"New Gold Spring"

... And into the great dawn, with hope that the earth’s
axis collapses and disturbs our hazardous slumbering...

Round and round the horses would weave
a hundred and forty busy circles and
fireflies would burn their way toward
orange hills with their once ignored,
now glorious light, and into the great

Awakening we would proceed, where men
slumber in hammock shade lightly
and women beat pancake batter and
children climb over wooden fences and
scrape their legs on leaves of poison ivy.

It is true that the unenviable loneliness of only Earth
would disturb everyone, and that everything
would feel the weight of living, but the ancient,
aging archer might peel back his bow and send
out a burning light to the towns, rescuing the cold
and freezing masses, and the wild moon’s blue night
light might be enough to subdue the blazing fires.

There has never been a Today, or a Together or a
Yesterday to celebrate this Tuesday or
Wednesday or Thursday properly, yet
morning owning the world as it now does
will alleviate this particular headache...

The navy blue Yankees’ gathering would soon turn
into Dixie red picnic springs, and white
Rocky Mountain heights visiting starry
desert bowling alley nights in dry Cali
valleys would leave us gawking at the
apparently gaudy apparel...

And we are all watching spritely lions,
long since retired from fighting,
marching tall and proudly forward on
even small, long roads with bright robes and
gleaming scepters in their paws, and hyenas,
scurrying sneakily under covers into proper hiding,
who are leaving the sacred duty of laughing to us few
who mourned when things were worse than just askew.

The motion, the temptation to rearrange and
scuttle across the differentiating and
debilitating descriptions would be
deemed a distraction and we would
make peace in between, the place
and the reason hearts and homes
never fail to be rendered warm.

The children among us would reach with spray to
clean windows with rag-wrapped hands and
golden beams would stream into living
room floors and onto kitchen machines.
Elsewhere, trees would bend into being
and feathers would float ‘round quiet
dogs that frantic barking made free...

But we would all be ex-slaves now, we would all
be released to the sound of metal spoons
clinking in potter’s bowls from the kiln
and we would only leave drops of milk
as the leaves leaving the wood of trees
would scatter below and our words in
wind would be known as undertow.

Nestled into our homey lives, nestled
among our fairy tales would be
outlines of great civilized nations,
ones that swallowed swords
for reasons no longer clear...

And forgiveness? This would be practiced
above the rest. This force, this last
art of great men and lost art of men,
would summon the various forces
of dawn into the strange and often
overlooked miracle of continuing.

Continuing, continuing with all or nothing
or some featureless reading in
territories of between. Laundry,
lashing, losing, these would remain
but fail to do the bleeding we were
once accustomed to them doing.

Neighbors wouldn’t be, they would be family,
and heaping mounds of sugar would revel
in their availability in buckets on the street.
The meddling of meadowlarks would be
negligible, and Saturday morning antiquing
would yield stories of ancestry only.

Hearts would still break but wet lips would seem near not
only to Shakespeares, and the romantic few would
ensure the Montagues and Capulets make do with
food fights. There is no need for romancing here,
since trust is in the cool air and our belief in final
relief keeps it there.

And the children fall asleep...
And our dog rests by the sliding door window into the kitchen.
And we hear a neighbor’s dog barking through our open window.
And we caress each other’s faces. And she touches my eyelids.
And I swallow, and we drown in love, and my hands sink below
 her waist and crawl up her back, and I cup her neck, and feel
her hair on my fingers.

And I whisper to her softly that I love her, and she
is smiling, inhaling, a moment before
we fall softly into our shared sleeping.