I am no one yet.
But the sun is rising
so there is connection,
nothing happening
but the light.
                            I grow,
I prosper
the tyrant said,
every tyrant, every self.

2.
Don’t quote me
said the bird
but I know something,
something useful
hidden in my song.
Don’t worry, answered
a passing car,
my lips are sealed—
and it may be
your secret runs me too.

3.
Fast break
from night bread.

Hope happens
all over town,

there is no fence
though round
this man’s song.

One more tyrant
lights the lust. 

4.
Just because I wake
I have to say.
Sunlight gold
in dimming green.

In that tattered
sleep they call waking
I remembered walking
when I was a little boy
down The Flume—a stream
quick through narrow chasm
with wet stone walls,
the air made half of water.
I distracted myself by guessing
the name had to come from Latin,
flumen, neuter, ‘river.’
But that doesn’t help.
It still felt just
like walking down into myself,
slippery stone, sloping down,
and who would I be if I fell?

5.
The mountains have changed too.
The Old Man’s face
has crumbled off the cliff.
My ancestor I thought he was
since I had known no other.
The irony is that Self Reliance
is something you get from a book.

6.
There is no pain
in being itself
but being is strange,
strange. They ease
our fears by citing Nature.
Have you ever seen nature,
even running away?

 7.

The bird was quiet then,
his gospel still.
The listening car
is in Kingston by now,
how long the telling is.
The Absolute is everywhere,
the book lies open on the table.
We call it flying.
We call them wings.

8.
Come back and comfort me.
Music should never be diversion,
ever be a version
of what you really mean,
you who flute or note it
down for someone else
to sing with her fingers
or her lips, let them say
sacred what you mean
in all the frivolous funerals of the heart
and so the slightest touch
becomes profound.
You know all this,
how strong music makes us
but we must be weak, weak
to start with
before the glory brass and strings
wake us, mountains, meanings.

19 November 2020