From www.sundialzen.com
Waiting
I
Like storks in a print on an edgy path
trees end to backlit cluster on a ridge,
as if counting down shimmery hours
in a mirage at the warm end of time
until dust hangs above a silent track
moving down to the avenues of dusk.
II
Like a breeze in a secluded garden,
impatience rustles the enchanting night.
Out of reach, crickets musical, yet shrill
accompany the bark of broken dogs
as silent and early tentative rain
spatters the cooling unprotected tile.
A winds fills, hesitating and fitful
the unfrequented, airless intervals
of courtyard, tiled pathway and garden.
III
Too much sensitivity in a leaf
without an early natural curfew,
subject to the worrying of the wind,
exhausted by a fresh obsession,
finds no wide heaven in the stranded stars,
scattered, random as the part-coherent.
IV
The light of far abandoned stars fragments
into a mosaic for scudding twigs.
Foliage fans out; tough shrubbery shakes
like jerked puppetry. Tan leaves curl and scrape
unseen. A charging mist scans the moon.
Wind soars to a surging hum in the slats
of square fastened then abandoned shutters:
waiting, the greater part of fulfilment,
as in waiting for a near storm to start.
V
Intensified struggle, the affliction,
conducted, fast fractional slats of cloud
on the wall, in a storm-puffed misery,
churning interior confrontation
to dust finding passage across the floor,
only ever crushed through limitation.
VI
In the fissiparous, loud wind outside,
there is a dust as if from the desert,
a granular addition to thick rain,
a seepage to pattern every surface.
And after the rain, in a wind of dust,
a fine interior coating to drift
the dust on the floor, intensifying
like a random, fine scattering of ash
cast on the terrain of an ancient night.
VII
Watching in a chair is the aperture
for a thousand, murmured vents of a wait
and a hinterland of lonely desert
with warm water never before tasted
and a silence there almost violent
deepening with silted beatitude.
VIII
Dawn, surreptitious then rosy-fingered
can freshen a turned and admonished cheek
as, anticipating the day, a wind
at the first light entering cools a breath
and catches the onlooker just awake,
conscious of inherent repetition
and that first light is always the first light
despite the outnumbering precedents
and the prevalent tenor of the dawn.
IX
The interminable storm, and crushing,
without predetermined or apparent
calculated measure will always end,
and if not by dawn, through an exhaustion
of pressure, the skies clearing to a depth
unusual in the omnipotent dawn.
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dated Sept 12 1988 part revised August 2018/May 2019
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Love Is Out In The Vaster Sunlit Uplands
Hands raised to shade the unprotected gaze
to meet beyond the invisible stars,
love is out in the vaster, sunlit uplands,
capricious and extreme, cool in the hot
impassive and un-sheltering weather,
leaving aloft ambient turtledoves
moving to settle a floral bower,
the wind sheer and the wide numbing sun sheer
yet to peel the grass of the plateau.
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