The Mid-life Poems # 2 - STRATA

Our days are made of

varied ages and

altering composition.

Layers of change through

out time and space.

To feel the changes

that have been made

does not require

the minds’ knowing alone - of where

one thing ends and

another begins.

Nor is the

heart’s feeling enough.

We need a gut that senses change.

An intuition that

senses the shifting

plates and layers

of life.  We need a

heart and a mind that will trust

the gut.

In us,

down deep and beneath

are movements we cannot see,

upheavals we will never see,

shifts we cannot know will come.

We can sense them. 

We can lean forward at

the first stirrings – bend into

them and suppose or

hunch.

It is the gut that notices

this larger terrain – this immense

sliding.  It is the gut that

feels its way through changing

landscape.

The eye may not see, the mind,

it may not know, the heart may

not feel, but the gut senses.

The gut holds on

to shudders and rumbles.  The

gut explores valleys and

hills, the faults and

plates of the

topology of our lives.

The gut knows nothing

of fur and feathers,

of brocade and silk.

It holds no hope in the fine

and the soft: amid

the smooth and refined.

The heart and the mind, they

loll themselves to sleep

in the finery.  Casting their

eyes on the silt and lace

of low grade terrain;

feeling for a faint

interior pulse that they

cannot know.

Our days shift and move

without regard for the mind’s

vigilant hope for reason, and

the heart’s need for rhythm

and rhyme.  Things

move about without warning.

I cannot hope to see

that plate raised up above the others

or that one dropped down below.

The gut knows disturbance:

turbulence is its language –

and it knows it well.

My gut feels them:

A jarring drop or jolting

rise is measured for sure in

the gut.  The heart, the heart

reaches out and feels

through the layers of space

and time for the shifting

and the rolling forces

We no longer see – the

sorrow and the joy

that arrives from change

ushered in on the current

of the hummingbird’s wing

at noon day.

Layers of life

that we cannot see.

We are piles of layers

within the twist of time

and the stretch of space;

the spray of the wave

and the stir of air.

We hold on amid

our lack of ingenuity;

we dream on despite our

innocence of any true power.

Sensing only the dark,

feeling only the layers

of our piled past,

we hope against hell that our

heart and our mind have

listened well and found

what is true, what is sure –

what the gut has to offer.