His last concert

I wasn't there to hear the choir
though once I sang with them,
but I still think of Holliday
at closing--cadence coming up
and his conducting stern, impassive
just as always
with the same authority,
demanding and receiving
absolute attention,
pulling them along .

What were his thoughts, I wonder,
'mid those final measures of polyphony
when glory filled the room?

When as the homophonic chords
resolved in the "amen"
his gaze still far away, aside,
just before the cutoff,
then he turned, perhaps,
to look directly at the singers
--that faintest hint of smile appearing,

wrists in last release,
the frame of stillness introduced...
his hands suspended...
four seconds of eternity
and he stepped down
to face the last applause,
what then?

Through all the years thereafter, I am told...
they offered him the podium as guest
and he, as always
quietly declined.
~

My Higher Self

I sense him watching with amusement
at my foolishness,
though I have need of him
else I would run amok.

Yet sometimes I resent him for his caution.
Let him play within his spirit world;
for mine, though just a fantasy
outranks his in its solidity.

I must admit it is the best
illusion I could ask;
for though I know that time
may only trickle out at my life's close--
the world is on a suicidal binge,
whiIe I may stay the game

if I remain within the present, cling
to it tenaciously; mine is not
the gloomy prophet's role. I am
the celebrant, the last remaining lover
quite as much adored and unrepenting,
thank you, as your bleeding Lord.

No,
I do not mock him as do those
with ears which will not hear
or hearts that will not bleed.
I mock your truth...and as I speak my own,
that too is just a hollow creed.

May I instead look up,
enabled (not at all enlightened
by pure truth) rather by desire
to sense its fire within,
where words may never
win the day.
~

Eccles...2005

Still there, amid the change,
the girl was speaking.

There was something
in her voice as she explained--
something
blanketing her fears
and yet revealing them
for those who wished to know
...something stealing softness
from between the words
and leaving gentle crusts of doubt
within her hand, seeds not of hope,
but resignation.

It was time to celebrate the wave
that crushed the innocent, the lost,
the weak that could not stand aside.
The truth she spoke, could never be denied.

It was time, assuming power at day's end--
a time that crushed remembering.
No seamless victory, perhaps, but still enough
to make the dead capitulate.
It was time to hate.
~

Evensong

Each day at five o'clock
the shepherd leads his flock
across the bridge,
the waiting traffic in suspended time,
serene, yet unaware
that they are gifted by
uncommon grace.
~

At the Gate

He walked beside a wall that day
and knew its silent stones
held something back,
no thing that might compel him,
yet he was compelled.
It was the opposite
of everything he knew,
a state of nothingness
that even God obeyed.
Someday he would press through,
engaging it with echoed stillness
of his own.

He walked the edge
of his own consciousness
with that suspended,
ever pristine void of the unknown
beyond--another blessed question
waiting in its paradise,
the answer in its hell.
~

Earthbound

It is the night that brings the spirits forth
in some ironic twist of the mystique
for they know only of eternal day,
and play upon the dark side of the moon
as readily as frolicing at noon
on some outrageous court we cannot see
with stuffy eyes in stuffy bodies bound
in time to contrast their eternity
.
It is no wonder we compare them with
the stuff that hallucinogens promote--
that nether world of dreams that science dares
to waken from a state of fantasy,
forgetting yesterday is but today.

Some say that life is just illusion; may
I then convey my deathless gratitude
to every soul who may come by to see
this new reality I made?
~