Instantaneous Telos

While I was resting, in joy
In a space of time, while
I slept, while I stretched,

I had the ability to forget
What I meant without fear
Of faith, fact, or contradiction.

No one could speak against me
While I remained, prone in prayer
And of no conquest since the Fall.

Here I make a mistake. Here
I pretend to a nobility no
Lord knows. I am not that

In the trees where branches sing
In the storm that has no reason
To be impressed previous

Trees survived worse so these
Which may or may not survive
Could thrive, a human voice

Trained by centuries of mountain
Generations to carry a tune
In a message while a storm

Causes those same breaking trees
To compete for song, yodels
Down to a servant soul, remote:

"You are not allowed
To while away your time,
Because your time belongs to life,

To body, yours or mine, to voice,
To survival, to lust, to mistakes
Wise or foolish. You are mine."

The Buddha of Do and Done

Those are the biggest blue eyes since Sumeria
Our daughter fixes onto us this ashy noon
When retreating winter throws a cowl on the sun
And then runs, leaving us confused and almost warm.

How long has it been? When did we really begin?
This is our civilization we made ourselves,
The bridge we sprinted and limped across barefooted,
Our own intentions, architecture as sculpture,

Sculpture as knowing wisdom, as goddess, as time.
This is what we use fancy phrases to describe:
An arbitrary atmosphere that rules our lives
Like the bug-eyed, perfect dragonfly that arrived

In my mind. It would be better if we could sing
Of archaic angels and Saxon kings listing
Who and what we came from to the last single snip.
And we can, but we can't, not with great confidence,

Never mind who it is we should become. She stands
Between us as we extemporize on ideas
Not our own, not like her, whose very energy
For talking, for drawing on life comes from us, whose eyes,

Metaphorically mixing volumes of our souls,
Converge on points so widely spaced, so far ahead,
And so far in the distant past of us that time
Itself, in her, is just a metaphor made just.