5. Recollection

Earth dreams where no moon glows.
Heat throbs on my skin. I cannot complain
that the rose has gone while perfume gentles
the beating air.

All my quiet day the sun shook
hot in the garden’s heart where blooms
played out their tone over the lawn,
where bees moved.

Thorns are fierce when shadows thicken
and veil my sight. The rose? Ah, the rose!
Night holds its form from budding to dropping
and light is not lost.

6. Judgement

 I'd flitted from dusting

 to washing to watching,

 tried counting the clouds,

 tried reading their grey,

 condemned the dry weeds,

 pruned, mowed, hoed.

             “Not this, not that,”

             I wrote last night.

 Air hung slow, bunched

 over the buddleia’s

 reach, its perfume wine

 where the bees dropped;

 they fell at the hive door,

 dancing.

              “Now,” it decrees,

              swabbing the dust

              from the path.

             “This and that,

              this and that,

              this and that.”

7. Aubade

  The dawn is wide with light,

  air tall as the last faint star

  over an edge of night

  when the quiet sun lifts

  full over fields

  where broad corn moves,

  green as the garden

  here at my feet.

 

  I hear unstrung

  the peace of a great morning,

  shorten my sight

  to the wall where the wrens flit,

  quick with seed

  that is spread for them.

  Day lurches

  and they are gone,

  piercing the curtain of willow, 

  their fear sharp as cut flint.

 

  I turn to the house,

  hearing tuned

  to the dance of day,

  to the birds who return

  as they always do,

  filling the world's long silence,

  deeper and higher,

  with their vast chant.

8. Knowledge

God know what lies

behind the curtain,

outside the door,

around the next corner,

over the thin bridge,

at the end of the tunnel.

I spend a lifetime walking

through the gaps,

up the mountains,

down the valleys.

Over the last ocean,

on the edge of the north wind,

gateways become familiar.

Above the skies,

near the quarters of the moon,

by the mansions of the sun,

out past every star,

beyond the abyss,

I go on

passing through.