What is the age of a moth,
fluttering in darkness
and counting days in eddies
of light?
A spoonful makes the measure
of life.

The mosquito counts years
in hours,
egg-obsessed,
seizing the day.
The sloth, though,
is born old,
time trickles through its fancies
like water through rock,
feeding secret caverns
of thought.

Trees’ slow-grown rings
beat time like an ancient clock,
sounding the rhythm of years,
the girth of their growth
gathering the substance of summer.

My growth
is harder to measure,
an invisible garnering of wisdom
and spirit
that can light time,
allowing the turn of the earth
to furnish a rhythm
of fading leaves, stiffening boughs

and fruit.

Sometimes time fades
and the grey minutes
of ordinary days
are lit with a hidden sun
so there is no bleak thought,
no work that is heavy
or humdrum
but all shine
as if love has been let loose
to settle on or in each thing
like snow.

It is the night
before Easter,
the night
of the waiting day.

We are in the body
of the dark sky,
its breath
is cool on our skin.

We are walking
on the earth,
walking on the bones of it,
through the dark dunes,
through the quiet of them
towards the angry surf.

The sea is breaking on the stones,
breaking on the stones
over and over.

The roar of its fall
fills the shell of the sky,
fills the ear of our bodies.

We stand in its call
until we can hold
the force of it,
until it finds an echo
in our silence.

The air
held thought like sheep’s wool
on a wire, soft on a
barb, blowing white and blowsy
on a dark thorn.
Gathering it felt like
stripping the silence for my own need
to not be alone,
floating in the bones behind the universe
like a toy balloon used to
bumping and hurrying
along

-the breath of the stars,
the pause of the hours,
the threshold between now
and other, and dreams, 
and the scurrying beetles
of thought.

There is no wind
to lift a kite,
no stars garlanding
the night
to lift a dream,
just the beat
of heart and time
to mark the chance
a life can take,
not bound by bread
and circuses
but squirrelling
the happier days,
valuing
the people met
and letting wrongs
fall by the way.