Musk of Autumn

 

Everyone has a plan but God.

She just sings.

The wisest fool follows her tear

back to the well of night that breathed us.

There's trembling in that stillness,

a generous flow from a hollow core

that never heals.

Musk of collapsing melons.

Zest of the last chrysanthemum.

A bad hair day for the caterpillar.

Dapper in black mask and tails,

cedar waxwing glides
over a ballroom of fallen water lilies,
clotted berry drops.

Time to search for the well inside water

where darkness sheathes the shine.

The singing of the world ends here

and begins again,
with many other things too beautiful
for creation
until we imagine them in ourselves.

God is all alone, yet She loves mirrors.

Her silence a kind of inverted 

language, spilling the earth 

out of secret words,

syllables of hidden splendor,

suspirations of the unborn.

This poem can't describe that sound.

These are only scratches

On the shattered glass.

Our teardrops seem to be many,

but the sorrow is one.

It is like a benediction, 

a luminous nectar

pouring from a single bead

in the eyes of all the ancestors.

They gaze from the well inside water

and behold the beauty of a world

not yet created. 

It gushes from seeing,

from the place where we go to pray,

the place where we kiss

before we are conceived.

Photo by Donna Kennedy