An idle infection —
the cyclical skewed
as we look for those continuities that sustain us.
Are your sins of omission dishonest,
after all?
It’s hard to wake when the season sings sleep.
I would settle for the truth of it,
now.
If only you could own your part.
I don’t tend toward irrationality.
And the illusion of it formed by this half-truth
is a weight.
(after)
((after that))
October came and I was something different again.
An aster —
a sweet that abides the fall.
And there is that moment of —
(hope is yet too strong a word) —
of light.
Of light,
and faith in life.
To a varying degree,
we grow a guard.
But the singing wire between matter and matter —
what matters —
never ceases.
Eternal throb and hum.
You need to let something go.
Cast off that self you’ve collected.
Give it to the wind
like the cottonwoods their leaves.
(You don’t have to share this with the world.)
The night is the night.
It falls.
But today I am content
to sit beside you and wait.
I
Follow the path of light
backwards
from where it draws the eye
above the front door —
through the tiptop of the stairwell,
through the hallway,
to the bedroom window
in the back of the house —
through the atmosphere,
the ether,
and the millions of miles of intervening space —
to the sun;
and a subatomic process
I can barely comprehend.
The incomprehensible,
macro or micro,
let us be awed.
II
They called the desire to comprehend,
original sin,
III
when not to organize life
so as to live in constant genuflection
to the continual stretching toward
and bending in
and deepening under
and untangling of —
that
seems the true wrong.
(let us pray)
May the Mother judge and deem us worthy.
May we make ourselves so before the light goes out.
It’s not
as though
I’ve nothing
left
to say.
I get distracted —
sideways addiction,
the silent,
obsessive considerations.
And I am
all too easily
knocked from my feet.
The finding
and finding
and finding.
Again.
So I will eat a bowl of cherries
because
I want to eat a bowl of cherries.
And I will drink water in a blue glass
because
I want to drink water in a blue glass.
Again.
And yet,
here we are —
bedeviled with impending judgement
(and the still-warm eastward-moving sun).
And yet,
here I am.
And look —
the goldenrod is still just beginning.
looking for roots 