High Water

Lost in your thoughts
you turn into your calle
and are stopped by
a pool of water in the middle.
Another surfacing, among all things,
you must deal with now, sensing
the shifting foundations
in their inscrutable moods.
The trees swinging, the shutters
whining in the wind
surround you, you feel besieged
subtly, familiarly.
The hazy sun lightens
the flooded stones of the bank
and heightens the water’s glare
on a row of unaware
silent thresholds
where a lace of lappings
is going to blur
all steps.

Breaths

Your breath reassures me
when I wake up in the dead of night
and lie still in the thick widespread silence,
a boundlessness on chest throat eyes,
when I fear the unframed present
pulsing in the dark and my huge
nothingness,
thank God I hear your quiet trail of breeze,
your stream of stars on shifting sands,
your thin, neat column of ants
travelling on valleys between whispering dunes

or in the day when I hear his breath, my old dog,
the palm of my hand embracing his ribcage
when I carry him in my arms with his night
of eager, tight, sniffing stars of eyes

waiting like me for the food of reassurance;
yes, it’s all a matter of getting quiet
with something to lean on in the dark,
the night pressing in with its bottomless
still core,
you want to believe is breathing too
but it’s too close and far off
and you keep listening.

The Wall

You came to it after running with the others
among the tall trees, gravel crunching underfoot
and perpetually scratched knees,
the drying crusts of blood you were always
tempted to raise before time,
your nervous fingers on them
while you all plotted a new plan
and sulked and mumbled and laughed
ready to start another run.
You needed a wilderness and found it
at the wall, your thick bastion, high, majestic,
at the end of the path, a rock
of concrete and gravel, some pebbles
sticking out like planets, where legs and feet
strove in their sky, finding good grip
during the climb, and where you
once on the top scanned the horizon,
possessed the plain, could dance,
be the king.
Then the seasons passed, one day in June
you found a huge gate hooked to your wall
and a crowd in black, cheering, toasting,
strolling in and out.
You were angry but knew
it was better pretending indifference
and turned your back to all that.
And it was not only because you were taller now
that the wall looked so small.