The River Speaks
Poet, it’s easy to mistake my meanderingsAs the convex-concave transit of past
And future. Why you’re not God looking
From above. Paddling through my music
Makes you a participant. Somewhere
Along smoothened rustles the sun scatters
Small glass shards, little golden vanishings.
If you persevere, you’ll see the ancient tree
On my right shoulder. Maybe melodious
Echoes will wing into your white spaces
Where otherworlds form, where sounds
Gather to shape you as creator
To The Miracle Plant
Your leaves stem my blood’sSweet rise, melt fats,
Return clarity to my eyes.
Gynura Procumbens, Longevity
Spinach, Green Harmony –
Your names. Your cut branches
Growing roots in water in days.
Mind-restorative: waking with
Roosters, replanting, slow
Chewing.
Verdure, the garden’s light-
Nervured corners, my cantabile
Forest to hear the heart’s
Hermit thrushes, or ponder:
If I could regrow
Parts of me, I could give
Myself like petiole – to papa’s
Younger sister, a new liver,
To mom’s elder sister
New kidneys
Before the Night Journey
Night pilgrims follow the indolent lineLike a colony cramming in the womb
Of the docked leviathan, moonburnt sea
Wooing the breeze-wreathed wharf.
They bring fragments of glimpsed future
In cartoons, bags, backpacks, pieces of broken,
Unfilled or shunted lives to be picked up when
The future opens to the plural.
In cots they wait: loners like portraits
In a dimlit museum, serenading silently
Memory’s sea; lovers joyous as the last of
Beethoven’s Ninth, in a medley of laughter, words.
Till the beast shudders and roars
To life, to take the pilgrims seaward
To moonsearch horizon’s land where she will
Lay them one by one like eggs of a giant turtle.
