Her love
A whitewater cascade
Fell hard
Into the basin
Of a lover
Whose stillness
Quelled
The torrent
In the confluence
They eddied
Mingled
Became one
An eternal embrace
Her love
A whitewater cascade
Fell hard
Into the basin
Of a lover
Whose stillness
Quelled
The torrent
In the confluence
They eddied
Mingled
Became one
An eternal embrace
Though journeys be fraught
With pitfalls and wanderings
Know the beauty of the path
That the pitfalls and wanderings
Make the path beautiful
That serenity finds its moments
White water falls away
A stream of sibilance
Embraced in verdance
Here I, find peace in this day
Even as the rain
Drizzles through the canopy
Embraced in patterns of nature
I dismantle patterns of self
Trouble falls away
An ornate lamp hangs
In a gentle place
There to illuminate
When darkness falls
A beautiful ornament
In the clear light of day
Would create a spectacle
In the dim hues of night
And now I wish
I had seen this room
Bathed in the prismatic glow
Which gives shape to the dark
Every culture
Every person
Knows beauty
In their own way
I remind myself
Try to find
Beauty’s heart
In every way
That is the place
Where we are all one
That is the place
From which flows love
The thing about travel is
Something so everyday
As a group of friends
Hanging out on a street corner
Seems extraordinary…
…even beautiful
The thing about extended travel is
Once familiarity renders
The extraordinary as everyday
The sense of beauty in the mundane
Remains…
…and travels home with me
You with the sad eyes
Who found the glass
In this swarm of activity
And I released the shutter
Capturing your moment
Of I know not what
Tired?
Beaten down?
Or just weary
Of yet another tourist
Stealing a moment of your life
For a purpose you’ll never know
One small moment of
Solitude in the chaos
Unladen Burdens
Hers was an exquisite beauty
Not the kind to command
Covers or runways
That puts a name
Up in lights or lead a headline
Her beauty commanded a second look
The kind you missed on a first take
And yes, it was there on the surface
But more, it ran deep
In her bearing
In the way she made others
The center of her world
Her smile flowed
From every feature of her being
To receive one was to be blessed
The first time
She gave me that gift
It was through a tangle of locks
Tossed about in the wind
The sound of breakers far below
My heart knew only one person
In the entirety of existence
And it took years to convince it
That there were other smiles in the universe
Some time after I’d grown beyond the desire to possess her
Our group of friends retraced that old road trip
And on this same point, through tousled locks
She gave me again that heart-stirring smile
But this time said
“I think I am falling in love with you.”
Bruised
Scarred
Burnt
But OK
I spit sand and salt
From my parched mouth
Then
Hunger
So up now
Onto the roiling sea of dunes
With their smaller wavelets
Of grasses in the wind
From the tallest
Scan up and down the shore
Only waves of ocean and grass
And the tidal strip of sand between
Inland
A barren of pines
Obscures whatever topography
Or structures
May be beyond
At the forward fringe
Where dunes meet forest
Thin
Scraggy
Scattered
Windswept trees become soon enough
A thickly boughed and wooded
Ideas without a tide
Or a beach to wash up on
Soaring on an unseen wind
I am adrift in a familiar peace
The pleasures of moments lived fully
On sun and sand excursions
Whether accompanied or
As preference sometimes won out
An adventure of solitude
Before long
The harsh admonishments
Of sun and wind take their toll
And while chewing my lip
In meandering thought
A chapped bit of it tears away
Leaving the taste of iron
The sting of revealed dermis
The elements have reduced my options
To an accommodation with mortality
Move or die
Shade or die