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n Age vitam plenissimen
Take a walk in the park
perhaps of an evening,
moonlight dancing lightly
through the swaying branches of the willow,
reflected off the water,
where the heron feeds,
Illuminating our path.
There is a slight breeze
a welcome silence
later we will have a fire
and listen to the music of the night.
I am humbled to remember that poetry is after all everywhere. It envelopes us. It is in the words we read and those we speak to each other.
It is in the very air I breathe, deep and slow.
I love poetry so it seems that I was destined to find
S. Penkevich’s review of this work.
If you have but a moment, then leave this page at once and read his review.
It is after all what brought me here.
And so I sail, around the room, while bits and pieces of this cling to me. They move about my head.
I am a sinner, not a scholar and rearrange them as it pleases me.
They clutter my windshield and call forth my senses.
I cannot seem to stop. Perhaps this is disrespectful
but I think not.
How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
cross my legs like his, and listen.
I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.
I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.
And later when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you
But today I am staying home,
standing at one window, then another,
or putting on a jacket
and wandering around outside
or sitting in a chair
watching the trees full of light- green buds
under the low hood of the sky.
And when I begin to turn slowly
I can feel the whole house turning with me,
rotating free of the earth.
the sun and the moon in all the windows
move, too, with the tips of my fingers
this is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
This is the best-
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house
Until the night makes me realize
that this place where they pace and dance
under colored lights,
is made of nothing but autumn leaves,
red, yellow, gold,
waiting for a sudden gust of wind
to scatter it all
into the dark spaces
beyond these late- night, practically empty streets.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
Such is life in this pavilion
of paper and ink
where a cup of tea is cooling,
where the windows darken then fill with light.
A book like this always has a way
of soothing the nerves,
quieting the riotous surf of information
that foams around my waist.
But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.
Still, let me know before you set out,
come knock on my door
and I will walk with you as far as the garden.
My fingertips thirsty, absorb this ink and intoxicated,
leave my stain all over these pages.
Thank you Billy!
All of the words in italics are Billy’s.
They have moved themselves around shamelessly to feed my unbridled pleasure.
