The sudden flash of a swallowtail's two long wings, black rustling silk edged with tints of blue, sepearted by a slender body alive and pulsing.

How can I appease my sharp hunger of vision by these transitory sights: that of a butterfly, that of your butterfly like presence?

2004:03:27 Atlanta

In the quiet afternoon, my thoughts return to those springs past Those wonderful nights of sudden delight

How much grief has filled Those vessels since! All those words are now a blur

On the fascimile of time The ladder one climbs year after year Into this time called the present

In which the afternoon sun Falls on this regret, that regret, so much regret. Still beauty as it stands in one's heart

Remains untranished A trout leaping from a spring The glide of geese - point to hope Hope in the heart, in the mind And in the pen I hold!

You set out on sidewalks scaled with cherry petals after last night's thunderstorm.

Dandelions have risen their yellow periscopes from a sea of grass

On which the wind is inking bars
for the day's music.

As it is continually written and erased. Two ducks dive bomb the lake green and full of secret glints

The secrets for which a man on the distant shore patiently awaits with a fishing rod in hand.

What cathedral can approximate the height of the sky, the verticals of the beeches, the stained greens of spring?

And what sermon informs better than a silent heart, the echo chamber for the geeses' wild honk!

What better company than these playful swallows hovering, wings flapping over the lake?

I hear you ask what about the consolation of griefs, the forgiveness of sins?

Walk into the deepest glade, jumping over beached and stripped logs to the moss covered spring.

Touch that open vien of this world. In that consilent instant, you shall become One and zero.

2004:03:21, Lullwater Estate, Atlanta