In the Intervals

Between childhood and aging,

travelling and settling,

I know our time here is temporary.

Though the tides

tied everything together eternally,

moments rolling in the soft distortion

of ever shifting clouds.

Wanderers, caught by candlelight

become silhouettes

in the snow mansions

of a dissolving union.

All that is transitory

the sky would express lyrically

through the windows of

these communal rooms.

The sturdy peaks pierced through

the ephemeral,

leaving stars and mana

a milky residue

that through the passing

of glittering stones

carried

hundreds of miles

would construct walls

and floating cities.

From the dark of speculation

we’re guided by coral,

shaped by the invisible.

Behind a veil of questions

we’ll ponder reflections

and the abandon staring back

offers no explanation.

Nanmadol.

What remains of the past

an effigy,

an extension of ancestors and

the energy of creation.

We’ll meet in the intervals

of bones and breaking waves,

as true nature stays

parallel

sourced from the ocean,

the largest of liminal space.

Thirsty, the sedentary receives

swells from seasonal rains.

Unstuck from routine,

boats are cast adrift

towards Argos, Phoenicia and Pohnpei,

the disappearing remnants

of another yesterday.

Gliding past the monolithic canvas

walls that do not obstruct the silence

but give rise

to the vines that

obscured entranceways

and distorted time.

The surface

of canals give passage

to the strange light of torches

toying with the senses.

Moments adrift

and winds becalmed

in a labyrinth of choices

pressing forward

through the blanks,

the sunlight through the palms

looking for openings.

As the wind picks up again,

you’ll consider the will and the breadth

to what has been left

upon this petri dish

of life and death.

It tells a story often repeated,

of benevolence and dissolution

crossing over into myth,

that realm of the unseen

and the power

to move everything,

while waiting in the intervals

as always

for it to pass somewhere

between vibration and illumination,

it will be built again.

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Harvest an Escape

Monte San Savino

entombed and silent,

preserved in smoke,

birthed into the next ancestor

that broke the mold,

like light through endless alleys

searching for a new home.

Blurring into another,

surrounded by remnants,

soon to uncover a passage in time.

Just before Spring

when winter is entwined in a last frost,

you lost your bearings to wandering.

Goals were offered up to a symbolic death.

Mist hanging like a pall on the rooftops,

moving across the stone with a silvery breath,

read in the meandering path like an epitaph to familiarity.

Seized with the reverie

of being lost in a foreign place.

Dragging a tired frame along the ground,

listening for the sound of echoes,

you’ve been here before.

Tracks rebound back to bells,

weaving a litany of spells,

one of which is the wish to remain,

to build a niche to destroy one day.

 

On burning bridges

you’re caught between places.

All that you built, all the pursuit,

leads to crossroads of dust

and the withering of fruit.

Still, it was nourishment for time,

to fuel the movement.

La Strada is like saying

another knot is coming loose.

New directions bent like stalks of vine

on the road to Gargonza.

Far gone and towards?

Which way is forward?

Deciphering all the cryptic signs

on horizon lines

that conspire in journals

to dissolve barriers

and toss you outside the walls.

You sleep in a contorted position.

The deep dark held you down to dream

of a familiarity skewed

as the motion picture spewed

images across the screen.

Indecipherable

until you rifle through

the drawers of your collected meaning.

This drama you may yet comprehend.

This gift to get lost in

your own countryside,

verdant and vast,

vacant for the imagination to cast in clay,

contours to assume

until it comes to decay.

The sun sweetens the grape,

harvests an escape,

while the wind plucks them away.

Another vagrant sure to stray

into different shades,

harmonized with the landscape

of tattered clothes,

of stone stairs and sleeping alone.

Without a home and in limbo,

its the oldest place one can go.

 

 

 

Orphaned Patterns

Randy,

What do you know of the deprived?

You’ve only begun to describe

by crossing vast stretches of desert by train.

What do you know of the rain?

Initiating a stream

filling the vacant bed

with cascades of thread

that lace together your straying thoughts.

What do you know of your end?

Will it meet you on an island

adrift of where you are going

and where you have been?

In Rome you were homeless,

in the cafes a stranger

falling asleep by the fire

before being awoken

like a pariah

and told you had to move on.

Always an outsider

and if there was folly

you travelled beside her

going great distances to behold

that which was novel

only to seek warmth and to borrow

a fabric inseperable from the pattern

you wore as if

the journey never happened.

Without realizing it,

you had been travelling all along.

The borders were formed

by a series of routines,

like a fascade or a sheen

over the comfortable dream of security

you were always shaken from.

Even still there is movement

through the crux of decision.

At every moment

the stark if somehow swirling

black and white of the liminal edge,

an abyss,

an unknown to witness

but never fully grip as you pass through.

You’ve written all of this

on the cusp of transition

between cities all seemingly the same

room full of strangers sipping espresso

spaced out just so

their own worlds have borders,

laptop screens, newspapers and magazines,

conversations soon to be smoke evaporating

into the backdrop of a life in motion.

Habits appear to be woven

temples to the still and the rigid.

Stuck in their fabric,

in their nets longing to be recast

like orphaned patterns

re-united at long last.

By shadowlight and long silences

you can be alone and without scripted statements,

no tense sentence of greeting or goodbye,

for no one knows you in nowhere.

Nothing to expect or respect

exept the slack in the lapses of thought.

No one to meet you halfway,

only the strange language of the wind

urging you to forget what you have learned

and to begin again.