My lover called me to the riverside
Where the breeze dances in the humid heat
Mercurially, not for him or me,
But a power far greater to decide.
In the heat where cycles of sweating dried,
He requested I witness this conceit—
Towering higher than being can be,
A dark, cloud-crafted fortress amplified.
What glorious court was held there inside,
With godly deliberations replete;
Can one down here imagine the decree
Their sovereign thunders which these great walls hide?
Beyond the grasp of where the seagulls glide,
The summer castle flickers at the feet
Of heat lightning sprinting its circuitry,
Lighting each parapet like distant guides.
Then he bade me view the other side,
And there was amassed a force to meet
The stronghold of the clouds: far as can see
An equally dark but blazing host skied.
A haughty army of luminous pride,
Or the pitted face of magmatic sheet;
A cloud wide as the other vertically
Inclined, burns an orange sunset-supplied.
They seemed two worlds preparing to collide,
Drawn for more than life or death to compete
In a great clash that fulfills sanctity
Between sunlight and night when it's complied.
Golden, gleaming besiegers far off ride.
The brilliant armor and shafts of elite
Soldiers gathered up in resplendently
Obscuring light in their rows multiplied.
The chateau sat across dark, dignified,
Feeling no fear, thinking not of defeat
Or even its own magnanimity,
Stoically on its dusky sky undyed.
We inconsequential observers spied
A bit of something senses can't entreat.
A grand mirage of scale and majesty,
Gawked at but not fully identified.
Theorizing and projecting we slide
To many a fantasy indiscrete,
But even a beauty's simplicity
Evokes different truths for each eye applied.
Some find beauty in brief things that subside
Like rainclouds that fade when their stores deplete,
Or an interaction of amity
With a complete stranger who leaves untied.
Things that will survive after we have died
And things that we'll outlive, though bittersweet,
We love; and with their mutability
We stretch them in thoughts kaleidoscope-eyed.
And by stages our analogies plied
Obvious things into things less concrete,
Metaphors and symbols, perhaps a plan
We ourselves could be also magnified.
So far away, so huge, titans bestride
Their cycles; which we can never complete
As micro pieces of infinity,
Yearning for more than our portions divide.
The greatest minds where genius can confide
Carry the weight of learning, which they beat
Into the DNA of progeny,
Making the best of what they can provide.
To know the world not just through what we've tried,
But experience things as more than meat,
More than myself existing chemically;
To know the reasons why so many cried,
To understand how disparate forces vied
In enigmatic epochs to delete
What was, which for most ends in tragedy,
And after all this to not have shied.
What is dismantled and what's fructified
In how many patterns repeat
The machinations of life's mystery;
Can all these things by clouds be belied?
A place for my poems 