What Has It Been
 
And what has it been after all
But infinite voids
And wheels rolling across sharp stones
Wheels rolling down hills
And over the ghosts of midday
Long, golden ghosts - they yawn at three-thirty
And gather up their gowns and their hollow eyes
Blindly they float through the cornfields
You've heard them, haven't you
Long, golden rustlings along a pathway to dreams
 
And yet___all of the light of the world
Flickers with a single candle on the mantle
 
The shipwrecked nights washing on shore
Wounding the sands
And rocks, stone words
Hollow driftwood - silver fish scales and broken bones
Even pearly seashells cut feet
 
Floating seaweed hair ripped from the the heads of watery mermaids
Their heads bumped with the currents against broken piers
Lying in submerged piles of cement
Piers once touching the time between Neptune's toes
And the sands that screamed
 
And still____ all of grief held in the call of a lone dove
On a twilight wire
All of ecstasy lingering in a slow pace that remembers
The burning glance held between two pairs of eyes  
 
And skies of rain, sad rain ... sad, dark rain
And metal stars
Daybreak with daggers at its sides
Lonely webs in window panes
Spinning spider eyes and death
Under skeletal trees, tombs of unknown tomorrows
 
And yet___ all of the music on the universe
Is the crescendo in the song of the seas
Rolling on eternally
 
Unrolled maps marked with the veins of history
And the blood of battles
Unrelenting mirrors that shout shrunken mortality
And the familiar bends we round, but are lost
The cracked windows with torn curtains
Broken chimneys ... and strangers on our porch swings
 
And yet, yet ... there is hope, vainglorious hope
All of hope in the throat-song
Of a single wren in spring