More on: time

We come into dusk
on roads narrowed by briar,
dewberries firing red
and purple musk in heat.

There at the petal’s edge a hint of decay encroaches upon the timeless stillness of the still life. The sunflower, seed-heavy, hangs its head. As if to fix the flux: a distant bell about to be rung.

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

Not angels, but pale travelers
            through time, come back
Not to condemn or to reverse
            our narrow acts, 

But to remind us, by their soft
            disclosures, what
Is still to come.

This silence before
love pulls itself
apart, against
the current of its own
longing, is the most terrible
silence I know.

All is still. God has come and gone.

The view from the west-facing window dwindled and gloamed. The flies continued to buzz, ________________________the mice never set a pad down. The flies continued to buzz. Who is the father of time, death or his arrogant brother?  

Retrofitting Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Let my worship be this work and the force of each bit-strike on masonry. Forswear my doubtful tongue. Let my past words be what they are: failed elegies to the living word. Let praise be pain rejoicing. What rose like dust now falls and it is beautiful and meaningless and…

It’s just time, the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. It’s just a needle I thread, a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing. It’s just time inside of time, the future inside the seeds inside the pulp of the apple I eat, skin and all,…