Among the Tombstones

In the big, open cemetery
I walk among the tombstones
in the daylight, soft hands
scraping along the grainy granite tops
of the taller head-masts.
So many rocks here
in the big cemetery,
so many rocks
cut-carved to some undeniable perfection
of geometry,

as if they never could have been anything else,
as is shape itself simply and quietly slipped into destiny.

It’s not amazing or frightening,
thinking of being with them one day,
a common joiner of the ethereal club,
another simple member of the dirt and the dead.
Gives me peace,
knowing to enter endless
will be a time of together,
not friendless, not alone,
but of ubiquitous,
among the great, vast universal bind—
electric-warm handshake within the greatness
of ever-expanse . . .

. . . that will again wake me
in a flash of my birth.
Then, one day
again I will roam ‘n toss among the tombstones, say, “ . . .
Who knows?
since something else then I’ll be—
perhaps a flit of wings
—suddenly,
I’ll hear.

Handbook of a Painter’s Life

You, hold out you hand—

It’s forever still in time
that what handed this painted stay.

There is an ancient question that rises—
instilled universal in the infinite bind
as that, all that will come to matter.

You, holding out your hand,
Sense what, Feel what,
that what mattered summoned anew
the ancient question?

You who hold out you hand—
What touches back?
There is no forward, only
what you’ve touched
that touches back.