Gliding upon cascades of sound,
The crumpled leaves that ride the rush
Make visible a crystal underhush
That gives the movement ground.
With wreckage that its current bears,
The stream is murmuring through a glen
Surrender to the eddying amen
Of stillness it declares.
Photo by MIDHUN GEORGE / Unsplash
The Poetry of Absence
(For a widowed friend) “Love makes us one with the very object of these words.”—Saint-John Perse
To make a thing, first be the thing Before the deed of making was: His hands and eyes fashion a ring That’s shaped by shaping its own cause.
His heart conceives a will beyond Its circumstance, while love in act Creates from nil as if a wand Spilled ink across the barest fact,
And ink spelled breath’s arithmetic. The widower-poet doesn’t think, In waiting for the grace or trick To still the waves where ashes sink.
He speaks the brightness of the dark. His heart already out at sea, The angel-pilot guides the barque Of souls to where his words would be.
