Remaining

Some words are as old as God—
meant for things barely remembered,
or assigned to wonders
seldom seen.

     Think of stopped
     watches
     buried beneath
     the pike;

     night dissolving
     in aurora
     quietly above
     the final miles
     of dead-ends.

There are songs that have only been sung
in imaginations of men
long dead,
whose bone-dust
stays in graves
that flute
the tired meadows.

There is a world there
left open, always,
slipped beneath
the mundane
daylight of
ladder-climbing
and fencelines.

The pathway always cuts away
from even fields
of fine and fertile soil;

and fades from
forever-lit cities
and monuments
hoping to commemorate
the past self,
the future self.

There, when eyes
have ceased insisting
on life’s plentiful lies
and settle—defeated if need be—
for the muddy, cricket-chirp truth,
then there is the silver script;
lost words of a beautiful tongue.

And we are wondrous again,
and fearfully made.

As few as we may be,
and lower than the angels
with our landscapes sweetly fading,
the wind is always new
on redemption-white, cold winter nights.

And in the middle of what once
I named nowhere,
I sit and watch the owl-wing clouds
fanning fire and ages
through a tired flesh
that stretches over the sky.

It is a pilgrimage in sitting still;
epiphany in remaining—

watching the old order
pass so quietly away
with eyes wide
and left behind.