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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Blurring Ancient Lines

1.

The nature of these ancient lines

is akin to convergence,

those brackish coastal transitions at the source of the stream.

I see them go down the way the unconscious empties into sleep,

revealing through the overlapping currents of dreams

reflections in a dark pool

a spool for the moon in the muliwai,

like a glimmering fish on the end of a line,

a texture in the undulating sky.

It is sustained through dawn

and her capricious rays

of insight in this variable space

absorbing the heaviest of thoughts

like the shore and the assault of the waves.

2.

Descending grooves at twilight,

the edges of streams yield to the unseen.

Blurring the line between the material and the spirit,

a surfacing replicated on the known,

releasing faces trapped in stone.

On the inverse of trees

the ripples of rain are received

like information from an alternate place.

The energy of a chant transforms water

and through alchemy

gives breath to long dormant entities.

Pulled through the roots to re-emerge

somewhere in the back of the valley,

a fissure in time, the essence of nature.

3.

Ancestral voices speak without water

in the quiet places, the dark haired recesses

accessed by stream beds

like ancient thruways

for the imagination to invent

“What’s back there?”

Pondering from the periphery,

so black there in the distance,

like a portal, an instance of mist

is a meandering medicine on the tips of the ridge.

Pulled by the wind through the fan palms

imprinted in clouds

bloodied by sunsets and tossed

to the landslides of green moss

over primordial rock.

From a certain perspective,

you see that the light writes its history

in petroglyphs and myths on the surfaces.

It reveals the bird man to the blind,

the dog guardian in grail,

the snake that swallows its own tail.

There is the realization that in modern times

the ancient can still prevail,

can still lie here in parallel

in a world disguised by a thin veil

with symbols to decipher the enigma of their presence.