as tears roll by

wet and gray, dreary perfection like those old days. time alone for the great mysteries to penetrate. On the porch I smoke, examine a broken fragment of a papery wasp nest; perhaps these long spheres were once torn pieces of poems i discarded in spring, chewed fenceposts where sylvia twists her bones to slip through, old news stories from mornings we curled with our coffee in the sun, cardboard put out on the curb; pieces captured on ominous flights across the yard and reassembled into a hive of birth and destruction. the bees dance to the music i hear floating over garry oaks from the park, sunday symphony plays on even through the rain. it all falls at my feet - these pieces of a day i appropriate and spin off to my own hive. he brings me a dozzen pink roses, two for he and me i place in a milk bottle on my little table above where the birds claw curiously at the feeder while my cat sleeps heavily, exhausted by her restlessness through the rainy night. While the birds scold me through the pane and swarm the peach tree i read Chaucer's Parliment of Fowls. . . the "dredful joye" of love, cupid's "myrakle and his crewel yre." so nice to know this sweet mystery sleeps beneath the dullness. I know I have not lost it at all, it merely sleeps like so many lions. My arm throbs, glass beneath the skin - the terror and peaceful mortality of injury, blood marching like armies of soldiers. The beauty of love rising up forever out of ashes, like the papery waspnest, built from a million pieces of nothing. the pieces leap through my mind to eternity.