An expectant exile
in circular patterns,
a clasp in the necklace
fastened by chance and distance.
What is left unfinished,
an art that is never completed
in the endless reel
of this motion.
The tide receding
the stars fleeting,
pinned like sea salt
on the slick surfaces of sky .
The expectant exile,
journals in the blanks
left on the trail.
Words weathered,
soaked through with rain,
the wind turned pages
in the book of changes.
A deep ancestral resonance,
chanted into the grooves
and in mountains
a distant profile
textured in stone.
Sunrise over Ka Iwi
the coast of bones.
Black are the remains
of an ancient flow,
like charcoaled veins
for a jagged running
narrative to time.
These silent sentinels
revealed in first light
at the border between worlds.
The edge of the sea was
an armor over the distant glimmer
perceived from the ridgeline,
a single drop in the universe
to nourish the thirst
for horizons.
The expectant exile
of sturdy trees felled
from far away forests.
The storms turned to driftwood,
made errant to currents,
to wash ashore
on far away beaches
with the lullaby of soft violence
that shapes these expressions.
Gods carved in effigy,
their likeness
carried off to war
or kept at temple entrances
to ward off the restless,
even harbor those protective
in places of refuge.
Shifting seasons,
Ua Koko,
the heavy rain
brings blood in
the tragedy of rivers.
Their curving knives
down clay hillsides
filling artesian springs
with an ecstasy
that sings through the rock
of expectant exile,
when clear waters are expelled
into the brackish grasp
of the unknown
who cast it adrift
to begin again.
yakskinpocketnotes 