Our days proceed on calendars squarely numbered
moving along ordered pathways, day after day
the sun seeming to rise, crest, benignly set
on the axis threading through our lives.
Moments, knotted on stretched and straight lines
confuse our senses, dissemble, lead us astray as if
we knew who begot us and when – our taut genealogies
spread in ordered years behind us, on paper unbroken.
I look back on a long line of those who shared my name
to see where I began, in a place not my own.
I turn around to glimpse my own foreordained end
blinking like a beacon on a far headland
closer and closer to its ragged, fog-enshrouded shore.
Clocks tick for each moment’s passing. They are gone.
Tolling bells sing of hours we cannot purchase back.
Holy days, ordinary times, seasons of winter to spring
come and go in a succession of events we thought we knew
yet those to come will bring what we cannot know.
Where come then the bending curves, failing edges
floating as leaves in the wind or worlds spun in space?
Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests
rounded to suit their needs, earth and twig spheres
bounded but by sweeping winds pushed in waves
bending in orbits of elliptical flight.
I look to see where my life goes
scrying the far distance for cairns
markers on travelled roads, leading me home.
Yet, they are only mirages after all
falling off the world’s edge before I reach them
harbingers without coherent meaning or sense
though to others they provided comfort on the way.
I try to see over my horizon’s watery edge.
A distant bank of clouds, lying on the world’s rim,
obscures the possibility of seeing what may come –
it cannot and will not be seen, life’s mystery
breaking onto an immutable and curved eternity.
The sun sets in an azure haze, an orange blaze
glowing under a softening sere dome in pinked violet
resolving into a ravishing image of one’s life lived.
Portland, Oregon – July 26, 2018
Photo is my own, taken on the Pacific coast, Olympic National Park, September 2017.
In Cascadia 