All There Is, Provenance, and Sycamore

All There Is

…one of those nights, a three of clock, when pen’s scuff
is all there is of sound,

soul ranging the terra incognita of a page.

Like strokes of mayfly wings rough its image on a mere,
so fancy ripples pondings of the silence,
And, having done, leaves to posterity no obelisks, no
colossi,

no glorious empires to recall…

Just moments in mind’s traces, will-made précis of
becoming…
The careless universe transmuted ‘to romance by wit’s
pellucid hammer,

motion shaped on anvils of rien du tout…

the ineffable garbed in song—

Provenance

It was a rainy last of August, and we did what we don’t do
much,
Watched dark accrue from the porch, saw a sparrow’s
twilight busyness,
As if, like wash, it took in its notes ere night hung hush’
on staves,

and trees and sky lost horizon’s thread.

The vertiginous spin, the oval dance ‘round a sun, the play
of veiling clouds,
And we alone together on oracular shore of dulling dusk…
As if a billion years were meant for us, that we should
rendezvous

with soft recursive gloamings of quotidian…

be amid implausible spells…

We the pennies flung down wishing wells, pensive casts
of time

by some provenance of dreams—

Sycamore

Still clad in September leaves, a sycamore fell halfway o’er
the Elk…

The same day Patsy died, rejoined John at Point Pleasant,
Leaving me with things I oughtn’t say, here, behind the
eyes;
Unsent billets doux tied with ribbons, wrapped in sighs,
Read by candlelight of self at evenfall, when I’m adrift
Along meridians of loss, cursives of what if on the foolscap 
of old visions,

love still bold on crumbling pages…

And in that beauty dropt were all the promises of spring,
When filled those boughs life’s cataract, that what it was
should

conjure hymns from infidels—