Outside the window the night is still cold

Stray

From another point of view
perhaps the truth looks different;
perhaps the hues will be warmer.

Outside the window the night is still cold.
Sky hides the stars from me
so my thoughts don't stray to her.
Sky tells me, "Find the warmth in clouds
and I'll cleanse you with morning's rain."

October 17, 2007

Sky

Tip tip, tap tap, splat sputter, tap,
Sky pulls a grey cover over her pretty
blue face to hide her sadness.

She works to stay quiet but her crying
lets loose tears to earth sounding like
plucked harp strings or a struggling brook

in the midst of Winter's ice.
I feel the cold in her hands reaching
toward my face and into my blood.

She says, "I ask for little, just a little verse,
just a momentary touch as it is so distant
and cold up here. So ethereal is this

existence and I want to feel, for once,
something warm besides a shower
of fiery meteors caught in my hair."

October 15, 2007

Silentium Amoris

As often-times the too resplendent sun
Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
A single ballad from the nightingale,
So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.

And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song,
So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.

But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.

Oscar Wilde
--

This poem was sent to me as a share by an acquaintance. I don't think she had any idea how close this is to the roilings of my insides as of late...

Shedding

The measure of depth in the season
is how low the morning shadows
are upon my neighbor's wall when I wake.

Even this far past sunrise the angles are low,
slanted, seemingly sharp. They remind me
of the sometimes sharp lines made by

light and shade cutting into Scottish fog
in early winter. The visuals take me
to another place; momentarily,

I escape the scraping feeling in my chest
(like a stingray's tail being removed).
I am still here and the angles are changing,

the day's light transforms as I am transformed.
bit by bit, the fleshy parts of memory
are removed and when I turn to the mirror

I begin to recognize myself less and less.
Soon, all those live cells with living memory
will fade and like a serpent I will have shed

my skin and be fresh to inherit another set
of this experience in each and every
moment of beauty, madness, joy and pain.

October 14, 2007