Plop of the Precipice

The day she rose in heat and flames, same as ever, as ever dripping with new birth.

Some One’s inside writ large, itself a microcosm within a macrocosm of self,

universes with no end.

Her crinkled eye, call it light or sleep’s next manifestation,

the blue festivals of undoing and the riot of making new.

Making breakfast, imagining the lawn, the way, the fields and city beyond.

Never quite room for each of us who is

the other to mirror his own eyes dim parentage and animalia to

bring us tender to recorded history, eager as children, strident as last words,

last rites with a thousand generations full now to this overflow.

This seance looking for season’s meaning in the scrap heap of bitten tongues,

war and broken promises.

Elasticity of language, the pull of the tribe, the resonance in each of our longings on

their exposed balance of pride and shame, striving and retreat.

Some eggs to make the debutante’s peace.

Some bright shiny for the yogi deed in the concentration of his distraction,

deeply personal to his broken home, her broken heart.

The limp of the will to the next corner.

The kiss of what is good and right.

Let nothing, gone ten thousand years, be taken for granted.

She heard herself say, “Yes” and as sleep comes to reason she touched the wounded world

as morning to the air and air turns a fair cheek to the deep woods now dappled

stirring birds and creeks with eternity and certainty,unwrapped

at a precipice of unbeing, a real loss to those of us trying to find the gifts of the edge.

The very edge of her brink, the deep drink of cold water

all the way down and down.

Say all it is not, closer than bare turning over its pillow,

the root sucking up the dark,

the clean releasing hum and fragrance to air as a prayer of the names,

the elastic lasting of names and the plop of cares as a frog in a pond,

Liberated, eating bugs, fighting to survive and be.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures