And one from a contemporary master:

Life will break you. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth.
You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed or hurt or left or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an  apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.


-Louise Erdrich

And one from the master...


You left me, sweet, two legacies,-
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had he the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.



-Emily Dickinson

Lead

 Reflection is Eve's temptation

to clone knowledge, assume power

Cells divide to live forever, and

love was made the fuel for their quest

The two way street became the curse, at once

the snake's lure and condemning deceit 

The circle is the absolute perfection of parallels

abandoning  Eden for the pleasure of connection

The lead chiming the harmony of sparkle

is the mirror's poisonous prize

Light fare

The fire inspection is today
Saving the candy thought
for the afternoon pick-me-up treat-
Kyomi, this one is for you!

Deliverance

Memory bank is empty
All the notes repaid,
forgiven or burnt

Fly little blue bird
for joy, and not hope

was your prize

Consolation

Heraclitus said "No man steps into the same river twice, for neither himself nor the river are ever the same again"

The fossilized leaf lays in pieces
on the concrete floor,
prisoner no longer at least,
still bearing faintly the green
that once had been

She bends to hold it,
the size of a heart, shattered
like the spring ice storm
that broke that branch once before,
shivering, alone again

The touch unlocks the chamber
of the crossover, and knows the sin
waiting behind, prepared this time,
 the sole antidote to blindsiding love
is a sealed tomb of longing

Scarcity

It makes me cry when it can't even be thought of
and the touch is the Judas
holding the seeing glass