Sequel

To be left alone, envisioning the private kingdom inherited from the mind
As the laughing ice groans a thousand feet down in the blue glacier
Of its icy irreversible movement.
The great crevices, sulci of structure turning to water, gushing to its low weak spots
To soften still further and lubricate the underside of the great edifice
Until it calves from its terminal end,
Dislodges the fracture belt of the shelf and
Retreats back up the gray matter of abandoned moraines.

I am not encouraged by myself or even the mind’s little flicker
In the hall or cathedral of her relatives.
My little story of petty conflicts and
Entrenched family sutures of obligation and despisal.
You love songs of the twinkling distance
With the motor bike throttle opened to roar full guzzle
But stuck in traffic, bleating the same identity and plea of so many horns,
So much weight of gravel and mixed traveling boulders.

How to reframe as positive the leaky boats of homeless humanity,
Her ache itself not justification of our failings,
Proper wall as the splinter in the eye, seeing all faults but our own.

Lofty peak rubbed to sandy bottom.
Bayou shores and stripling trees blooming a biomass for the jungle,
The life force outstripping, as sure as time lays out the generations,
Helter skelter as a mud slide, revolutions and murder.
Not our nature carrying down the pulsing river with its acreage of silt and debris,
But somehow in the mind’s eye, it is ours.

The planet that honed our longing to its contours of each other
Plumed and spreading, desirous only to be in the lap of its shores,
In the cling of its delivery to next and more.
Sure footed as the mountain sheep or the goat or the rodent,
Quick to eat and disappear before the predators among us
Spy its delicate sack of cells, of vegetation and disease.

I care not to list it or its travesties, call it she or me or they developing
As if the spirit of its regressions could re-capitulate my own mind,
Your mind, to now, questioning.

Such is not the way therapy (such a new invention) works.
Your memory as the tale of so many words is as it should be, diverse,
Not amenable to grand synthesis as symbol or archetype, in metaphor
Even as tools, not quite fit, to talk of arrival, trends of inertia or drift,
Not stacked for use or mined for gold,
The royal road of art inhabiting, setting shelter by the rushing creek
As a perch from which to listen, a platform for the telescope to see.

We should not rush to positive resolution,
Just as anxiety need not fear the spooling tripe of the hatchet men
And their dreams of dominion bubbling in real world blood.
No synthesis but honesty.
No truth, even as interpretation throws its veils and lights the
Subtle distinctions of the way for each of us to be considered,
As each word has its weight, innuendo and hidden meaning,
The shy face of her gentle child hiding behind her thighs,
The Wink of the world to beauty’s interwoven mesh,
The net of her webs flashing another captive tipping gentle souls
With the cold water they drink and the diminutive priority
To let speak the dark, the humble, suffering immensity both couth and uncouth
Telling the astonished self that she is, that she raises heroes,
Has the path of snails and hurricanes behind her,
Asking after the direction of heart’s leaning in with the job at hand of
Everything and everything beyond, still patent and presently
Asking after Being.

After being on the good earth,
As the stretching wing and starving plain,
Asking not of fear and wariness, but of love,
Her brood still whispering the distant yet intimate
Music of our spheres,
Our coughing,
Our carrying on and
Her shadow of slight and indelible release.