8 June 2016

8

In Sight of What’s Wise

My shivering ghost awoke lonely last morning, its thin cotton sheets soaked right through, and so cold.

Why the high window lay wide open all through the night, I don’t know, but I’ve always been told

that someone will prize a way forward wherever the least, finest gap is left mindless. You let

a ghost find your hiding-place, send its report back to horrid headquarters, then hound you with wet,

thin, soul-sucking sheets that read out their sad histories, lying their faces off, wept blind with tears

that knew they were destined for uses much higher, but such did not happen; the stretches of years

in which beds bore the sad weight of penitent strength, and the minds that lay there at full length wracked with pain—

sang out as eyes between fingers took pictures, and built up by measures the lay of night rain

that you are now seeing as tears in full flood over soft lower eyelids and cheekbones so carved—

You used to wander the floods-waters’ canyon and watch for the sign that your soul was too starved

to follow—in times of distraction, it wanted so much, it fell short of its own awe at last,

but then you awoke with your mind in the length of wet sheets written over with songs that came fast—

Even tomorrow, come dawn, long before the soft hour when the high tides of noon meet the wane

of the light that makes colorful clouds raise a huge gale of magic, of music that breaks through the pain

that built up its barrier signal-to-noise sense of harmony, ghostly as love at great length—

Carry me back to the fields of sweet dawn in the greenness of spring where ghosts drown love in strength.

Maybe you shivered a little too much and your limbs are a bit stiff and sore; all is well.

Nightfall comes early and late, and we always want more of whatever its long beauties spell

toward us, and meetings of eyelids and tears and held-out arms and fingers, and shinings of eyes—

Please don’t begin to start thinking, my darling; we’ve made it this far; we’re in sight of what’s wise.