Root and Branch

This one diffused and startled moment

When the light drifts on the current,

And you are far away, but emphatically connected,

Because these gardens of memory grow within me,

Tendrils scrolling through the low crumbling stones,

Great swaying trees, evergreen monuments to the endless words,

Branching from one another, spoken and not, the understandings,

The mis-taken, the branches that are bare fruitless lines

Of what we failed to say,

Whole hillsides of rolling wildgrass faces, voices, strays,

Deep roots unseen and unsuspected, coiling within and into

One another, moments into each other, hours that tap wellspringing

Years and nights and seconds,

In the rich pungent soil of me,

The wet

Pooling in the cupped loam,

The wet of your kisses, of your tears, the wet between your legs,

The mingled wet of sweat and the salt trace of pure body, de-composed,

The elemental grains of decay and life, dust impregnated with nourishment,

The unending thirst for you, the gravity and the reaching, root and branch.

You are far away, but emphatically connected, you are the root and the branch,

My garden is overgrown with you.

In these moments, as the light ebbs, and my wakefulness

Is the low berm of heavy stones crumbling at my feet,

The taste of your soil lingers, the grains and the wet,

The cup of the belly swells in the starving dark,

The soil slowly mingles memory with longing

And nourishes improbably,

The autumnal garden made to bloom again.

OR 7

Every smell

And every stone and

The turning lip of brine

In the bend of the running stream

Are all precious facts,

Spraying like the mist of your breath in the cold,

And I am faithfully tracking

All of it,

Because I'm still looking for you.


I know these roads.

That's the rock face

I lost my light to.

There's the beach where we kissed,

Beyond the tunnel,

Mingling, starfishes

And handprints.

I still have no light

And the road is longer

And colder than

I remember it should be,

But I am still looking for you.


I can still hear

My mother's howls.

It's possible, just,

To be joyfully sad,

To long for what I willfully left behind.

Because I am still looking for you.

Untitled

There are these great trees out my window,

They live exuberantly. They live

Balanced on the surface of the seasons

Throwing their long-grown colors at me.

Their hands are stiff in the naked air,

Their shadows ignore the light altogether,

They whisper in the language of tides,

They do not know the words for regret,

That we know, have always known, so well.

I wish I knew

How to feel

The way they must feel

The passage of time.

It must be

That their days are our years,

That our hours are their moments.

The running lights of night and day

Are exhalations

That we unknowingly

Release from within,

Without,

In,

Out,

Light,

Night.

They live exuberantly,

Because they live careless

Of those hours, those running lights,

The many colors thrown at my feet.

And my hands are stiff in the cold air,

I do not always see the light,

And my moments last hours,

Falling like leaves

From the sky of my opened heart.

best,

paulmonster-wintering