Timing

The old crooner walks down a quay
focussed on fireworks across the bay
that illuminate an old steeple,
while the young girl dances
between his legs and runs down
to the rocky ocean searching
for an octopus in the pulsing night,
watching, mesmerized,
as a toy submarine floats past,
lighting up silk-dark water and
all the fish in such a way they seem
more like starlight than scales.

I know these two well,
have seen them with me everywhere,
in meadows, churches, quiet garden lots;
places where the sky goes on forever,
or where the seas meet and twirl
a whitewind tango way out past forever;
places where there is no sky at all,
just darkness and the hint
of an ancient elephant
Naledi gathered by to bury the dead.

Before whom I fell last night
and scraped my knee,
crying out softly in dream
as I discovered not blood,
but the light beneath,
singing softly between shining points
as if it were not self but process,
and skin but a symbol,
a no-boundary condition
where dance the ten thousand cells
of a passing soul;
just another name
for the meeting place
of what is alone
with what is forever:
a dance, a joke,
a well-timed full stop.

TRACE

Anthem

Clearly

Milton’s Mad Epic

Almost Human