losing a fear of emptiness



and upon returning
to the dusty reality of being


one has traversed
already


the longest road
to seeing


the blunt knife
and the uncarved rock


the unbleached sophistication
of hearing beauty


in those almost silent mornings
of snowfall choreography

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This is a poem


to live


in the essence




of solitude
of dreams of clouds
in skies.

I said dance -




I meant the noun



you took the verb
(of course)

and you danced it
you moved


and that was -

not a word


but you

breathing



allowing
embracing
touching the space

around you

being the space around you


and a spoonfull of the moment's ebb and flow
of the stuff that is time


changing course



hit my senses with a beauty almost too small
for a word



of the moment
a fleeting beauty
I once tried to capture in text

and failed

because the words
wouldn't




move.

morning after

counting what if's -


do you remember what I said



(you are every face I saw

every cloud
and every tree)


little escapes from reality

one walking away with someone else

another drifting away
in the memory of a fire

the smell of another's lips
somewhere in your dreams


vanishing into an echo of a kiss



and the sound of flames
dying

of voices in the rain
(to feel the drops on your forehead -

to feel

last night's echoes


the bygone art
of waking up)

fables of one's own shadows

usually begin
with a dying memory on a sinking ship

and an ancient knot - so strong
elegantly tying your words, making them whispers
(whispers - melting on silence like soft snow floating
on a brook almost too small for a map)

and it's those few early autumn days, when it might rain (and it might not)

that the leaves, on the ground, discover the sacredness
of falling

(of touching
an unnamed rock)

as spontaneously as a pond
reflects the geese

and as silently as your memories die behind you
you walk alone out of the forest

(a forsaken solitude - the trail

of a shadow's story)

and then

between numbness of existence
and caring

(for the names of trees)

arrives a moment, in which
so clear

that nothing but music
could have better set

the moment to
art.