The sky with all its foam and layers
has shifted from form to waves
of brutal joy.

What cruel bliss to know there is an
ocean of these crackling, blinding
drops of knowing

just a life away.

Another earth was born today
while I watched

and all I had to do was be here
and here was everywhere,
still and decoded and angelic
like a dog that saves its human
every moment of its short life,

and I finally knew it:
There is nowhere to go but here
if love is the journey.

In a world of deeply-etched formulas
and endings and no's

love begins and ends with one word:
yes.

It was in this dismantled and shapeless
Real World,
between cement people carrying time
on their backs

and the endlessness that
yearns for us,

I stumbled into a love
that could crush me,
scatter me
and remake me into
any imaginable, glorious thing.

God breathes and the stars awaken.
One breath and a universe shows up.

In a voice too human
to match the wonder,
but following the current
that leads to the vastness of Now,

I rehearse another afterlife,
I spill like the enshrined passion
of a martyred sky
and I answer
yes.


Patricia Joan Jones