THE COLLECTIVE OF STILLNESS

There’s not far to go before the land starts insisting

I am alive in every place I stand

The telepathy of clouds

Drawing my face to the sky

The valley bows to my feet

The Rock People watching.

——-

I am listening as hard as I can to the Silence

My ears so still (no cilia vibrating)

No sound save Eternity

Settling in for the long run.

——

Earth whispers to me of immortality

Longing to be a poem

It tells me to take it everywhere

That water-meadow in Wisconsin

Chesapeake Bay largesse

The stone-poems of rock nearby

An unchanging safety

Waiting to claim all flesh

I am immortal as I can be in this moment

The activation of love in a grain of sand.

———

The spare skeleton remains; a lace & calcium poem

Yellow-white teeth resembling long-bone toes

I will be blanched

Gnawed by coyote cubs, dragged, growling, to dens

Sung into sunrise: danced on four legs

——–

Roadside flowers

Visible only en masse

A color smudging the landscape

Wreathing no arches

Serving as Butterfly’s foothold

Nectar in a bitter landscape.

——–