from The Hours -- Stephen Sartarelli

Face to the minutes
in our pages,
teeming in flight
falling as air
to the life below
so we proceed
dark on blankness
parting to each
step taken with each
opening of eyes
onto passages
remaining as ruins
to be unfound
again the chasms
of our looking out


Like water we wake
to the touch,
skin enacting
the erosion as we
come to be,
fall away
as organisms
casting out
in all directions,
offspring of salt,
magnetisms
of the minute's flesh
in ebullition,
our future birthing
uneternal


The few remaining breaches
in our cloth-and-metal
ramparts shrink
so imperceptibly
with each attempt
to fashion hardness
like a plant,
make it grow in light,
pass through stone or air
or the emptiness
closing at each breath
about to be driven
across the earth,
all in a moment's ravage


These ages of
rapt inattention
fast unravel utterly
to nothing but
a vacuum of whims,
nothing but chances
by the ever-turning
wayside, wisps of time
within time,
dust bestirred
until it should rise
over heaven,
monumental streaks
of our precipitation
into subdivisions
of all possibility--

What gardens of air
still burn in the fire


Singly by the gaps
in time, efforts
of the hand
or heart still find
a sun or moon
by which to stand
as if by their own light,
as breaks in the
provisioned air
swept fast away
by every shadow
cast anew
unleashing a descent
of errant eyes
mornings of eons
in our midst


And by the time
the minutes settle
sound by sound
to open up
their beckoning interiors
to something more
than our own fragile,
all-desiring future,
what silence, then,
soft as the meanders
of the flesh, cavern
of the eyes unseen,
what vistas of the torrent
of receding air
shall yet remain
unpeopled by the children
of disasters wrought
to strip the day
of emptiness?


Here my unencumbered
simple weight,
red-veiled skin
of air as memory
to light the way,
falls still to earth

Gone are the burdens
of standing forever,
gone the palaces,
gone the symmetries,
gone the time without time

Here I only am,
forfeit of projections
on my simple day,
vehicle of what
was made to be
undone by all these
seasons looming
over every step.


Open and reopened
in the swollen flank
of birthing day,
voids in motion
round the head
so many pillows
under shadows of branches
yet to be dreamt
bless our passage
o'er the burning ground
at last to rest
in our wandering


As outlines blur
in fading day
what I see is not
some thing absorbing
and reflecting light
but a disturbance
somewhere
in the space between
occurrence in time
and the vast residues
of ages,
fraught with what desire
I would thrust upon it
as imagination