Maybe this is why we are mortal

MAYBE THIS IS WHY WE ARE MORTAL

At the swelling, reliable dawn chorus,
 Spring’s fresh wave
 Your new, dissonant orchestra still tuning,
Chins and fingers poised,
Damp, fierce and scared
You are born.

In morning’s child light is blinding silver,
A clear window, potent canvas.

Soon, summer and fall
Fall down
You might have a sea of oak leaves crackle  feet, humus- firefly scent rising
A murder of Crows
Play cats cradle above
 throwing amused insults
At your childish retreat

Grandpa, grandma,  friends, passion-mates,
Beloved life-mate hound
Her warm snout nudged your palm always,
Familiar in the  terms of love.

They all glide away
No by your leave
No pardon me
No pause  to forgive your wrongs.
Sudden they slip
into murky lapping dusk
 Encroaching the hem
Of the gently rolling orchard
Where we built our home

They swim away,
Kick by brave stroke
Steady until even the  white flash of their brave heels and slight hands, blazing the wake you followed is swallowed,
Tight lipped dark water
Erasing any trail.

As the next gentle ocean swell passes
Lifting and lowering  
You hang splayed suspended alone in salt water
Breathing amplified,
Learning the mocking silence
The taste of their absence
Directionless on the vast floor
In  the bewildering moving indifferent wildness,
Nobody says your name.

Each departure paints a rain,
One more  colored translucent memory-shade,  a cloak, a filter changing your sky
changing the color and cast
The  mood of all the breaths
All the steps that remain,
As the road rises to meet you.

We kneel to pick up our story
The Tale of each Departed,
Adding one more stake to the bundle of kindling,
We stubborn carry
What might be flame,
What will burn our story
Bright in our willed firelight
Charcoal to paint our tale
On the wailing wall.

Aiming for home
Scanning for the twinkle of bonfire
Where all stories replay at nightfall
Your Odyssey a tale grown richer with layered evenings,
Told and again, revived in warm laughing,
We will add our stained biographies,
 to the blazing pyre
Turning exile to comfort
Our feet fingers whiskers cheeks
Will  brush and lean, foreheads touching
 casual and thoughtless comfort again,
Circled,
  Knowing the feast, the field, as embers die
We speak soft
Of what may lie beyond this night.

Maybe the  real stage where we won’t strut in restless poverty;
Struggling with forgotten lines
We will rest and play
Chasing tails, rolling, nuzzling,
Glad in one another’s natural finery.

The weight of all the kindling...
Each memory tale
Slows and turns your quest
Windows stained,
murals saving the tale
of every beloved layer
 thicker, deeper,  blurring
our glass -turned- scripture

As your Word is built
Traced on the face of the deep
There is less to see without
And a greening grows within.

The world returns to womb
The You, the I am,
Becoming  a cathedral of stained glass
Etched, connected
To insist we are pieces of light burning our Word transcend and
In a quilt stitched, caught, fallen, trapped  in the dark lead web of deep night

You are  filtered light
Framed with the leaden bones of each and every

When you are done
Seeking an imagined destination
Looking for a false  horizon that is not home.
You may be transfixed
Falling in love with the masterpiece,  the dome poured in endless glow,
With some
Maker deftly threading the dark needle,
Separting us,
naming us,
Giving us time to strut and pen our lines
Freedom to cast our refractory role.
These dark strokes cleave us
Grieve us, release us
One by one
To take up arms,
Or spin, or teach
As it holds us  tight and dear

Trekking like some bumbling submarine
On the black ocean floor is a fools errand. Turn in.

The glow, the odyssey, the layered colors lavished by all your sweet denmates glows inside,
where voices mingle murmur, glasses clink.  

Even if the mountain’s iron weight, the fields of black waters above crush us like a tin,
The loss is  incidental,
Arrived, you become a color diamond,
Light cathedrals summoned built within,

I can be dismissed
My light is cast
I have changed the glass

I am soaring colored  light
The leaded story captured
Painted beautiful hostage
by all the moving loves
That rained and blew about me
Sweet and wild
I am no more
A waiting looking glass.