and we came, tumbling down the hills,
to find, nothing
and looked about us, and into each
other’s eyes, and saw, and realized,
the emptiness, and what we had to do,
to pass the time

a song of summer, a dance in fresh woods,
the incipient breaths, the laughter
of spring
on a virgin shore, footprints lightly
etched in damp warm sand, turning,
to gaze outward, on a ruffled bed of
blue, the instant a harmonious
conjunction of air and mind, of sky
and consciousness, an inanimate
smile
hearing faint echoes, echoes of the
valleys, and metallic mountain lakes,
and the song, the eternal music,
the sound
a bright sun descending gently on a
pillow of vapor and foam, the fabric
of pure existence, a single note
of recognition, then silence

a song of fall, life a shadowy procession
seen through shattered panes coated with
dust, with indecision, with the mocking
presence of doubt
hands slip away, away from the grasp,
from the clutching of hope, and
illusion, and desire
reconciled to the death of meaning,
the burgeoning of despair, the sickly
accretions of passing time, all else
a pretense of the patently false, the
vanity of struggle, the squalor of
delusion
a dance of the past, under beacons
from barren lands, long devoid of
human presence, and toil, and joy,
the past survives, tangible, infinitely
faceted, the playground of the psyche,
its heart fired with the light of life
to suddenly encounter the vortex,
a deafening crescendo of time,
the annihilation of all thought and
nuance, subsuming space and sound,
definitive, final, it proclaims
the singularity, the perfection, of
the emptiness, it reveals the frigid
lightless inertia of space
without humor, without pity, it wraps
human thought and endeavor in a
firm blanket of repose
only to fade, subside, the phenomena
of existence return, a sunset, soft
pastels, the translucent haze of dusk,
a bow cuts through placid ribbed waves,
the night

at last comes a waning, slow, excruciating,
but inexorable, time passes, in moments,
or days, or years, it passes
the end is sounded, it is spoken in a
language ineffable, in tones of brittle
glass, and clouds, and surging waters,
air pushed and hurled, in waves, toward the
horizon