I should silence
this troublesome whispering
inside my heart

I've already considered
the plain facts
of absence

Falling headlong
into its gorge
too soon

Not knowing who might
drown in their own eyes
night after night

It's not my wish to punish
or pain another soul
beyond my own.

I dream of white
winds blowing,
like dogwood
petals, or snow.

This is the longest
I’ve been so close
to you on a sheet
of papered dreams.

Like you, death,
these poems
about you, come
as no surprise.

Close to the last page
between the covers,
still I think I’ll need
at least one other.

I hoped before
I could let you go,
before I hoped
the white winds blow.

I do not know whose eyes perceive
my finite movement toward light.

Each letting go, a small cry,
each forward move my life's
migratory assurance of what
none of us can ever know.

The genetic certainty of cells
propels the forebrain
with its stumbling feet,
while a heartache of hope
wins each moment even
as it is lost to the next.

And we must accept
the impermanent flow
that is like air, necessary
and sacred; tears are not
the only salt of sorrow.

I don't know what
the limits are
what impacts fragment
beyond repair, outside the web
of what there are words for,
murderous facts that leave mute
witnesses’ souls brittle
inside their chests,
as the thousandth child starves
somewhere in our inhumane
universe another star grows dark.

To live a life in perspective
I’m told you need to define a horizon
line eye level to the viewer.

From my hill of years the view is fluid
as in watery, but also as in unpredictable.

On the sea’s face a wall of fog moves in
and out like histories remembered
and forgotten.

Sometimes silver striates the sea
with such a glitter of insight
I am bedazzled and cannot look.

Sometimes fogbank and ocean merge
with such blue-gray unity it seems
the horizon rises so that I stand on
the shore, dwarfed by a surf of knowledge
that pounds at my ignorance.

Sometimes the sea becomes invisible,
the white air a questioning emptiness,
a finger-touch of damp against the cheek.

Some call him a dreamer
   quiet, sad and deeper
than water in a river
    after the floods come

    dark like the light
outside a widower's curtains
   when the moon hides
behind clouds gray as yesterday

and the day before
   and whatever sorrow
tomorrow or
  the night has in store.

Tonight, outside the storm
rages while the silence
inside me is as deafening
as a drowning violin,
I am as lonely as a lost feather
floating on a wandering
wind, my thoughts as painful
as a heartache wondering
when the beating will end
and love has turned cold,
passion has left, and when
the wine is all drunk I'll become
the insatiable leviathan
sinking ship after lost ship,
the salmon who drank the river
dry, the sailor who swallowed
the sea, until my forgotten
lover's face is seen in each breath,
and crystals condense
on my heart and my hands,
and the night is as dark
as a stranger’s stark shadow.