Temporal Covenant

All experience
Bound to one
Instant, an
Enchanted flash
Of fire and shape.
Is it motion or
Expanding stillness? 

Love grows.
What time
Is a rose?

Geranium

In flower language
Geranium means folly.
Probably some outrage in 
Restoration drama, a fluke,
Cad, a missing comma
In a perfumed letter --
A rebuke then, better left
To the past than any future
Time might emit and call
Us here, where it seems so clear.
Geranium means sprouts
Where other cuttings wither,
Stems jammed back in earth
Issue threads, thrive, neither
Conquered nor dead but
Quite the reverse --if this is
Folly, we could do worse. 
 

Explaining Myself To A Purple Pansy

Born deep in another
Century --what did 
I feel and do?
I'd wake and sleep
In sun and night --in
Light of other days, 
Like you, in what is real.
I felt time take me
Here, where we are
In hope and dream.
It does not seem so far.

Halloween Poem Inserted Into Hamlet Act 5, Scene 1

(I found this Calderon scene slightly more fun than Hamlet and Horatio unearthing Yorick's skull in the graveyard. Have always wished the old jester had a line in Shakespeare's play, but ventriloquism with a skull would be a bit morbid) 

This shell of holes and hinges
Doth in disinterment turn
Bold and impart timeless
Secrets to thee --lives in discussion,
Not aristocracy, want thought
And not decree-- in guilds and
Trades, list, oh list: the human
Mind seeks rationality, the sublime,
To combine and and set it free.

What Doves Do

["Mother and two baby birds, if you can find them in the darkness"--Norma]

We wait on trellis arches
For faces in ivy leaves--
Whether eye-patched pirate or
Jesus-- what we see and sees us--
What one believes depends
On angle, light, on sundown
Shadow --impressions one
Receives change in setting sun.
In all, whatever runs this
Process, we are doves, and
Even nightfall brings us love.

 
 

Old Poem, New World

I have climbed the stairs,
An astonished child.
I have left the lull of illusion.
You and I and a tremor of time
Climb brimming bright along the shore.
I am not only myself anymore.
We are a wave 
Holding sunlight and life,
A rolling glow, music and more--
More than the sum of ourselves before
We gave our gift to time.
We stepped our separate stairs
To a door upon the earth.
It is open.
We have a simple hold,
A touch, a wash of fanning sea
Over a swath of sand, a boulder,
A lace of foam, a stairway of waves--
A lyric on  land.
When songs mingle, they sing
Among themselves, winding gift
With gift where new-winged dreams
Drift, melodies touch.
We touched,
We joined ways, and to
That touch entrusted all our days.

Western Fence Lizard

I watch a lizard scale a
Sunbleached rail and learn.
"Are you leaving our
Garden?" I ask --he turns
From his task and answers.
"Where I go, the garden is.
So no, I cannot leave, nor
Can you; you are part
Of the garden too." 

[I'd like to thank William at Looking For Jack, for identifying my little garden friend as a Western Fence Lizard. Go see his blog. It rewards attention!]