August serenade under a summer sun

Standing before the chasm’s depth I’m undone

I spill into the darkness before me

Unseeing the light reaching from thee

The void unfulfilled and shapeless

Shudders through my soul hopeless

The depth of you swallows me whole

The very darkness envelopes me on both poles

On The Brink

When fear becomes the heart of being

The beat is uneven and thunderous

When anxiety fills a prayer with leaving

Goodbyes are false decisions ponderous

When errors fill the mind and soul from gleaming

The body trembles answers are silent questions dangerous

When quilt arrests the art of striving

Then dreams become quiet and death becomes tremendous.

When I wander

When I wander out of my pace

Fast to the stride of others

I falter and tremble in their wake

But if I ponder a pause

And keep the beast quiet and still

The ruminations become silent and I am content

Under the blue of big sky country

I miss the smell of water

In all that was about me

The foliage of green turning to autumn fire

The rock cuts on forest highways

The scent of evergreens and red earth in the eskers

The purity of land cleans the soul

Here under the sun, we are pounded into the clay

Driven into the work day by the midnight sun

Big trucks big rigs faster everything

Building upon everything attached

To calyces connected to grunts

Bourne on the shoulders of some poor fucker

Sinking in the clay and oil (take a stride)

I miss the breeze drifting off the long lakes

Carrying the voices of those who sang by the fire

The smoke that glides over the water

Like the morning mist comes showing us stars

And shadows of past tides against the shores of decades

In August look for the flicker of fire flies

And the darting splash of the blue heron

On the shores of Nippissing waters

Wooden steps thump their echo on the boardwalk

To the sandy shore as we stroll on Sunday eve

Under the big sky the breeze dusty at times

Over endless fields and eternal horizons

Can bring you snow in late June

Or crash down upon you like God’s heel

But today just races waves of long grasses

Shoring up to dirt roads and highways

Running east from the foothills

Through dunes short forests and badlands

It reaches into the depths of my being

Sweeping me back onto the Canadian Shield

By dark waters cliffs and forgotten inlets

Where life hides and dies on the earth-soaked rocks

In the lush brush, coniferous and deciduous

Scents of all seasons crashing

Against an old mine’s head frame

Framed through burning eyes scorched by the sunset’s glow

Underlined with the murmur of the lake just below

“Home is the place your heart’s never left.”

Here the endless level plains afford us

A clear view of miles and decades ahead

Here when the sun sets

It takes the horizon with it

Deep into the dark cold bitter abyss

Winter levels against us till spring sets us free

That ice prick always has a hand in things

The rain will always fall from above

And the snow will flutter to the ground

The winds will always blow cold or warm

And the sun will always rise and set

As ordained by its place in the universe

The landscape gives it all pause and twists

Turns and spins it all into that which we are

And what I miss most is sitting next to you and Lilly’

Listening to the waters lap up against

The rocks and dock of Nipissing shores