Walking this old shoreline,
this heap of shells and sand,
this abandoned port
heaved from the gulf of death
all of the old questions return,
all of the masquerade and greasepaint
washes off, the harlequin tattoos
and carnival blues, the jester bells
and tide pool marketplace smirks
until nothing remains when
the dark psyche spills its banks,
the sun sloshes your skin, palm fronds
waver across your mind,
the warm, bitterswet water
laps your feet, your eyes burn like old stars,
sacred stones, you are being
unborn.
- - - - - - - - -
You have known this feeling
before--a pilgrim walking the coast
of Manitou Island, its shipwrecks
and green lagoons, its rookeries and
steep dunes sliding into the west,
the buoyant couplings in Lake Michigan's
cold waves under the aurora borealis,
the failed schoolhouse and its fallen apples,
the abandoned graveyard, making love
everywhere in this island of ghosts
and lost ancestors, apparitions
dissolving in the morning mist,
unspoken souls wandering
the water's edge, seeking asylum
in some forgotten tongue.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Or Northport, tiptoeing the cold
slippery stones beyond the lighthouse,
sliding and teetering in the slick muck
and rocks, like learning to walk
all over again, balance betrayed,
you follow the shallow glimmerings,
the fabulous petoskey stones,
scarred with ancient star eyes!,
where waves criss-cross,
an eternal dissection of diamonds,
the silver ripples on the surface,
and the luminescent light looming
across the stones below, you are now
Atlas, straddling two bodies
of water. infinity spreading itself
everywhere before you. There is
only expanse, only the north,
only the unreachable and unreadable.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Years later, across the lake,
what you never tell anyone,
getting lost in Death's Door,
chanting poems on an outcrop of stone,
blue lips trembling those words
haunting the cold November shore
like angry ghosts, the mist
of naked birch, the fear of fear itself,
the ache in your soul, the longing
for the end of longing, when
the dark psyche spills and
runs amok, and there is
nothing left but you on the stones,
the water lapping, the chill,
the shivering, the fear.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
So, what exactly are
the old questions?
What are the words that remain
after all of the hubbub, the
flotsam and jetsam, the debris,
the trappings, the endless propositions?
They are inscrutable, the signs
and symbols inscribed in a world
of nouns and verbs, a deep grammar
deeper than anything we can know,
lines and marks, smudges and tempestuous
mood, quotidian derivatives,
tones and sounds, scents and flavors
of stone and metal, lodestone,
something we can only know
and not know, and knowing,
never fully capture, or translate,
or get down in anything like
apprehendible form before the
the ashes vanish into ghosts
breathing across the water,
abandoning all form and time
and being.
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