The tines of the rake
comb through a dispersing tumble.
Ocher clumps form random hillocks,
most slip through the iron teeth
dancing drunkenly away.
I was called into the rushing air.
Physical work with the dead and dying
is a ‘calling’ isn’t it?
The newly deceased keep falling.
Maple leaf bones crackle underfoot.
I scoop their remains,
brush an autumnal cerecloth,
shake the dead into swirls of afterlife.
Today, I fancy I am a caretaker
for the changing seasons,
yet an autumnal age divests me.
the years turn
and I am more exposed.
Next year I will buy a leaf blower,
my wife may need it
when I fall.
O, why did I fall for you, O' sun,
When my soul is nestled in the deeps?
Agape and afraid, my eyne mosey deeper still; they run,
Yet on the colder current your warmth invitingly sleeps.
The distance that defies the divine betwixt us
Somehow is no occlusion for you to reach me,
But gods 'gainst me guarding your gates, and hope's quietus,
Make my valentines reaching you an impossibility.
Somehow still, suffocated in these sorrowful seas,
I seem to mishear the rhythm of your limpid light
As a melody yearning to find the lost keys
To my manacles and enrapture me with your sight.
When finally I undo these tethers for you,
The cosmos Herself derides my dolorous deeps
Laved in a longing that over millennia grew,
And shrouds your smile with a prejudiced eclipse.
But I see you clad carnally in that cerecloth--
Why?--stoking the gypsy in me with your misconstrued call.
Why did you build that stairway of light and masquerading troth,
That I so eagerly took, thus perishing in a fall?
The tines of the rake
comb through a dispersing tumble.
Ocher clumps form random hillocks,
most slip through the iron teeth
dancing drunkenly away.
I was called into the rushing air.
Physical work with the dead and dying
is a ‘calling’ isn’t it?
The newly deceased keep falling.
Maple leaf bones crackle underfoot.
I scoop their remains,
brush an autumnal cerecloth,
shake the dead into swirls of afterlife.
The tines of the rake
comb through a dispersing blow.
Some heaps hold,
ocher clumps form random hillocks,
most slip through the iron teeth
dancing drunkenly away.
I was called out into the rushing air.
Physical work with the dead and dying
is indeed a calling.
Meanwhile the dead keep falling;
my arms shake a cerecloth
into the vivid swirls of an afterlife.
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