Clambering Toward The Silence

I found
a very small
piece
of myself
clambering
toward the silence
at the edges
of life –
out
along the places
where desolation
has come to be
the lay
of the land.

There should
have been
no one there;
and yet,
it was
strewn all
about with bodies
and heaps of decay.
Who knew?

I came here to
lament the lunacy
of the city –

the madness of
the dwellers of
concrete and macadam.

They have taken
to passing a motion;
taken to passing
an unbridled act
of desperation.
An act of greed,
and of planning,
and of drilling,
and of blasting away
along the
edges of my Delaware –

among the basin of
our River and of
our very future and
the future of our Sister
Water.

She winds her way
along, and through
and among the land
and the villages that
have nestled themselves
on her banks
for countless ages –

Ages Unto Ages.

The echoes of the
thousand, thousand
voices
of time
carry themselves
across
her surface,
across
her skin,
across
the flesh
feeling ripples of her
dank and aroma’d shores.
First, mud,
then fish,
then shell,
then weed,
then mud, again.

Oh, my sick and
sordid love
of this ambient measure
of what it means to
be a man could soon
come to an end.
Would that others
would speak their
affair with
the earth, with
the rivers, with
the sky herself.
But, no. In the
place where silence
should tender the
art of wooing enamor-ment
it stands instead against
the affair of the soul
with matter.

What man shall stand,
what woman proclaim
the madness of greed
for more? In the end,
it shall all
be undone.

Time and the
whirling passage
of its core of
ebbing upheaval
will break apart
the matter
of who we are.
Barons will be
given to entropy
and decay as will
the pen, and heart,
and voice of this
unknown poet.

But, oh
the solemn risk we run
of coming to our
falling apart
in a wasteland of
disarray and toxic
calumny exposed.

Would we should
come undone amid
a beauty of resplendent
glee; a bliss we
follow – like a thread –
to the ground from
which we have come.