Two Poems

Vanishing Perspectives

Move out to the farthest focal point
beyond the Hubbell's eye,
edging possibility.
See how quickly we are vanishing from sight,
the room, the house, all around us, gone.
Look. The river is a filament of silk,
mountains cryptic scrawls,
oceans no more than one ice crystal
melting on your hand,
galaxies, nebulae, wisps of smoke
from a guttering candle-end.

Come in. Come back.
I am homesick, need to be returned
to shape and pattern, to ourselves.
There. Look how our our roof
carves out a portion of the sky.
That tree is massive, a continent,
the sun a flickering insect
in the lowlands of its leaves.

Come closer still, close enough
to see a grass seed
reflected in a finch's eye.
Now, move back a little way,
that we may see each other's faces,
our shared particularity.

 

Lunacy

Even now, known and trampled,
it refuses us release.
Water's captive, dream haunter,
poets cannot let it go.
Ancients, Romantics, someone this moment
sounding its name,
seeing not the riddled face, never that,
but one suffused; illusion caught,
reflection stayed by words.
A fossil rock, it draws us
surely as it pulls the tides.
Beyond sense, beyond reach,
that small figure, running headlong,
arms outstretched, ankle-deep
in moonlit grass.