Tag Archives: aging

The road moves easily within the fortress skull

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One luck-drenched park bench afternoon
while dust drifted in and out of sunbeam
streams eyes closed I dreamed of living
of love-stained moons and lake-bound swoons
and stars so vast so supreme that only
a poor cosmic speck of a remnant spark
unremembered could hope to comprehend it
of the gravity of gravity and all the loose
and hellbound distance between here and now and now
and then the slow sloping dip of the long trip
at a whim an ungrim wager with fate I dreamed
of how in old age our deciduous dreams their bones
still seductive nudge us toward a place arriving
at which we can only look back helpless bemused.

Reunion

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After hours of fitful turning,
Georgie fell to sleeping,
The rasping cough too strenuous
The light too ambiguous,
His eyelids too large to will open

In his dream,
All that ever was and all that shall be
Converged on him, and he saw the limitless
And held it close to his heart

He saw the child’s Christmas, one with
Rubble-strewn streets and bomb-laced
Windows, the spanking cry of new-born
Wrinkled joy, one with tear-washed dead lips
Of a life, spent and discarded, brushed aside

He saw the stars, new and old, explode eternally,
Worlds awash with life and others bereft of it
And tiny, forlorn pulses in ancient crevices,
Which would have been long forgotten
Had anyone ever known of them.

He could see them all, and all seemed dear,
The sublime and the petty,
The ecstasy and the torment,
Down to the final finalness, indistinguishable
From the beginning

Even down to the last corner of the vastness,
Down to the last lonely planet
Where Georgie lay on the gurney,
The sheet pulled over his unblinking face.

Friday haiku 56

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A poll of seasons
wind whipped and weary
these ragged dreams

Reflections on a park bench in autumn

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Time is winning this game,
score tied, one to infinity,
the last stop on this old trolley line
looms ahead, witless, wanton.

It’s cold, let’s face it, but
I can’t help loving the slatted
sunlight, the already tattered leaves
flinging themselves underfoot.

I may be hopelessly anchored
here in this silty backwater
astride these gifts of algae
given long ago,

but I am surely more than just a worm
through time. I sink, I swim, all a-whim,
the winds washing the stained earth.
Still, there are fates involved, I’m told.

Dreams, like phantoms, peer out
from under sheaves of light.
Live with ghosts, and before long,
you begin to feel thin yourself.

A sparrow lands at my feet.
All I can do is stare dumbly.
“I’m so sorry,” sighs the breeze,
“May I do it again?”

In spite of rain

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In spite of rain tumbling toward sleet,
the street half-hearted and gray
with envy of clouds, which take
their opportunity to jettison

sweet dying light,
the sun unhidden briefly, quickly,
and hustled back before any expectation
of warm rebuttal of fall can set in,

I know the trees live still,
though barren of celebration,,
I know beneath the crust that grass
and flowers grow, unheard, unseen,

I wonder at the thinness of sparrows
and the strength of their fires
on days like this that drive the mice,
beloved of field and furrow, indoors

to nibble in resignation
at the edges of mortality.