Another rasping end,
this day,
this winter, this last
frame of life
it all comes
down to.

How easily I drank your
poison bliss
and died effortless,
infinite deaths,
and every place
you touched
became an awakened
world,
blossoming
like swans on the
distant lake of my
childhood—
yes, that
perfect place
with all its
grassy freedom.

Now in the unendurable
embrace of beauty—
icy purity—
I practice the fine
art of forgetting,
yet somehow you're
still the wind
chiming without
a voice,

and I still carry around
this collapsable heart,
still adore the idea
of love's giddy hazard,
while knowing
joy was never something
outside myself.

Look . . .
see how the forest
expands for me,
makes way for me,
these oaks like
burnt angels,
smoky and twisted
like reality
after dreaming,

like my own haze
reaching for its Source.

In truth, nothing can
harm me, the real me, but
little nothings put on
a convincing show,

until they don't.

Now in the tiger's eye
morning of my birth,
I walk with trees,
I breathe,
I live.



Patricia Joan Jones