The Return

What returns is never the same

smelling of afternoon sun

clothed in dust motes

that clutter the room

sheet music on the piano yellows

to leave is to forsake

the innuendo and rumor

of the social self squeezed

into bourgeois aspirations

of material comfort and success

endless power over the Other

they must be burned to begin again

Out of the cluster of oaks

I clamber across the grasslands

they sway as diverse in their strength

as the berries that weigh down the ivy

brushing against the face of my home

I do not judge them they ignore me

their perfect spheres taunting my need

for order beauty the seasons turning

and so I am back hunting them

gathering them washing them in cold water

tasting their outer layer of flesh then the hint

of sweetness waiting in their darkened core

All discoveries are new mysterious

seedily mundane they compose

the enigma of arrival the enigma

of being-there to wrestle eternity and time

to outrun death lodged in our chests

like a riddled heart pumping poison

that spills out of capillaries and veins

soaks into our socks bathes our knees

splashes into the bowels of life which circle

monotonously on the weaver’s spindle

fabric embryonic in its strands

is about to appear textured colored marked

in dyes the ancestors raised from the earth

I would not remain but the owl cries stir in me

the lust to fly after prey to swoop down

on the unsuspecting jewel hidden

in clumps of earth overturned

by the plow I will write a new self

on the wing wedded to the hills rich

in simple things finding my way

through the milky shadows

of deepest night

the muffled calls

of the return