Close your eyes and step into my summer garden
(empty, small, forlorn) come into my cloister
built of whispers among chunks of dove-grey stone
from Guillem-le-Desert and listen, now
to the cicada-continuum hidden in leafy shade overhead
a droning one-one-one of winged heartbeats eyes
closed the threads of sound proliferate and
lose themselves and then (returning) come around again
and where the small courtyard (behind your eyelids)
contains the world a heavy heart spreads canvas sails,
takes flight like a gray brush-stroke toward Yellow Mountain
or as a fiddlehead uncurls in chilly mud toward the sun
In the abandoned cloister your gnomon leads the way
toward noon thus at the vanishing point of appearances
a warmth exudes light flashes in a spring wounded, unwound
there and gathering the earth and all its dusty paths
into a balance graceful, just barely there
afloat like gnats in the evening over a wide river
the particulars of every dream that ever was
were there with you empty-hearted Orpheus
waiting for the light-fall the wing-beat
bringing word of your beloved
from the grave of winter embedded
in the purling spring a sign (J-fragment
from a fiddlehead) the only sign
shrouded in murmurs of mourning dove
or some Shoshone June ghost-dance
here in the empty garden (at the entrance)
2.18.04
2.19.2004
this is how new things start, possibly (always a maybe). from Dove Street draft:
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