Signals to Her Heart
Out where the ocean beats its calm thunder
against grainy shores of quartz and sand,
she strolls, hands pocketed in a flowing gown
of pearl-like luminance.
I can see her with hair the color of sky's deepest night
when it whispers to the sun's widow
to masquerade as the sickle's light.
So this is she.
The only one who knows me as I am
though untouched is my skin.
The world from which she steps pounces from mystery,
announces her calm purity
like a willow tree bent to still waters.
In this unhurt place she takes her body
to the shoreline listening for sounds beneath the waves
that tell her what to do.
How great is her love?
Will it take her across the sea to me?
Does she hear my heart's voice before the translation?
She scoops some sand with her ivory hands and
like an hourglass the particles fall having borrowed time
for a chance to touch her beauty.
Her lips move with prayers of grace as she tells
the wind her story;
even the clouds gather overhead to listen.
Her gestures multiply my love with the sign of infinity,
disentangled from all calculations,
adorning her face with a poetry of tears.
I am unsummoned though I hear her voice
so clear it startles me.
I watch her because I can.
I know her because she is me.
I love her because she is not me.
In all my movement, in the vast search
for something that will replace me,
I have found her on this shoreline, her faint footprints,
signatures of perfection that embarrass time with their fleeting nature.
I am like the cave behind her watching from darkness,
hollowed from tortured waves
into a vault that yearns to say what she cannot resist.
A language so pure it releases itself
from my mouth like long-held captives
finally ushered to their home;
jubilant gods dancing away from sorrow's reach.
She turns her head and looks past me as if I were a ghost unseen,
yet I know she sees my deepest light.
I know the ocean is no boundary to her love.
She is waiting for the final path to my heart to become clear.
And I am waiting for something deep inside
to take my empty hands and fill them with her face
so I can know the rehearsals were numbered,
and all the splinters were signals to her heart.
Nothing Matters
Space is curved
so no elevator can slither to its stars.
Time is a spindle of the present
that spins the past and future away.
Energy is an imperishable force
so permanence can be felt.
Matter flings itself to the universe,
perfectly pitiless in its betrayal of soul.
You can only take away
what has been given you.
Have you not called the ravens the foulest of birds?
Is their matter and energy so different than ours?
Are we not under the same sky?
Is their blood not red?
Their mouth pink, too?
Molten thoughts, so hot they fuse space and time,
sing their prophecies of discontent.
Listen to their songs in the channels of air
that curl overhead like temporary tattoos
of light's shimmering ways.
Am I merely a witness of the betrayal?
Where are you who are cast to see?
How have you been hidden from me?
Is there a splinter that carries you to the whole?
If I could speak your names I would call you to my side
and take your hands so gentle you would not see me,
feeling only the warm passage of time
and the tremor of your spine moving you to weep.
Space is curved so I must bend.
Time is a spindle so I must resolve its center.
Energy, an imperishable force I must ride.
And matter, so pitiless I refuse to be betrayed.
So I stand naked to the coldest wind
and ask it to carve out an island in my soul
in honor of you who stand beside me in silence.
Lonely, I live on this island assured of one thing:
that of space, time, energy, and matter; nothing matters.
Yet when I think of you in the cobwebbed corner,
hoveled without wings
like a seed planted beneath a dead tree stump,
I know you are watching
with new galaxies wild in your breast.
I know you are listening
to the lidded screams smiling their awkward trust.
All I ask of you is to throw me a rope sometimes
so I can feel the permanence of your heart.
It's all I need in the face of nothing matters.
