Empty Pillow

Every so often, the thought of her passes
Through my mind, and I am there with her
Under that quilted belly of gray sky,
The soft crunch of cold faded earth,
And in between… us, dissecting the plane,
Lingering in the perpetual dusk of autumn
Where memory with its visceral decay
Can no longer hold, like winter branches,
Truth, that awoke from that moment,
But now only sleeps atop the empty pillow
Beside me that no longer
Holds her scent.

Transcendence

A humpback cloud, solitary, floated
As a silhouette through the twilight.
Beneath, slumbering sailboats in the still
Lake which reflects the quiet of the sky.
I become quiet.
The pendulous chiming of the masts, hypnotic,
Sway my mind like water.

The Darkness is radiant and revealing.

I am that cloud, looking down
On those boats that see only
The shadow of my belly.
I look down at the water to see
the stars above me.
The stars gaze at the water
to see the undersurface of things below them.

For a moment, we are all connected through reflection,
Until I pass onto solid ground and feel my feet again.

Despair

I have lived my life in clouds, without wings,
unable to see the ground. I am too
heavy for air and my dreams are the
substance of concrete. I move in the
direction of memories that are not
mine and sleep for dreams, jagged
visions that fracture with waking, but
leave something indelible that moves
like mist, musing alternative endings,
visions in sepia of child fantasies.

We do not see clouds move through night
unless they block the moon. I want to be
a night cloud, but I am too heavy.
I am too heavy, living the moment
for memory so there is always
some place to retreat to.
I don’t want
to dissipate
like a
cloud.

The Colors of Nothing

The colors of nothing hold so much
as my breath beneath the heavy stillness.
The whiteness of air breaks into grey and
becomes nothing of reflections it once held.
I am but a reflection of white, then nothing,
then… a cloud, expectant as the rain it holds,
but waits for sad trees to shiver from winds
carrying the colors of nothing that paint
their leaves.

The colors of nothing scream like mutes
and cold stars, far from particles that
move in me, passing through light, fading
in earth. Soil and rock stare up at sky with
little longing to be more, and me, in between
with palette in hand, colors dripping from my
fingers. I am no artist and have only so many
colors of my own that dream with rainbows
under moons.

The colors of nothing are gently lapping against
Horizon’s shore and then recede back upon
the Day’s end, revealing wet days past
filled with colors that did not wash from the
canvas. My colors are elemental and bleed onto
rocks that never breathe life despite the brilliance
they may sparkle.

The Memory

The memory is the moment
that was that night,
outside the window,
drifting through air
like cool water, the speckled sky,
particles that were my thoughts,
words, whispers, still in space,
above the window that is now,
but far from the memory.

Grand Canyon

To not stand
as stoic as a mountain,
But to hold
in its deep shadowed tracks of time
secrets
that even mountains
Cannot know.

Black and White

Does the color of your thoughts fall between
the black and white, inside shadows, along their cryptic edges
where my teeming reality is recreated; where, through shadows,
they may resolve the discordance between art and the illusion of physical existence?

Do the places between black and white confuse your
expression of abstraction, clamored with the complexities
of color that are ill-defined in the mind’s eye?

How your lines fall with calculated imperfection,
rubbed and pulled, mirrored with asymmetry,
the delicate strokes of vision, the beautiful you,
blending, obscuring verticals and horizontals,
teasing the mind, seductively, with your allusions and held breaths.

Fingers dance, beguiled by black dust, seducing the page, each
fluid movement drawn to the last, each finger invoking a
sense. Images, watery, undulate toward the corners of some
reconstructed reality, haunting, in the wake of angles,
feeling, with your mind, the passionate you, the colors,
inexpressible colors, consumed by shadows, by black and white.