there, here

Now, we are grown older.
A discarded pair of glasses, eye, shade or costume, is not ours for the trying-on.
We have come to the park not to chase across the grass, nor to examine worlds and kingdoms at trees’ feet, but for still and silent council with colder, quieter elements: rock, restless water, the sun in its jewels and brocade taking survey of its limitless empire.
Here the seconds widen.
A minute is gulf enough to inhabit oneself, small, complete and simple; to locate this unusual, unremarkable corner of space and enjoy, for sixty seconds, the terrifying brook of murmuring time.
In the random span of our living rope, here we might choose to exist, reserved and serene on a gray and stony shore.
In our age there is no madness, neither pain, but only shores of faces, hands and hair and fingers, whose high watermarks make up our passing time.

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Michigan

see the vast heaving, pneumoniac breathing

here are the catty shoulders, grinding imperfect self-portraits in glass and stone and secret beds of sand

this is the repulsor of light, rippling out of penetrating sight and stealing away with sucking sound, carrying forward nothing and drawing it back by time, time, time

know that an indifferent imperial train to each vast impermanent outpost owes nothing to the moments, hears and sees them spark and stamp and fail

all is contained in time, through time, for a time

there the stone-carver, glass-etcher, softener of sturdy walls to silken secret beds of sand, passes sentinel millenia in ancient endless poetry

babble, rush and murmur to this moment, living offspring of an ocean, quintuplet sister Michigan

From the Rock in my Back

Between the close end of the pack and its unmarked center I have set foothold in the broken rocks and step press side stepped myself onto a hard perch here where the lake is not so removed and I am not too far gone to alarm the law

The near water is edges of glass over dusty mitey motey clouds licking at cool stone candy tumbling jawbreakers through silty spit and spray looking out out it is an undulation of sunlight blue and shadow green pulsed out from a hidden heart of Michigan

Exposed bones of old docks like spears stuck in the gullet of a wave out out to a horizon broken only by scattered sails of defiant insignificant boats on their way to nowhere

I am here in this nowhere as I have been on muddy tracks and hidden up in a bunk listening for thick blood rain on the cobblestones and shouts and laughter and staggered heels and silent for the threat of a knocking door or  kick-propped against green walls

Small in the company of paintings and pianos heaving breath for another long draw from a foamy cup or back to the boards and velvet all around me buried in the deep secret concert hall casket

I am here
the rock is cold
the lake is alive
I must go