Month: August 2018

In darkness, a full composure,
surrounded by a crown of swollen
rocks, trees, and sloping crests,
The Perseids shot streaks
across the sky. The night was warm and

the new moon wore a cloak of shadow.

A few lights around the garden
lit up the scene, a handful of guests
putting hunger and thirst away, enjoying
poetry and song. Few stars above:
Mars alone gazed prominent
red over the cusp of the horizon.

Once the guitars’ strumming sank
to echoes in the humid night,
and the story was concluded
in a triumph–liberty!–the lights
receded at a footwise pace. My eyes

adjusted, gently sinking into the night,
and I heard the soft rush of water
against smoothed stones below
the bridge, and I cast my throat towards
that immense, open air: distant lights
and the occasional shot streaked
across the sky.

The crimson blood of the sun
coalesces onto heavy vines
into goblets of nectar,
full of sky, rain, and soil.

Plucked: then anointed with olive
and salt, slices of ripened blush
sings a solo sublime, though
we surely ought not refuse
a bit of bread and some soft cheese.

An adolescent incessantly drilling
flash cards of arcane letters,
stroke orders, the combinations
and pronunciations of Kanji,

spent hours, evenings, 7nenkan
fervently applied to an eastern
obscurity. For intrigue, for interest
in something so unhomelike, farfar
away–tooi, fushigi– demo
itsudemo omoshiroi to omoida:
The yearning for vast impossibilities.

Perhaps a lonely picture? This lone
boy with his flash cards, persistently
wishing to tap into some understanding,
felt like a precipice and the sensation
of swaying in one’s stomach on its edge.
Or  perhaps, to some purpose yet,
some… yakusoku, perhaps.

Wanderer across the winedark sea,
master of land ways and sea ways,
how far did you gaze across
those expansive depths? Though thrashed
by storms, woes unbound, and shaded
even by the shadows of death,
in your mind’s eye remained affixed
native soil; you longingly wept
for Ithaca and Penelope as time
struggled to crawl forward, day by day.

Though most remarkable of all,
was your senseless certainty, just as assured
as you were that Dawn would spread
her fingertips of rose, your confidence
in your eventual reunion. By virtue
of the absurd, this man was tenderly
watched over by a pair of clear grey eyes.