There’s full moons tonight
All the worlds everywhere
Love sighs
By the light of ancient stars
Lips part breathless
© Chagall 2016
There’s full moons tonight
All the worlds everywhere
Love sighs
By the light of ancient stars
Lips part breathless
© Chagall 2016
Candles oblige me, light me back
to the sea, for at night I lose my way
if not for the sound of surf, the salt-spray,
I’d be lost, tossed about as innocence in the squall,
fragile bones amid limber wind, snapped barely alive
except for the thought of you buried deep,
the last seed of hope that I know I’ll sow someday.
© Chagall 2016
In the photo we are at
the corner of Rue N. Chapeau Rouge,
Dijon, France, circa 2011,
in front of a flower shop,
each petal so finely fixed in digital color,
your arm under mine, our gazes down, smiling,
with various Dijonaise blurred about us scurrying,
caught up in their day-to-day.
© Chagall 2016
I am exhilarated by early morning and
the promise of timelessness
to experience life’s wonder.
Till evening song
when hours hang heavily and
I shift to the eternity of sky for bearing.
© Chagall 2016
The lights are going out,
not forever – just for now.
We have coffee and tea,
we can make bread if need be,
sing, play cards …
Only for a little while,
only just for now.
© Chagall 2016
If you – my student –
go forward to do great things,
come back for me, take me along for the ride.
© Chagall 2016
If I took all those moments and ran them as a reel
– a film rather a dance – what would they amount to
in grams on ethereal scales how much would they weigh?
© Chagall 2016
What I thought was one of
the black butterflies of summer
was instead a tiny bird.
© Chagall 2016
Ripe things are
getting harder to find
nowadays.
© Chagall 2016
The night is crisp, autumnal.
Bourbon sweeter.
My son and his petite amie
at a friend’s cabin while they’re away.
With them, a bag of sweet potatoes
I grew and cured, for roasting
over the wood fire they’ll make.
Life is good.
Peepers sing earlier
than usual tonight. Harmonics from breezes
to trees to shape the glass arc of our ears
to blow gently in them.
I am yellow aged orange inflamed
dared to go red before withering.
I pray to the last gold ray of sun
there in the tall eastern trees
that refuses to say die to another day.
© Chagall 2016