Time

Inviolate

You could hear it in the air.
You could taste it in the water.
You could smell it in the earth.
You could feel it in the sunlight.

The western wind brought you your dreams
as you caught the scent of legend,
your soul filling with the breath of horizons,
baptized in the light of 100,000,000 stars.

But ignorant of the price,
how could you not fly into the riving storm?

For the world knows nothing
of the western wind.

This is how we become.

And so we learn to pay the world
with our dreamwings,
with our soulships,
with our heartfire.

But what in return?
What precious return for such a precious sacrifice?

A frail imitation of Pandora’s Box,
overfull with terrors and darkness;
and once opened,
nothing.

Nothing.

The eye’s spark
becomes a feast for the void.

Our heads angle
downward.

And then on, and on.
Anon.

And in the small moments,
those fleeting scraps of time,
when the light angles just the right way,
a little breath of the air brushes past,
carrying… something.

You can almost remember.
It is a whisper, and then gone.

You can almost remember,
because you were written
in a convergence of the violent death of suns
and the birth of worlds ascending.

How peaceful, the mountains in their defiance.
How inviolate, the mote of your flame.
How simple, that wings must grow feathers anew.

Behold.
The wind rises.

The Time and Space of Humanity

Just over 4.5 billion years ago, our local solar system started forming. In the last 0.2% of that span of galactic time, against all odds, a species arose with the capacity for reason and the desire to dream beyond their little planet– to stare defiantly into the reaches of space, and wonder.

If the age of our solar system were 1 hour, we’ve been here less than 8 seconds. And despite the struggles that have consumed large parts of our history, and continue to do so, there’s no doubt that on this day, there is one thing that unites the members of humanity under its gaze– the total solar eclipse.

The Moon is almost 240,000 miles from Earth, and it will pass in front of the Sun, traveling at almost 2,000 mph in its tidally-locked orbit. In the prime region of its path, it will fully and perfectly eclipse the Sun, some 93,000,000 miles away. Light, the fastest thing in the known universe, travels at 186,000 miles/second from the Sun, reaching Earth in just over 8 minutes.

The Sun itself is middle-aged, and will live for another 5 billion years before dying a glorious and violent death, taking most of the immediate solar system with it.

How incredible, how strange, how humbling, to be a part of this young and wondrous species, to be able to look up knowing all this… and how much more humbling to realize that current estimates have calculated over 100,000,000,000 stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, and that there are roughly 10 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

As you look up today, know that our Sun, the basis of all life on Earth, is one of a probable 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 x 10^24) stars.

Our time on this planet has brought us to this point. The future of our species, of our fellow species, and of the place we all call home stands upon the edge of a knife. When the eclipse passes, after we’re all done talking about it, after we’ve gone to sleep, humanity will waken tomorrow with a faint memory, a whisper of something greater than ourselves. And work will resume. Conflict and struggle, hatred and violence will resume; ideology, irresponsibility, and pride will resume.

Yet so will the hope for peace, the love for our Earth and everything on it, and the call for a future built on the foundations of our better nature– the same one that took us to the Moon, and will take us beyond. As we speed through the vastness of space on this little speck of dust, we can’t help but wonder what’s out there, both at home and abroad in the universe.

Only time will tell what we’ll leave for future generations, what path they will have to take… and whether they will ever see the eclipse of humanity itself.

Hammer, Nails, Earth, Light

We were, weren’t we?
The opening power chord of the concert,
the thing that deafens the crowd as they cheer for it.

Perhaps, over time
(even in the beat and the offbeat, I feel this),
it’s more like a jazz quartet,
finding all the right grace-notes.

I mean, really- think about it. Just think of it!
All the kitchens in the world no two ever danced in.
What a waste.

But then, I too have shunned life’s gifts,
running headfirst into the wind,
my back to the sun, my face to the shadows.

How they tell us to be. And how we become.

The beat of the heart, of the drum? No. Not for you.

NOT FOR YOU

But, wait, wait… I soared wildly into the night once,
and there among the confusions and hellfires-
there, a lighthouse in this sea of blackness.

How could I not change my tack?
What else would call so brightly?
There is, in fact, an answer.
My own compass, imparted at birth,
long forgotten,
was pressed into my hand.

“I lost my way once, as well,” she said.

These things new and forgotten
were merely of the harmonic,
of the consonant, of life and death;
and of our wings,
which always grow back given the right medicine.

If you’re reading this, whoever you are,
I hope at least once you know
the salvation hidden in the least-expected soul.

You think you know love-
until you actually know love.

We rise out of the ground- all of us
-for a moment (a moment!),
looking up wildly into the stars,
daring the infinite,
before we descend together back down into the earth.

So speak it then, all you-
speak my apostasy into the airwaves.

Even more than this,
more than the perfect publicity,
more than the grand overtures,
more even than these comforts,

I would ask of nothing but her grace.

For which is better?

The glass of whiskey,
smashed on the floor in the back of the bar,
the fire in the eyes,
the unsaid unsaid UNSAID,
the staring each other down in the midst of the storm?
The endless slow-death?
(all this does lay foundations, it’s true)

Or… the hand, laid upon the other’s head,
in those moments when all hope seems lost?
(do you see?)

The fire has purged us both, then;
and whoever you are-
if you’re reading this,
remember what I said on the other side:

I could curse the darkness we both walked through;
but far better in this, I think,
whatever the road,
is to build a house made of her light.

In the Halls of Light and Thunder

There is an aurora tonight,
and my pen is heavy.

Friends drove out beyond the light pollution
to witness this miracle-
out to where I came from,
to where my heart
lies beating in the wilderness
where it was forged.

I did not go,
and I have no answers for their questions.
This pen feels like a neutron star.
My soul has flown south for awhile.
That heart, out in the mountains, seems faint-
so faint from here. I strain to hear it.

I wander to the edge
of these suburbs at midnight.
I have no answers for their questions.
The distant voice of the highway
hums in the dark.

I cannot see the aurora, but what did I expect?

A thunderstorm is gathering, though-
quickly, insistently, intently
to the west;
cutting between the solar wind
and the city lights.

It is silent save for crickets
and I force this pen to move,
because I have to.
I have to.

A scent of summer flowers and water cleansing
pulses
nearer.
I force this pen to move
and I have no answers for their questions.

I cannot see the stars,
but they are where they are.
I cannot see the aurora,
but it dances on the face of the earth.

Rumbling echoes fading in the dark.
Electric arclight stabs and spits and forks
staccato into the cloudwall rising.

I strain my ears to listen.
I breathe.
I force my pen to move.

Heavy it may be;
but how else-
how else to hear your heart beat,
to hear you breathe,
somewhere out there,
under a storm of your own
(and, perhaps, a solar wind)?

How else
to hear my own heart,
softly,
singing in the mountains?

A stray dog stops for a moment,
at the edge of these suburbs,
in the rumble-echo,
in the rising summer wind;
we regard each the other in silence.

Finding no questions to ask me,
he resumes his journey without looking back.

An Elegy of Leaves

Hours and hours,
and hours
into the woods-

through the rainfall,
the sunpierce,
the pine and spruce;
off the trail
of the acorn and ash,
of the prairie lily,
of light and water dancing
on needles and leaves;
past the hidden spring,
yawning cavern,
past limestone spires
and granite punctured
up from the heart of the earth;
in the forest and veldt
of the snake and the lark,
and the ram and the elk.

Your lungs are thirsty,
your heart, hungry,
your mind, tired- no?

And so we pass
into the land of the gods
of life and death.

But what else to be said?
What else,
as we tread perdition
through our doctrine of the night,
seeking a horizon reckoning?
What verdict given?

Shall I say,
“hold your sins & dreams
as you would your breath,
hold them now
until the coming dawn!”

?

No.
It is all ashen
and ground to dust.

Even if you cannot see
that the flame
I carry in my heart
could burn this place clear,
I still must lay it
before this living altar.

Listen.
Birds are singing in the thicket.

There is more music,
deeper in,
deeper still.
There hums a resonation.

What else, then?
What else to offer beyond this-
this sad
and staggering presumption
that I can somehow relay
this sanctification
to you
in words,
as though I have the skill,
and the right?

For I am no priest
and this place
has no need of one.

Here then-
let me lay down a permanence
for you,
and in full artistic grace,
describe instead
the peace
and eternity of this place:

I wish you were here.

Feast of Light

(the song my mother taught me)
__________________________________

Yea, though I walk
through the valley
of the shadow of Death,

and you lament your simple self,
and shed tears in your unadornment-

wait,

for I too have cursed my own shadow.

So let us instead consider
things that carve and pierce,
let us feel the ground
upon which we stand,
for you only know the walking dead
by their tranquility,
and the truly content
by their graves.

Speak to me your nightprayers.
And watch.

We will learn of knots
and grindstones,
of prows and lathes,
of ecstasy​, of aurescence,
of momentum.

Let me then become
the bride of the earth,
and the groom of ships
that plow the rising waves;
let me be as one
who stalks and slays fear,
who preys upon the darkness,
who bathes in the falconfall
coup de grace of our prisons,
who devours
the terror in midnight
that chews and rends and swallows
your soul.

Let me sit then at the table
with your demons-
see how I’ve prepared a place
for them.

Now,
pay attention,

for the night is flayed open,
and the maw widens in hunger.

Can you learn to tack into the wind?
Can you sail into the storm’s embrace?
Can you carve the roil,
and bring your sails unfurled,
riding this deathsong
to strike through thunder’s inertia?

This is the only way I know
to cut off the black hand
that holds your heart,
for I can see your song;
it carries out
past the edge of lightning
sunset into glory.

My dear,
your heart is a spear,
and a compass-needle;
your soul is a sailor,
young and bold,
come to spit in the Devil’s eye;
you are Incarnate,
you are Destiny.

From here, the stars.
From here, the stars.

artist credit requested

1.618034

I have offered up my lamentations
out of the dust of Eden
and painted them into the night.

I have trodden stars underfoot
and crushed them
into the wine of singularities.

(so my younger self told me in a dream,
reaching forward in the temporal
as I now enter the embrace of the world
and age into my slavery)
I’d pay good money to hear what yours told you.

Shall we build a fire then, in this desolation,
and brand me with the aspect of shadow?
How shall we brand you?

If Pride were ground into powder,
I suspect it could then be an anointing
upon this corruption;
perhaps even an atonement-
simple enough, yes?

Enough.

Show me then-
come, show me,
while there is still some serenity;
let us examine your engines of the dark
and the nightmare-fuel within
(are you watching closely?
energy equals matter
times the speed of light squared).

Drift you now to the far shores,
sleep, and dream,
drift with your own permission-
for a song of this magnitude radiant
shall fly only to constellations;
was meant only for the season of sowing.

Do you not see how alive you are?
And do we have an according then, you & I?

For as I see all hands open
in these songs of light and dark,
and music woven out of silence cleansed
in the cloudwalk ascendant,
purified in the cosmotic night,
washed in the blood of the earth;
so do I see you dare to direct your gaze
up.

Now
take my lantern
and I’ll hold your hymns-

say it’s a good trade.
(it’s a good trade)

Behold then:
the field opening verdant in its laughter,
bathed in blossomscent,
how even the black dirt and red clay
sing under the sun
in their rushing to meet the mountains;

for winter will come again,
and still all will sing,
still all will sing.
Come,
for the river is deep, and wide;
the water clear, and cool.
I tell you my grace and yours was bartered between us
in these bending waves of wildwheat.

Have you forgotten?
This is an accord, in fact,
with the song aureate in all things.

I know you can hear it.

The dark washes off so easily,
so easily, my love,
so easily.

There was an old father in the desert,
a long time ago,
(have you heard this one?)
who stretched his hands toward heaven,
and told his disciple
as his fingers turned to dancing fire,

“If you will,
you can become all flame.”

No Spirits on Royal Street

“Well?”

Well what.

“You’re at the Monteleone.”

And?

“So write something.”

Oh, like it just came to you.

“My God, at least drink something.”

Do I need to tell you about inflation?

“Ha! Lord, please tell me
you’re not always this boring.”

Only when I want to be.
Requires some concentrated effort.

“Son, that sounds entirely exhausting.”

It is. But I’ll come back and buy us a round.

“Now that, I’d like to see,”
said Faulkner’s ghost.
“At your speed, son,
this place’ll be full-up of spirits by then.”