am I become an asterisk in your life,
a small reminder of what once was soul-deep,
was the trumpet-radiance of character?
I wander, unshod, in the wilderness created of myself,
to revisit a dystopian dream, where my soul-scars
bleach white from time’s long goodbye
and my caged heart sings a canary’s song to no one

am I become Bukowski’s consummation of grief
dancing on thorns to a choreography of remorse
to a dissonancy of love?

when did I become a mere star-point in your
wintercircle, lost in the wilderness of your sky,

an asterisk abandoned in your asterism?


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

Left with no last goodbye
tossed by the wayside,
a finished cigarette flicked
out the car window,
sparks bursting apart
like the light of our love
all to pieces by the side
of a dark country road

The burnt flavor of her
still inside my lungs,
riding on my tongue,
in the breathless hesitant
last long goodnight kiss

Loss is what I see
when I look into the sky
tonight, no trees reaching
its leaves up for me

The burn of her words
is in the way that I say
but I loved you,
the way I wait, the way
I hold my breath to listen
for her footsteps in the kitchen.

your words sound my bellsoul
a depth charge of incandescent tone
to coalesce the ground of my whisper-being
to sunder me from self-falsity
to shoe my doubting feet with fierce clarity
to walk me thus shod in cradling Truth
more deeply into the oblivion
of my ethereal dark    whose web tingles and sounds
with tiny silvered bells

I am belled
sounded by Love in Love

Its deep and penetrated tone
calls back
the shards of being
I abandoned
along my lifeway
so to join me

together


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

I recall your eyes as the sky looking back at me

loosed from its cage
my heart sails on the high    hot thermal
of my soul
into your sky-eyes
into the blue and away from my life
toward my Life

I am phoenix    arising
from the ashy embers of what was
into the future what-is
carried on flights of feathers
into

the sky looking back at me


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

To S.B./T.H.

it matters not where you meet St. Gabriel
whether on earth or in heaven    for
writ large on a person’s soul is a deepening
an aging
an inevitable annunciation that your casket of buried
fears and joylessness
is being dug by the gravedigger   an ancient
angelic presence   who keeps you safe
that you may hear the annunciation of your worthiness
to serve Love
that your immaculate conceptions are beloved
of Love
that you are the hands and imagination
of Love
and that the poetry of your life
is a chrism
an anointing     by Love,
                        for Love, and
                        in Love



c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

comes a time to turn   to put the feet of the heart
forward    step at a time   each foot shod in time lessness
and space lessness

comes a space to hold    to place the hands of the soul
around    the body’s tabernacle    each hand soothed and
soothing

comes a view to see    to cast the eyes of the being
beyond    the mind’s walls    built by No without
Know ingness

comes a time to cluster these     in courage and trust
to move away    from the air lessness of shallow being
Toward

to step off the craig    onto Love



c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater