By: John Muro

Abiding

I’ve come to this stretch of shoreline
with an uncertain purpose, watching
the early autumn light pinking the hill-
sides and the small swells that rise
then pause in dramatic fashion, seeming
to hold back time and allowing me to
draw in the soft, mournful lapping of
the waves and to watch how the leaves,
in the hushed throttle of a morning wind,
seem suspended, too, in mid-flight
as if they’ve taken delight in their dying
before they fall like lurid pieces of
sediment and gather in layered ruin
beyond the tide-line, gravity and grieving
serving as sextant and compass, and
I’m wondering if you, who were born
beautiful and bound with grace, would
remember the profound emptiness of
this place and the life we had hoped for,
or the time we had stopped here some
years back, when you mentioned how
the light on its way to finding us was
but the final remains of distant stars
that had likely died some time ago
before being swallowed whole by the
eager surf arriving with shattered
sprays of light, then slowly departing
with a muted drawl and hiss from shore.

                       ~

All In (on) Autumn

Even twilight seems to hesitate
and look over its shoulder wistfully
at the remains of this day before
the sun slips below the edge
of evening in a blaze so brilliant
that the emerging stars appear
to be little more than embers
predictably rising, but even you,
who believes that, unlike the
elusive, soft-timbred air of early
summer, this is surely the saddest
of seasons where everything is
long-settled, tethered and held
close to ground, including the
orchard’s trees, lumbering down-
hill with their gnarled branches
laden with spoiled fruit, and wisps
of fog hovering just above fields
of frost where a few dark birds
have descended like flecks of ash
upon the ground, and how, after
all, it is doing little more than
turning from the sun and courting
an uneasy emptiness, determined
to unhear a dying earth’s songs
of rapture that eventually, in
diminishing light, will come to
settle and roost deep inside the heart.

                    ~

Reconciliation

Barely any sounds or light in the sky
just yet and there’s an uncommon
stillness as if the dull, dark whole
of the world has taken an indrawn
breath while a pregnant moon, in its
slow transit, spills its feeble light
across the brooding hills and the
water and I’m wondering why it is
that I sometimes feel better suited
to the world at an hour such as this
when silence takes hold, and, knowing
how memories become more elusive
as we age, I am somehow able to
more clearly recall those times I lost
what mattered most in this life while
watching days shamble into months
and months into years and you tell
yourself that all that goes missing
happens for a reason and that there’s
a valiant purpose to be found in grief
and anguish until that moment of
quiet retreat gives way to a bird
yearning haplessly to lift itself from
the surface of the water, the rhythmic
knocking of a loosely tethered boat,
the muffled unfurling of a flag
wakened by wind, and the louder
foment of the mid-summer tide
rising and rushing towards shore
and the brazen detritus of the living,
lifting and cleansing the heart
before it slowly settles back to body.

                      ~