Battle

Three thousand men in full armor
galloping headlong into some distant battle;
the trembling hearts, the straining muscles,
the pitch and silence of time strung out
like fairy lights along a moment.

The dream of it, the violence.

The aching hearts reaching back across
the wave of motion for any time
before now, any time where simplicity
reigned as simply as it did now,
without the vigilance, without the threat,
without water and blood and mud
and screaming shouts of souls escaping
in mystery streams of echoing dead men,
each dead, each alive, each mustering
within that space

within that time

as if it were nothing but a blade of grass
divided 10,000 by 10,000 times.

Then stop

and then

Shock.

Cycles

When we learn to live a little,
we also learn about dying:
those whom we live with
eventually leave, and we must mourn
them as if they were dead.

A relationship dies; it flutters out,
like the sun between summer leaves
eventually setting and leaving
nothing but the evening
and the stars, a reminder

of all those who are dead
and gone, a simple metaphor
to remember as we gaze upon
the stars and their remnants.
We are all made of stars,

to the stars we will return,
or perhaps we will become
part of an earthworm's digestion,
part of a plant's molecular makeup,
something poetic like that.

Perhaps my salad today
was Albert Einstein's part
of the brain that theorized
relativity.  But you realize
what a genius he was

when he said, "It's all relative,"
because a death to someone
may mean a new life for someone else,
and that is always what I try
to remember, or maybe try not to forget;

that love is an ever-fixed mark.
We spin like clockwork around it,
ticking our gears, locking into each other
for brief minutes, hours, days, years.
But we are nothing without birth

and without death, and each fresh
revolution brings us closer to the truth
about ourselves: that we are all eventually
a plant stem rising high to the sunlight
in early summer, beginning again

in some new-found life.

Echoes

Let me play a little music
in my stricken heart
that sounds a lot
like the chords
we used to beat
out together at odd
times of night; as if we
were creating a new language
that, when discovered all those
years later by humans digging
through the remains
of our lost civilization,
will deliver shots of beauty
throughout a world painted
by chaos and misdirection.

A Moment

If I could write
a moment perfectly
I would fill her up
with incandescence,
as if her soul,
for one fleeting moment
shone brightly
through her
smiling cheeks
and poked holes
in the still fabric
of my heart.