Seasons of Dream and Desire

Ⅰ

Four faded fallow walls, alas,
circumscribe my self-imprisonment
in this room where we once loved. Intent
upon the past, I search its shadows
for the barest semblance of life: echoes
of the sighs upon our parted lips;
the warm silk of thighs beneath fingertips—
must time leave nothing, nothing to seek?
Yet it seems I've heard my memory speak
of sleepless winter nights you said,
It's cold in here, come back to bed,
while late into the dark I mused
on the seductive love of poets— confused
in the fervor that fired our youth
with the captive love we called truth—
just a ghost that vanished in the air.
But why of love and truth despair?
Their enigmas are all I've ever known,
or ever will, whatever reason deems,
no more, nor less, than these dreams
I chance, since birds and you have flown.
And now, as dawn quickens, coming near
like the sound of a distant fire, I hear,
so real, those whispers of contentment.
Come choke me fast sweet sentiment,
lest I taste the cynicism so sour,
or forget the passion that was ours
so briefly burning in the past


Ⅱ

In pensive mood this early morn
I walk alone alongside a bay,
a glassy china bowl of grey
beneath a low, evanescent mist.
By a tidal pool I kneel to rest
and draw my hand through its jadeite
glass, whereupon a rippling wavelet
breaks the calm. There, a bit deeper,
where limpets and other such sleepers
cling to the rocks, a solitary starfish
catches my eye, its pentacled, purplish
shape perfectly poised. It is then,
in one of those fragile moments when
light and thought are both reflective,
I sense, as in a trance, my introspective
self, strangely distant, yet so near.
And what beseeching call do I hear
beckoning from some other shoal?
A circling gull? A disembodied soul?
When magically I'm above the shore,
as through the unveiled sky I soar,
like some rarefied phoenix— half me,
half fledgling-feathered-fantasy—
now sailing over a seaside field,
gently waking flowers that yield
in the wind and change their hue
from blue to white and back to blue.
Weightless on these wings of faith,
I leave the mortal realm beneath,
now high above the hills, now lifting
heavenward until, amongst drifting
clouds, the creation and I become one—
then instantly these wings are gone,
this glimpse of the eternal dispelled,
the dreamtime quelled, the angel felled,
the world of grave and gravity reborn


Ⅲ

Here I linger, trapped in tranquil
afternoon, watching waves abandon
the shore to the firedance of the sun.
It seems that everywhere the signs
of exodus abound, as summer entwines
with fall in that gentle way of gracious
departures. Overhead, a sequacious
flock of geese passes by, the rhythm
of their wings luring me deep within
the phantasmagoria of clouded skies
where they vent their urgent cries.
Were it so easy for me to take wing
and leave my ennui behind, following
the tempting impulse to flee time's
cyclical march, in search of fairer climes;
to renew the inner seasons of the soul,
to pursue a different destiny or role.
And here some mad thought intrudes:
that such reveries are like interludes,
perhaps portals to a parallel universe
where alternate paths somehow reverse,
unfurl, diverge and re-merge, like frost
upon a windowpane, and where, lost
in this phantasmal existence, our script
is secretly re-plotted, as if we've tricked
the clockwork convention, and rewound
old familiar stories, those time-bound
collections we playback in our heads.
Yet later, unsuspecting, we go to our beds,
trusting there's been no hapless mistake,
the mind doing an imperceptible retake
to adjust the memories, editing here,
discarding there, recreating with sheer
perfection all our fondest fallacies,
and a few flawless facts to appease
those who may yet harbor suspicion.

And here I make the seamless transition
back to the present, to find a seashell,
borne pristine of the effervescent swell,
where within its spiraling symmetry,
echoing the sea's eternal soliloquy,
our true voice is sounding still.


Ⅳ

Often I have stood enamored by the light
of autumn's theater, its leafscape, its vast
mosaic of mysteries and parquetries of past,
all shimmering with such ardent colour
that if I were to live until the final hour
of time, and never again see crimson
or gold, I would not lose their winsome
memory. And I have paused to ponder
frostwork on a fated flower, and wonder
what ironic god could have begot
such poignant beauty from out of rot.
Yet no tears of regret are heaven-sent,
the high woodwinds do not lament
the leaves, loosed by the ruffled applause
of birds, now dancing through sunlit flaws,
as if they hear some seraphic symphony,
some music of spheres denied to me.
And now I know that this is the way
we long for, to abandon bleak dismay,
and live not in yesterday, or tomorrow,
but to go with the wind here and now,
to surrender to life's ephemeral flash,
and fall as willing as we fought in flesh.
Yes, this is what we seek so desperately,
to take that single step into eternity.
What holds us back, what fear of fears,
causes us to count the dwindling years,
and grasp, possessively, onto the circles
of our lives? For if not for miracles
of patient seed and candescent fire,
latent in seasons of dream and desire,
in what dark world would we belong,
where silent would fall the wind-sent song,
and leaves forever fade from sight.


Ⅴ

Ahead the path rises, winding far
into the sanctum of the evergreen
toward the darkening sky. Unseen,
unbidden, an airborne omen—an inkling
of its shadow like a shaman on the wing—
now quickly sweeps the startled brush,
invading the haven of dusk-stilled hush,
as a raven's mock laughter causes
my blood to chill. My heart pauses;
as suddenly as it arrived, the bird
subsides. A sole fir is left bestirred,
its trembling hands silhouetted in twilight,
as if it too might be moved by the sight
of tattered shrouds of cloud catching fire
in the transmutation of sunset's pyre,
while a newly minted moon on the rise
smiles upon the gloom its light defies.
So are these days in dissolution,
when the once luminous resolutions
of the past have been obscured by doubt;
when, undeterred, I've strayed without
objective, along an unexpected track,
leading deeper, like a sudden switchback,
into the déjà vu of a far-off springtime,
where a journey another heart made to mine,
that faithful in each step, each beat,
never failed to find a path, or to meet
my wandering love. And now I see,
as these thoughts slip into the mystery
and I feel so infinitesimal beneath the sky,
should my heart be lost then so would I,
and the firmament in its slow turn.
No, I cannot know the journey's end,
nor how long I've left to ascend,
but in my soul a light does burn,
bright as heaven's first evening star.


Ⅵ

Behold in a window an imaginal vision,
a tryst of amethyst and blue sapphire —
oh how such beauty does inspire.
Now spellbound in the soul's oubliette,
as if a metaphorical muse might abet
an escape from existential angst,
a moth, tapping its wings against
the windowpane, flounders in a web
of shadow, struggling to resist the ebb
of life, perhaps rapt by some fond
hint of summer in the glow beyond
the glass, not content to go to rest
where, unmoved and silent, the forest
in its sepulchral pose has fallen victim.
Then, like some serpentine totem,
a faintly foreboding presentiment
settles in, as I halfheartedly attempt
to chase its chill from my mind—
but it only moves downward to wind
its way around my spine, snake-wise.
And so, as the sun's final flare belies
the cold, I rise to close the shutters,
pausing as the pale-winged form flutters
to the ground. Thus this passion play
attains, in the dying light of day,
an end where death becomes sublime.

Such is the peril of the poet's pastime,
that the sanctuary behind one's doors
becomes a stage of cryptic endeavors,
wherein the mind, in blind devotion,
working the mine of buried emotion,
succumbs to a daemon's relentless drum.
And so I retreat into this last modicum
of comfort, acquiescently playing my part,
following day after day as they depart
into their mercifully muted demise.

Surely it comes as no great surprise,
that signs of change loom close to home,
like a troubled sleeper's mournful moan
in the night. Around me, once familiar
things are beginning to appear peculiar:
photographs of folks I barely recognize;
once loved books now filled with lies;
the paraphernalia of years gone by,
forgotten and forsaken. Even the wry
looks of friends now seem to falter
when we meet—as discreetly they alter
their mood—and with their ambiguous
smiles, ever-so-politely dubious,
they feign sympathy which the eyes
give away. Logic no longer denies
that in some queer quixotic quirk
of spacetime—have I gone berserk?—
my life has been inexplicably rearranged,
and my once and future self now changed.
There is an odd feeling to this insight,
as I write it here in black and white,
that my world—I know not why—has flopped
inside-out, and, like a drop undropped,
I'm somehow suspended in mid-dance,
where the imagined meets happenstance,
a dreamland in which I can transgress
the everyday rules of consciousness,
reliving lives I can no longer disown,
reloving lovers I must have known
in the memory-soft bed of my amorphous
past, until, as the all too tenuous
bridge between all that one deems
real and the netherworld of dreams
begins to dissolve, I'm misplaced in some
halfway house of a makeshift simulacrum,
as somewhere, somewhen, time is waylaid,
and an erstwhile hour irretrievably mislaid,
though in my mind not a minute is amiss.
These things I know one could dismiss
as madness, revealing in subtle intimations,
the glimmerings of imminent transformations.

Once again, delivered from the gloom,
a veil of indigo now drawn upon the room,
I watch the moonstruck Luna take flight,
loath to bequeath its spirit to the night.
Floating beyond the tracery of trees,
a pearl-like paraselene at last frees
itself from their grasp, meeting above
with constellations, as if moved by love,
they all gather at some celestial ball,
to dance throughout the infinite hall
of the heavens, performing in sidereal
time an exquisitely executed quadrille.
Thus entranced by this nightbound
scene, could I perhaps sleep sound?
And touched by such transcendence,
so serene in the lunar luminescence,
is it possible I might again abide
some resurrected lover by my side?

Hence the moth reappears at the window,
seemingly doomed to reprise its imbroglio,
and like some tragic and discomposed
impostor in the wings, I'm transposed
into my double, mirrored into place,
a look of awestruck wonder on its face,
and with this fusion, ends the confusion.

Who Knew?

And so question after question,

belief after belief,  it has somehow

come down to this: following a life lost

in a quest for meaning, one finally reaches

an impasse  ...  suddenly everything stops.

No going forward, no going back,

no way out, no way in, one just is,

as every wisp of thought dissolves

into the essence of awareness,

where one is in all, and all in each one.

Searching, striving, craving, grasping,

they all come to a halt at the end of time.

Nothing to hang on to, nothing to let go of,

no need for words, no need to speak,

there is nothing but this miraculous dream

rising from the boundless formless stillness

that resides at the very heart of one’s being.

And in that instant, just as one stops looking,

a world of divine truth and beauty is seen.

Yet the wonder of it is, it has always been.