I grew up as a child
Where I wandered the fields and the forests
And studied life in the wild
I wander the unknown paths
In sunshine and in rain
Smell the fragrance of the Heather
And underfoot crushed wild thyme
This is my place
My escape from a dying world
You can bury me here in my South Country
With a tree standing over my grave
I need no long drawn out service
Just a place that nature has made

The others look at the ground.
They look at the sky.
They watch for a miracle,
Believing that they believe,
Wondering when they will no longer wonder,
Unthinkingly mouthing the New English Bible.

You ignore their designs.
You wait for the moment
When we will forget
The climate in our clothes
And the slaughter on our plates
And the tongues of our elders
And the mystery of what remains
And that light is our order,
Our kingdom is stone
And that love, envy, joy, despair
Are rituals that we cannot unlearn
As we touch and retreat in predictable ways.

The sun burns its vicious circle.
So you lie down to sleep.
You try to go to sleep.
You hope they remember to wake you.
But not too soon.
No, not too soon.

Love is like a raindrop,
delicately formed by the vapors of time,
inherently achieving its perfect shape,
before gently falling through the atmosphere of life,
dispersing into oblivion as it hits the ground,
lost forever as though it was never there.