The Northwest Passage

In storms of the mundane I’m lost, I try but cannot find you now.
In frost-locked squalls of daily grind, you’re muddled and can’t feel my hand,
or see the way to go with me,
and so around us it comes down: a maelstrom of minutiae
our creditors and balances within and sometimes due without
a wrack of places, dates, and now-we-musts, of expectations and of others’ doubts
a farrago of all the fears of the not quite so young or new,
the brilliant and the underused, who worry what they’ve brought they’ll lose.
We’re snowblind in the blizzard, then,
forget to breathe and now we’re panicking,
forget to stop before we go, and now we’re shocked our steps are faltering
forget to listen for the quiet and now sick our paths are vanishing;
and how the noise just snowballs,
‘til we’re running blind and deaf to all
the lines we cross, the signs we left, the signals back and forth we missed.

It’s in silences I find you best, the warm and curving stillnesses.
In calm of moments taken well you see me and know where I’m bound,
and it’s together we have always found, with surety of doubled breath,
a symphony of sacred time, the spark of synchronicity,
to see our path, to know our way, to find the hope for years and days
yet unarrived, a pair of lives no more or less
unbounden or unburdened with the troubles and the weights
that all fight off, or all take on, or all fall to, or all flee from;
but in those sun-becalming undulations of our moments of serenity,
I see you and you hear me, and in glad appreciation of the patience
and the perseverance of the pridefulness, refusing pain’s privations;
the unhurried sense of harmony that let us come together first
becomes our compass, and our spyglass, and our footing and our nerve.

Fair-weather friends are free to suffer fickle fate or flee,
but all is fair in love, we know, and for us there in unity’s no strength unless
it be a map, a chart, a jointly written rutter that shall route us from
the bitterest of winter’s parts and bring us to ourselves again:
for in our twoness when we’re one, our fear’s undone, and we
can learn to trust our way again and come through struggle’s cyclone swirl
to tranquil light upon the eye, the stillness of uniqueness that’s
a glance of what’s in you and I.

Something New Under The Sun

There are no true words for nature.
All us children of Adam Earthson and Eve of the Free Will,
we can’t really describe it--
our first task when we arose, and we’re not even close.
Rain, land, wind; monsoon, continent, hurricane:
syllable symbols obscurely exemplifying something
too elemental to entrap in shallow sounds
or hollow scrawls.

Primal, you came to me,
unnamable yet named unshakably,
element of the Elements with storm-blue eyes,
paragon of paradoxy,
luminous with lucidity,
coriolis-crowned in simplicity’s mystery,
sacramental silver strong,
making your windward way through the unbound world,

You

wash over me (slate breakers and seafoam)
whirl me down (breath of the planet as it spins)
scorch me (white spark of creation)
jolt me (granite cracked in passing worldshock)
cause me joy (feral happiness, so real it hurts)

and I still can’t name your essence.
Breathless, gasping, I am
whelmed-- over, under, all directions--
wonder-filled and fierce with revelation
of
with
for
by

you.

Is this the First Feeling?
Is this what First Man and First Woman felt
looking at the hot, new world
with tender, laughing eyes:
every thing a present in its freshness
a challenge in its selfness
awaiting with eternal patience
a name
that may yet never come,
a name
to replace all the murky mutterings and markings
when we mean what really is.

No five letters ever
could bind up everything that’s you,
no more than any five fingers
could ever take and hold you back
from walking your wild way through the wild woods.
You are
who you are.
I know it.
Even if I cannot name it.