on home going

Sep 7

the beginning is here somewhere,

snake says, rough scales taken in mouth,

I can feel it twitch here in my jaws.

clarity and space blossom everywhere,

a chattering plague of disappearances:

something is made invisible (a leaf, and more)

another thing (freshly cast or hidden)

crystallizes out of air. weeks warp

like books left in rain, shedding their form

for new shapes, bloated and wavering,

quick as running ink.

the ground blurs soft in the gloaming valley,

a lushness of swards thick under summer sun

resurrected in what is once again the passing

of things. stars drop from the sky,

shiver and huddle close in the myriad darknesses

of a dusky land teeming like the sea.

in our lives there are dozens of these cosmic leaps.

there is a strange planet for every second,

a shooting star, an unseen asteroid in the thickets

of deep space. a shifting, again and again,

hand on heart, eyes in backs of heads,

we hold ourselves or each other in the folds of night

and through the sheer and baffling passage:

scale- soft, not unremembered,

beginning of the end of the end.

sonnet two