The sun descends before his head designs
To let its weariness allow decline
Into a pillow or a blanket's touch,
With hours of work at his bench left behind.
Despite exhaustion plying overmuch
Upon his downslumped shoulders, tired as such
Would make his sleep necessitated, though
No rest he finds, no flight from tiring's clutch.
Insomniatic paramores bestow
Their anti-inspiration from below
The liminal request, but wakefulness
Prevents the blossom: rest, its growing show.
No dreaming glow within the tired's duress,
No nightlong calmness that the beasts possess,
Gestaltly seething in nocturnal sounds
Insensible, unlike his waitfulness;
Though sunlight tenderly extends around
The back of earth, caressing with the down
Of nightshine from its lunar elbow strewn
Upon the moths that seek its midnight crown;
And frogs in hidden choirs intone the tune
Of nightling drones. Their covert throats balloon
In waves of sonic darkness. They reply
To one another and beyond the Moon.
The song they sing for just themselves is wise,
Far wiser than what can be known: their I
Is not the same as mine. And from the marsh
Their din might indicate the Way's device.
The Way in its inexorable march,
Unseen, unheard, mistaken to be harsh
In its obscurity, we seek in vain
For traces of it in the chthonic karst.
In "where it must have been" a thought explains
Itself and reconciles with one domain
Near truth, but only so far, lost in mist;
This senses must be fluid to attain.
A million forms of matter does it twist,
A million pores in states and senses list
A million paths, yet most escape us still;
Divergent millions toward a single tryst.
To one eternal colloquy they will
Return, and even now might oneness fill
The chambers of a soul ecology
One sometimes grasps before it overspills.
A glimpse affords a little peace to me,
If only it could be to him some key
To access feeling whole, my friend who said,
I feel no god within when there I seek.
I take him at his word, though I'm not led
By any means to think him lost or dead
Completely. Oh, but how he feels alone
Among it all, the hermit of his head.
The water tracks the way throughout the zones
Terrestrial, and spiritual's own
Domain alike is replicated deep
Within the journey of a droplet's koan.
An ancient riddle? That's what he's to keep
At dawn when he's exhausted in a heap?
We transient things need despite ourselves,
For wisdom makes poor substitute for sleep.
I hear at leisure all the host that delves
In midnight's niches, yet that same dispels
The hope of sleep for my poor friend who's still
Unrested in so many hours past twelves.
A place for my poems 