The Quiet

Darkness falls hard on the black pond, persistently,
through the porous granite of foggy slumber.
Into its embrace I hurtle my self, fearless almost,
the threshold of my vision lower than ever,
the threat of the unknown untraceable,
the image unseen, the sight
tucked away in the bottom drawers of deep memory,
the risk quieted—
in freezing hypnotic spiral, in a blank impersonality. Pale moonbeams
penetrate into this almost-emptiness, shivering over
glassy ripples on lake-surface undisturbed
the notes crawling gingerly over your skin,
charting courses on maps undrawn
in deeper engraved traces, journeys that can
cover the distance the water has not rushed in,
but never are completed—
—when completed, nowhere is there to go,
nothing ends in anything. Far far away,
photons fly unrestrained
on the shadows of the hidden cove
behind the basalt boulder, and, in synch temp, the
string of water lilies anchored on the muddy lake-
bed sway, swinging without knowledge.
Then, tomorrow, I have a remembrance
of the future, a foggy one,
there is no outlet for the flow of thought, the exactness of words
fails in definitions and subtext, we cannot
expunge emotion off prepositions,
an ocean that tightly maintains is calmness and
fullness, the heavens
are converging on the singular vanishing point of shapeless singularity,
merging the grammar of intent with the
syntax of will, a design so
determined and dormant
that the pronoun “us” has no meaning left, only a faint
remnant of hopes and dreams, what is left
when one entertains his last thought.

[end]