Maker's Pause

       
Red-veined iron ore slow burns   
All made things pause,  turn.  
     
One low-slung star drops winded      
Down for the count cold      
Piercing an onyx deep.      

A fulsome jade tide pauses       
Her ebb deterred at apex      
By a shiver in the axis.      
A  flicker, redoubling,      
Slighter than the sparrow's running shadow        
Wingtips slicing the cheekbones        
Of an impassive, slant-eyed sea.      
       
We fallen noisy dumb      
Turn distracted blurred and blind        
Toward tones brushing our whisker tips        
Ringing, winging high through mingling ether      
Circling to, from, and looping back again      
Carrying chords of freedom.
        
Tuning fork fugues of praise, loss        
Tolled, hanging in sound beyond the register      
Tracing on our brief exhaled plumes
We point to where we are
We mouth the words insistent
We draw on the wet window
    
The outline of a train      
Rounding the mobius bend    
Before the next inhale begins  
Paused at the perfect ineffable curve
Do we rise or fall?
Is this new birth or return to earth?  
Bound on a wake of dissolving track    
Running onward   
Home to the spheres      
       
Are we near salvation, nigh awake?    
In dense and deaf containment      
Redoubling the charge through dark earth        
Clamping the bit, urged by the reminding taste
Moles in the earth,
Comets exploring the starts,       
Lone miners tunneling to the strains
Faintly but surely heard!
Let us mine towards that sound,     
Our engine tended with  an appetite for light.