The Call

Slow, soft words
like a voice from childhood
prying open my morning.

A hovering dream
like the eternity that comes before
and after.

Flutter

The window is aflutter
with the day's newborn rays,
envoys from the heavens
thrust

at the immensity of our existence.

The room fills up
in unhurried moments,
like a schoolboy's watercolour.

The cosmos surges

in fractions of coffee cups and childhoods

as eternity pounds away like a machined heart.

We are surrounded by movement

but we,

we do not move.

The Feast

They can't remember
where the evening began,
the boy
and the girl with the Russian name,

but they remember
where it ended up.

In poetry, as always.

***

Neruda offered his odes,
songs of blood, skin, earth
and the fire of youth.

Brodsky brought his friend Baryshnikov
who recreated
a dance for the ages.

Bukowski made an appearance,
doodles, half-burnt cigarettes,
typewriter and all.

Szymborska stood in the corner
gifting rhymes, nonchalant.

Armitage charmed his way in
with the nostalgia of childhood
and his butter-fingered verse.

Cavafy took them on an odyssey
on the ocean of life
with gods, monsters and wisdom.

Bolaño made an entrance in furious lyric,
strumming on the savagery of the heart.

Borges snuck in his doppelgänger,
mirrors, swords, hourglasses
and the infinite library of chance.

***

Through the pages they strolled the night,
under the high ceiling
that mimicked a constellation.

She closed her eyes,
the girl with the Russian name,
and let his voice fall on her

like rain.

The Makers

Men born with humility
instead of a face
their fingers reach out across the ages
to craft miracles,
the slow song of human ingenuity.

In the quiet corridors of oblivion
they chisel, they weave, they carve

daily
arriving at the truth
that no one can own
but belongs to everyone.

Epilogue

[For S. N. R.]

That was how he
rested his argument with the world.

At the first sunrise of a new year
as the rest of the world burst with optimism
and confetti still wafted on the streets

he succumbed to silence.

Time went on without him
as he slipped into the cradle of the past.
In an instant, he was.

Relinquishing his breath,
he embraced the air's stillness
and left his song behind for others to sing.

He didn't run out of music,
he ran out of time.