the open field

somewhere. not here. someone. not you. what goes to make up a life must be that which goes up. the hour before the hour. it goes on. with or without you. when life would be in the finding, the clearing...an open field, raw, broken, that does what it knows the case to be, is what its own silence tells it, has learnt to dispense with mirrors.

stone, tree. your absence. shaking my heart like a storm in old trees. the affinity of the high leaf for roots, the richest vein, there from the beginning, in stone. open to the light, vertical shadow. morning brightness, spiked, startling, loosened into deathless afternoon conventions. fearless timekeepers mark the abundance of time, which is really the lack of time. this was you, after all.

speak for yourself. who else could? you're so full of yourself. unselfing: as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else. but the act of hiding is still an act. light reflected, with all its settled qualities, is still not the thing.

~~~

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the sources of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told

often i am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos.

---R. Duncan.