Shades of Indigo
Ocean or sky, it’s all the same; liquid or vapor, fluid, sky—
Look for the stars and wonder why you can’t remember your place, your name,
Your hopes, your fears, your heart, your dreams, or anything like a concrete fact,
But only sense, faintly, a world intact when the air and sea converge their streams.
When the blue engulfs both thought and time, what is the measure by which you live?
How many tears and breaths must give their blue to make the world so sublime?
If Beauty Dwells Inside
If beauty dwells inside the mortal heart
and soul, what dark impediment can be
so strong that we’d forget, incessantly,
to let it rule and be the greater part?
Have bitterness and poverty of care
for good and kindly things the weight and sway
to force the love of beauty out, away,
and leave a wound of emptiness in there?
What fault in us could any cause invent
to trade our greatest gift for grief or hate—
can joy revive, or is it left too late
that we grow wiser, love, create—relent?
Let us let go of emptiness, grow whole
by filling it with Beauty, heart and soul.
Quiet Companion
In the cooler corners of my crooked little room
There gleams an iridescence that defies the chilly gloom,
The pale enchantment of an eye that never shuts in sleep
Or wavers in its glowing gaze, whose watch is wont to keep
A careful, mystic, present love that guards me from all harm
And teaches me her secrets when I curl beneath her arm
So I can rest in confidence with this companion, whose
Great beauty is to fill my soul, for that she is
my Muse.
Brown Recluse to Black Widow
Never fret, my darling;
Never fear, my dear:
If I had meant to murder you
You wouldn’t still be here—
But I prefer the gentler sort
Of crime, soft as a breath—
Embracing you with all eight arms,
While kissing you to death.
All Tied Up in a Bow
Tidy packages are not
the sole solutions I have got,
but of the puzzles in my path,
few fill me with such rage and wrath
as that I cannot seem to find
what I have lost from in my mind.
I’ve lost more thought than many hath;
Does that make me a psychopath?
Don’t fret, my pretties, yet, for I
am not a wholly rotten guy:
I’d bump you off, but you should know,
I won’t (for certain sums of dough)…
and if you can’t afford the fee,
I’ll parcel you out tidily.
Precious Things
Copper in the morning hours and gold at peak of noon,
And sparkling like a thousand gems until the silver moon
Highlights the constellations of diamonds in the sky—
None has a richer treasury than Nature has—and I.
Storied
The house on the lake, awake, asleep,
Has legends to tell, and secrets, keep,
Of seasons fled and of lives gone by,
In whispers, hushed, like the distant cry
Of an owl that’s flown on her muffled wing—
The house on the lake holds everything
Behind closed shutters and boarded doors,
As tightly as novels protect their stores
Of stories—the ghosts of bygone make
The pages turn in the house on the lake.
Heart’s Aflutter
Forgive me if I seem a nutter,
the way I mumble, moon, and mutter,
but I can’t help my palpitating
when my heart is all aflutter.
Pardon that I cling to what’re
rhymes as rife with fat as butter—
maybe even nauseating—
but my heart is all aflutter.
Please absolve me when I putter
aimlessly, and stammer, stutter,
stumble as I’m indicating
that my heart is all aflutter!
Evening among the Stones
Under cedars, in the beeches
in the garden’s deepest reaches,
sing the crickets and the sparrows,
robins, and the draught that harrows
every hollow of the windy, wooded hill…
Where those sleepers are reclining,
and above their tombs, repining,
kneel the loves they left behind them,
who return here yet to find them
and commune again together, sweetly, still…
As the honeysuckle flowers
lull away the weary hours,
here all spirits, in communion
so with nature, find reunion
in the waning light of afternoons at ease…
With the daylight, sadness dimming
like this lake where swans go swimming
through the lilies as its silver
mirror dims, goes dark forever,
souls may meet again as often as they please…
Art-Colored Glasses 