It wouldn’t do
to take my eyes off of you,
to pretend for one second that
you weren’t always on my mind.
I think about you all the time.
I could not act as if
your lips, strayed from our kiss,
left me unbereft of emptiness.
You are hardly forgotten,
nor will you be unmissed.
It would be a lie,
an affront to try,
a ruse, miscarried, and so belie
that in your absence I am not fine,
that I am not happy but resigned.
I could not affect
hiding a heart unchecked,
strength in the shade of your neglect.
Your going has weight to it and heft.
it is tissue and breathing flesh.
I am removed of the rest
of you, gone but for darkness.
It has dimension, place and depth.
Your lack is all remaining of you,
a presence only in my head.
When she laughs and I hear her
walking in front of her or behind
no matter our distance, I am near her;
she replaces every thought in my mind
The water of it, jumping, pouring,
amid her lips, flowing, soaring
from her neck, her head thrown back,
igniting all the air she breathes,
in thrilling fingerprints she leaves
on me with what her laughter says.
And what her laughter says is that:
“I am nowhere else but with you now.”
Then, this having been announced,
the space around her levitates;
it becomes a little weightless,
elevating those who surround her,
and endows on the air the traces
of lightning that the water chases,
the flash of flame which dances
in splashes on the water’s faces
down the dips and rippling places
makes electric that air with luster
her voice is joy and life recovered.
Her voice is notes of sunlit motes
like fireflies that float in close
in late summer and never rest
the parts of them that softly glow.
When she talks, it’s like her laughter
is gathered up in bales together,
in melodies, and gently tethered.
Her words redound the gales of air
then from the music of her laughter
all at once, lyrics are there.
So, her laughter has an overture
its denouement, its quiet end,
when her slowly fading singing,
holding, however losing ringing,
and, yet even as silence tries,
to eclipse her choir inside from sight,
their memory friable in the bright,
her laughter is more gorgeous still
than any words I could ever write.
Suspended over landscaped greens and streets,
above the roads, rivers and gazing plains
are held aloft the wires, pathways and veins
on pillars raised and columns all arrayed,
through towns and over lakes, you can see them
strung in a web and woven into lace
a few feet higher than our sightline.
They innervate the tissue of the earth
and pass along them amber sparks that race
crepitating along braided fiber
attired in flesh, sealed and safe, crystal plaits
withstand the siege of nature that buffets them
and would surely cast them far off their course.
//
All the world they break
into a million pixels
light to be refracted
trade to be conveyed.
//
In single file, and yet as one, they dance
along the currents of the capillaries,
the strands of light and passage,
fluorescent beams always clashing above,
stranger to their goal and course.
Unseen they must have been,
with care once reassembled,
are in all details attended.
They disassemble our desires,
manhandle our wants and our intentions.
Sparks rearrange these feelings into parts
and pack them by section within parcels,
writing upon each one in careful hand
the address of final destination.
//
To us they bring back visions, symphonies,
literature, all civilization.
Though most of all they bring us others.
They carry to our trembling hands letters,
messages we long dreaded receiving.
They dive in flight under the half-done light.
We see and hear our love complete that light,
almost embracing those whom we hold dear,
milling stone to dust, burning glass from sand,
the strands author it upon cresting wave,
igniting peals of tears that fell for years
by heartbreak, injury, into vapor.
//
By wonder carried, borne on westward wind,
their silent embers slowly lose their heat.
They rest before they quiet, task complete,
surrendering to merely be, and gleam.