companion poems to
SHADES
OF LIVING LIGHT
read on landscape tablet or desktop to ensure correct enjambment
The Precipice
Everything you are, I have been.
-
void, cavern, space,
on the edge, sheets loose,
Nowhere
and now here,
in this space, time
moving slower, you,
feeling some sudden
separation,
begin to drift out
over the edge, not
fallen, not yet,
but the state between
here and there
and nowhere, and now,
here, gravity finds you,
and you it,
and the forest spills out before you.
FALLING INTO OURSELVES
Silver, new, present,
small hands grasping, limbs
draping over cold steel,
heaving into altitude’s ecstasy.
New leaves dot the driveway, skipping
in the wind outside the window. Golden,
as red as your heart, certainly,
thumping within, some solid instrument
suddenly retuned in midwinter.
You didn’t ask questions,
kept your eyes out of the window,
hoping the mushy, pulpy carpets
in the gutters
would be alive once more,
in the air, in their wondrous
post-death spectacle.
But the year passed,
and the yellowed green of spring came
and went, and summer followed,
its heat nothing but sensation,
and you stood on tiptoe for the first time
in a year to watch them fall again
as autumn finally knocked, and the trees
exploded into something new and old again.
And you walks with the leaves, spinning
and twirling, but not with them,
and your heart softly understood
that something had been lost,
and in all your gain along the way,
nothing would be the same.
IRIS VERDIGRIS
Days, months years,
it starts to collapse into itself,
finding a comfortable equilibrium,
and then the Glow arrives.
You first saw it
on one of the colder days,
in the endless mezzanine,
and somehow it thought that you were Glowing too,
even though every night
you stared into the mirror you shared
with somebody in the wall
and nothing you could ever see Glowed like it.
You would take it to the ballroom
night after night, its linoleum barren,
and sit on the floor, or the piano bench,
and the Glow would dance and laugh and soften.
You watched it write, watched
its fingers twist container lids,
and doorknobs, and your arm,
and wrap its Glow in your clothes,
and you cradled this Glow as if nursing a flame,
and the flame rested, Glowing within your eyes,
igniting the gold within.
-
You’re standing at the water’s edge.
It’s deeper than you expected.
PULSE
Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?
-
., ., .,
At the waterline, palms closing,
pointing at the pebbles
and their bubbling, popping cries,
the tide-comb brushing them to a restless sleep.
Laughing over tossed rocks—
what else is there?
You’re looking to the west,
following the Pacific waves
until they become the sky,
remembering the same horizon
from different years of memories,
sorting them one by one, focusing
as if one could pluck them from a row.
Cliffs, beaches, cities
blur into a gossamer mass,
the horizon constant.
Your hand is squeezed three times, and you’re back on the beach.
— I’m ready.
You walk back to the treeline,
palms closing, hand in hand.
-
“Your companion changes everything.”
komorebi
You, the Glow, Trees
towering above, the Sun
high in the Sky, raining
Light over the Canopy,
dripping, pouring down
in a fragmenting fluid,
running down the Trunks
and Ferns and Moss and
yellowing your skin—
you perch on your legs,
drinking the Air and its rosin.
Everything is happening around you,
standing within yourself, sensations
pulling you to the outside, surfacing.
monument park breeze
Dusk has just begun to drape
over the evening when you wake,
plucking yourself from the ground
with loaded limbs.
Grasses part before you, a thin path
through the windswept garden.
The clouds, forget-me-not and lilac
branches swept
by slow looms, are funneling east,
their silver linings bearing
the weight of oceans rushing up,
breaching, frozen, alight.
This is a familiar place.
You’re sparking,
and you and the Glow stand underneath a familiar streetlamp.
You’re capturing what it means to you,
and the familiar sun goes down,
and the place morphs into something transcendent.
You know that, in three decades,
you’re sitting, or standing,
still trying
to describe it.
PRISM
., ., .,
There is an iris
of a sunset pupil and a rolling cloud bank
and a torn woolen filament hanging
silently at the edge of the sky.
Looking west, minutes pass—
the bloody glow dopplering in pieces.
The light is gone from the sky.
You lay down.
-
There’s a change.
SHATTER
[a conversation]
dream tree
In your sleep, the trees bring you to the Shore.
“Here,” they say,
limbs protruding in gesture
to the branches scraping the water’s edge.
Here and there, a glass wave
licks at the grasping of the fine twigs,
completing some circuit,
cascading needles of light flooding the shallows,
and the Glow stood close,
even in your sleep,
guiding your vision
— it was me all along?
You knew the trees as yourself—
your life the trunk, attenuated
from root into stable cord,
heaving, headfirst, into the water
from the ponderous weight of what has yet to come.
roots
(shades of living light)
Is this the way we grow?
-
You’re awake, the Glow flooding you, the sky lightening,
the leaves on the trees
reddening, goldening, becoming
something hyperreal, the grasses
dried, and you’ve never felt more.
-
You’re carrying yourself up the biggest hill you can see.
-
There’s an old song in your throat,
your catharsis—so simple!
You’re standing at the top of a hill,
watching the seasons fly past,
a crescendo, amplifying,
and the trunk keeps getting stronger,
and the branches wave harder, and softer,
and harder still—
(there’s a beautiful, weighted darkness to inevitability)
—and you feel your roots sinking into the Earth,
and the way you look at everything keeps changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,
and changing, and changing, and changing,