A grey shroud
A perfect cloud
My spirit leaps and becomes the mist
And I dissipate with the gentle roll of wind

This evenly dispersed cloud fills the memory of rock
Hulled out by great machines in decades past
A haunting memorial to a past life in layers of mineral.
Oh! And now the sun quickens
From some unknown corner of the world--
It excites the fog
With a tone of brilliant urgency.
But I feel the fog resist,
Maintaining its:
“I am here now, only here, and only now”.
The birds pluck and pull at the corners of the shroud
With quick lyric bouts,
But how to awake the sleeping beast of a cloud
When it has rested so calmly,
So transcendently,
Upon the silent waters
Of the quarry.


At last,
All in an instant,
It resigns to the harmony songs of the birds
And the brilliant shine of the sun,
And it rises and quickens over the water --
A gentle exodus.
And as it goes,
I feel it kiss my cheeks
With a fine dusting of mist,
Like a last great exhale.

There are ways to tread the earth that are kind
and gentle.
Find them.

Kind is the path that wanders
in tandem with my spirit
It unfolds through arcs and mounds
as if my slow careful steps
somehow through their quiet voice
invite the trail to dance
a gentle careless waltz
through the meandering sunlight
that sifts through the blushing leaves
and lands in quilted patches
on the breathing ground.

the loving is folded inside the aching.
the rich and deep is the sandy beaches reflecting in a million directions —
the light blinding and the earth burning, it is everything
at once.
the splendor of magnitude contained in a moment,
the moment is bursting at the seams now.
the thread unravels as the sheets unveil the
limitlessness of time - the error of its conception,
the paradox of infinite finitude, of finite infinity—
we are living life in the spaces between certainties.
we find our rhythm to the music of experience
and we fall into ourselves, and find home between our ribs,
nestling into the cavity of being, we trip into each other,
fall in embrace, and rise in ecstasy of laughter.
we are copper rays of light, exuberant !
flitting between the maple leaves
we dance with the tails of grass
we hum in synchrony till the moon reflects our lily cheeks.
and we taste the stars and see the galaxies behind our eyes,
the construct of days fade away and it is only space
between certainties of light and dark
and we inhabit it with a bold stomp and a wild laugh.

I will stretch and bend
and even if I break
I will mend