watchman for the dawn

i

Where in the windy dark have my dull feet led?
Bitter smoke, thick as shrubbery, stinking
of shit and ashes, veiling empty places -
a low grunting, always a footstep ahead
or behind - and wings throbbing, and shrieking
in the unlit hollow howling bell of space.

This is home. This is where the heart is,
sucking and spitting blood, a toad in the muck
of the shattered garden. Nearby, the void cocoon
dangles and rattles in the swaying shadows.
(Was there a time I stood on a high rock,
waiting for a certain light to come?

Is there a path returning to that place
to meet the immense stranger, face to face?)

ii

The opening mind beheld an amorphous face,
an unbodied, blossoming light to move toward.
If answers were a lie, at least the questions
bent in the same warm wind. There was a word
to dip into the waters of suggestion -
and something that would nourish in the glass.

The night air carried a sweet and trackable scent
as something moved through the trees and the scattering stars,
leaving a wake of whispers. The music grew
to overflowing in the shoreless dark
and played upon itself - as if the tune
were string and brass, and song the instrument.

The piper wove a ring of happy reels;
the music was in silence, as in pulse.

iii

Touching the skin of earth, I felt a pulse.
Was it the white heart beating at the core?
The heart of Worm? Or more? The clanging bells
of blade and grass and hill and hovering sun
were discord and irrhythmic in my ear:
Were they, unheard, in pitch and rhythm one?

I felt myself a central point in the web,
like every other, struck and trembled by
each distant pluck. One wave gushed up and ebbed,
one current shoved and shifted in the river,
one star erupted in the bending sky -
all animate and bound in the singular.

One birthing impulse, as if a drop could swell
and feed all furious thirsting from its well.

iv

So the world was mask: there was a face as well,
enraptured smiling of one urge to be
revealed behind the fearless symmetry -
or so it felt in that lit particular
passage of my life, as if all stairs
sloped easily up, sturdy and charitable.

The brute blast and grunt of distant sounds
were lightly explained from a soft civilian chair
as chance: it could have easily fallen here.
My portion wasn't large, but was enough
(you eat the bread you're given, or you starve),
and the sheets were cool upon such minor wounds

as I endured. The days descending, slow,
were washed, if not with joy, at least with echo.

v

Something changed. The flavor of the air,
the light on leaves. All harmony declined
to noise; the imaged smiling fell in shards
though no stone struck the glass. Some deaths, some pain:
the common burden, loosed from broken cords
of a binding pattern, now grew heavier,

though the load remained the same. The garden decayed
to pits and weeds and puddles, a hollow space
I wandered, bent and breathless, scratching my face.
My rest was entropy, my sleep a breath.
(Was it the tree that ruined and rotted - or did
the apple shrivel in the bitter mouth?

I couldn't tell, the question voided meaning
lost in a landscape voided of all shining.)

vi

Was there no clear or silvered glass to view,
within or without, a looming fertile eye?
Shadows define a shape that lives in light -
but could this bulging darkness be that fruit?
(Perhaps the one defined the other through
embattled contrast. Maybe both were lies.

I didn't know.) Sometimes I thought I heard
an echo belling through the masking groan
and clatter of this sky, a faint, remembered
rhythm. Now I recognize the sound:
erupted breath colliding with blunt wind,
prodigal steps on wood and mud and stone.

Watchmen stumble through corrupting gloom
toward a dawn which may or may not come.

^

Biography

Married, three children, living in Washingtonville, New York, over 350 poems and stories in dozens of magazines, including recently, The Horsethief's Journal, Cafe Irreal, The TMP Irregular and (this) poetry site