You Are Waiting For Great Things, For the Coming of the Stars

I know it is only nighttime

the wind grows loud now,

and the cacophonies in our heads grow large

and you, whoever you may be, are far away,

watching hours pass from behind your own loneliness.

It is only this vacant stretch of night

and the slow beat of aching comes dancing into your knuckles,

comes storming heavy through your marrow

when it seems in all the world there may be nothing but oblivion,

nothing but nothingness,

and I know you are afraid, whoever you are.

I know because I am afraid,

because I can feel that ache like my bones have turned to daggers or to lead,

like my blood is only nightshade.

And I know too that chamomile and sleep are only small melodies,

little sounds that do not fill the hours,

or the gouged out pieces of black hole in your pitted chest.

But stitch yourself these remedies anyway, love, whoever you are.

There will be many nights for greater things.

There will be many nights to ponder the stars.

I Am a Truth of Many Moments

I have lived between the silences that fall in the hollows of my words,

lived in the great and living breaths of the city’s motion.

I have lived in these miraculous afternoons,

in the turmoil of the storm.

When it rains, I walk umbrella-less and unhooded so the drops run across my face,

so the weather tells me of its songs and journeys.

In the snowstorm, I walked two miles, kicking at new drifts,

the flakes sticking gentle and cold to my cheeks,

the city full of freezing and of melting,

the glory of the winds and the warm comfort of the aftermath, collided.

I have been made a whole and heady human by the passage of such hours,

spent in the dusty drifts of turned pages and whispered laughter above them,

in the shape of sunlight and shadow through a cloud of street-smoke.

I am stitched of truths and remnants,

which turn like pocket watch pieces and run like stockings.

I am fond of time, for it tells us how to measure the impossibilities of existence,

the small measures of these symphonies,

the dancing grains of the inbetween places, where we settle.

I have lived, in fancy, in a small grey house on a large grey coast,

where loons call delirious in the morning and a lighthouse sweep is a distant promise,

and squalls hit violent and beautiful.

I have lived in a glass and copper city,

and among the farthest reaches of some star-laden black-cut cloth of night.

Try to Remember

Do you know what you are?

That you are glorious,

this new thing made for all the feats you are mustering,

all the grand dreams you will have?

Do you know that you cannot be broken

not in pieces, not together,

for you are one unconquerable thing,

and you are beautiful.

Most days I am lost, but today I know what I am

and I am so joyous in the truth, in happiness itself.

Tell me, do you know what you are?

When We Are History

What about when we are history,

when our days have passed like fables

and we are only dim memories of memories past?

What then will it amount to

whether we passed our footsteps over these cracked sidewalks

and whittled away our hours in their fullest?

But perhaps we are myths,

the smallest things our mysteries.

Perhaps we are, after all, history,

broad pages we are filling with words,

falling from our beaten rubber soles when we are walking through October.

And what then of our braveries and small wise moments

if we are not breathing every instant for

Achaian shores, the end of long journeys home,

our helmets battered and our faces grown older in our years away?

What then would be the magic of mortal mystery

if we were not fighting,

filling our lungs with hopefulness—

maybe we are not now the things we wanted to be

but we are making history of ourselves every hour

making of ourselves things to be said.

And so what about when we are history,

when we are greatness,

will there have been passages that made our words worth telling?

A Realization From the Roof of the Architecture Building

I stood there, on the top of the world,

watching the city and, at the same time,

the way the invisible wind played with my shadow’s skirt,

leaning on the railing, facing south,

framed by that great yellow structure that was, sometimes, a lecture hall,

and now just a hull, quiet and hot and good for thinking,

and realized that there are so many moments

and I have established the quantifiable possibility of their misery,

and I would far prefer to drink them in joy.

And this is only one small set of days, after all,

and if the wind can pick up pieces of me so joyfully

then I may as well let it take the ones I don’t want.

Please remind me thatshores are made of sand

Please remind me that

shores are made of sand that shifts

but stand nonetheless.

Unraveled

The air is humming.

dancing back and forth in brazen, zigzag patterns,

edging one particle against the next and

filling the world with sounding electricity.

It is in my bloodstream and the pounding of my heart,

and it is in my numbing fingers,

and my eyes, tired of heaviness,

and my tongue, which will not speak.

I must work and tire and hope the humming sings me home

and back to humble wholeness.

After

The air is cooler,

brushing at us at our edges in gentle hymns,

humming of the days that have just finished their passing

and faded quietly behind our jutting shoulder blades.

Those places will be quiet now, settling before they are forced again to separate life.

We are quiet now as well.

Nostalgia comes easy in weariness,

when we are unsure of where we are going,

certain only of the goodness of the places we have been.

The Half-Life of an Afternoon

She gathers moments to her like a high pile of pages,

written all over in greying graphite,

lines blurring one into the next, until the whole page is a soft fog of forgotten diagrams,

and she leafs through them with quiet fingers,

whispering at the edges,

feather-quick and feather-soft.

The world around her is lazing towards twilight,

moments stretching out like sand-spills from the tall curves of broken hourglass edges,

slipping one past the next with a near-silent susurrus across the floorboards.

The floor is cold, and the air smells damp, like leaf-life trod under high-stepping pacing.

On the other side of the cool, misting glass of the windows, the world is dissolving in grey,

in the irregular percussion that beats its broken call on the drowsing Beyond,

which sits serene and waiting in the spaces past her margins and her fingertips.

The dust settles hushed in the corners,

and she turns past the pages of half-remembered memories, and ill-forgotten moments,

and stitches them to her with silver thread, for the sake of safe-keeping,

and as armor against the later hours of the afternoon,

carrying on their coming tide the promise of darkness, and sleepless hours,

when blinking lights held high above will trace out paths between the stormclouds,

and the world will flash white with the fires of all the sand trickled out across her bedroom floor.

The Death of NaPoWriMo

So I didn’t make it through.  About halfway through the month I fell behind because I went to visit college, got sick, and took three weeks to get better.  Also this choosing-a-college business is more stressful than I thought.  And now I’ve come out the other side of that, but the month is done.  So NaPoWriMo didn’t carry me through this year, but there’s always next year.  And all the days in between.  Happy May!