Duality.
Is it necessary
for struggle and ease
to mirror each other
to understand
that the boulevard and the river
are the same silence
broken by the next transition?
The presence of a hawk
registers on another frequency,
in the bowers of an old oak
in clock towers juxtaposed
to the winding hours
standing silent witness
to our movements below.
Through the hanging clouds that cloak this parallel,
the passing rain massaged a message
into painted asphalt.
It means nothing beyond
the soft sounds it creates
in neon fallout.
There were intervals of stoplight reds
along the blinding yellow’s edge,
verdant greens awash in
jungle scenes
where the city ends
a forest begins
to breathe again,
its lush mist
lifts curtains of
what remains uncertain.
Streaks and silhouettes
in the shades back lit
and on the larger canvass
the stars were puncture points,
sparkling eyes in the blackest
disguise over an abyss
that like an oil slick
caused them to slip from their space,
freeing a moment’s spark,
skiing the slopes of dark
with a sway and subtle shift in the flow,
it is the same momentum
beneath heaving banks and drunken boats.
There are moments of clarity
inherent in memory,
the glimmer of pebbles
beneath the spontaneity.
There is a unison to the lights
in apartments at night,
as they flicker on
one by one,
modern lodge fires
for the compartmentalized.
In vertical cities where
the glass divides the wild,
creating a void,
there is no matter only vanity,
each side spying the other.
Down below in the fallout and the forgotten,
tents spring to summer squalor,
flushed downstream, the ruin careens
with wretched pursuit and muddy water.
In the calm’s a parallel stream
to navigate the obstacles
to assist in the unknowing,
to accept what we resist in the aging.
It is the smooth
in well worn shoes of leather,
a whitened driftwood
tossed astray by storms,
in all its variation
there’s grace in surrender.
This rumination,
this duality in nature,
of what comes apart and what is binding,
the subtle gestures of the river.
Beyond the sky and the illusion of time
is an infinite ocean receiving
a mere fraction of illumination,
in its mirror our own motion
that goes on and honors the moment,
as insignificant as it may seem.
yakskinpocketnotes 