Montmorency Park

Jack sat inside his thoughts lost in the park

Of yesterdays where wooden benches that

Received between the shady trees the dark

And twilight flecks that dappled where Jack sat –

He thought the whispered thoughts I'll softly tell

Of heated love turned wounded hate and caught

Between those warlike forces heaven hell

Where we with him sit where that day he thought –

He spied her there beside the cannons laugh

Within a life her sunny ways outside

His thoughts of her lost in the shadowed half

Where fixed a malice aimed at those he spied –

Onetime inside this park there was a crime

In shot of those black cannons there onetime –

Cupid and Psyche Redux

Give him your token, maiden, mother, crone –

He kneels for it, then raises it, her hand

Guides him towards the waiting empty throne,

From where they rule together this new land.

It flows before them in their golden dreams

Like hawks in flight, the grounds behind them roll,

And all that once was here and all that seems

Returns to them for them to mete and dole.

As angels on a height, they now survey

The grass within its growth, a cricket’s sound,

The feather of a hummingbird, its sway

Within a breeze where sunburst breaks unbound

From center, seed and egg, the embryo

From which love finds increase, change, constant flow.

Slowed Motion

 Her laughter bubbled from across the room

And then soft raindrops full of evening fell
And light on bend around a lunar bloom

Showed songbirds in confession in their dell

And in my mind I caught her twilight eyes
And then they grew those eyes all I could see
Were grey and deep round full and full of sighs
Or were they mine those sighs no longer free
To stand in thought I could not wait I moved
And she moved there towards some middle spot
Where meadows mountains skies seas earths approved
And universes everywhere forgot
Their laws and reasons spaces distant times

What’s here and there with sounding chimes and rhymes

Who’s That Knocking?

So who’s that knocking on sweet Sue’s front door?
She locked it just in time – it seems to her –
And now she’s hiding on her kitchen floor,
Behind a kitchen chair, her brain a blur.
“So who’s that knocking?” now she asks again –
“This knocking just won’t stop, and breaks my head;
It shatters every part of my poor brain,
And if it doesn’t stop, I’ll soon be dead.”
“So who’s that knocking, who’s that knocking here?
Now if you answer you will soon find out,
For I will breathe such sweetness in your ear:
The sweetest treats are what I’m all about.”
So who was knocking, promising such sweets?
It’s he who's taken now the sweeter treats.

Points

And when I see you there – you point my way –
I walk towards you where you waiting stand,
Although I know that you will soon today
Move me towards another point of land.
And though I know that you behind me reach
And there you’ve stood before me in the past,
And that you vanish when I near you, each
New time’s as fresh to me as was the last.
So stand away, my dear, and I’ll be there,
Approaching as you steer my daily course,
And step on step again I walk aware
That in you glows my beacon and that force
That through the waking day draws me towards
Those points where light, life, love mark their accords.   

This Last Turn of Our Mind

He sold his soul and did not ask a thing –

Brave Faust, I know him well – inside

The solaces that metaphysics bring,

We live together, talk, turn, steep and hide.

“Perhaps some tea,” I say to him betimes;

“Lapsang souchong,” he smokily suggests;

“It’s ten o’clock,” repeat the mantel’s chimes;

“So not yet twelve,” time equally protests.

“More talk perhaps, one last investigation

Of this turned that, the world does turn, you know;”

“From me you’ll get to that no protestation –

What will it do without us when we go?”

We sold our souls, and now we leave behind,

At twelve o’clock, this last turn of our mind.