Dustfully
by Phocas
And then left to roam and to play on the blank, empty page, what freedom and rapt holy summons rolling, tumbling fields across and thrumming deep inside the ground in the very roots and tendrils of every tree and flower up into my very eyeteeth and sap spreading out and slowly dripping and oozing in radial gladness and maybe this charged piece of electrical poem after all and current more enclosing and epochal of earth and what delirious, teeming possibilities of praise in every dust mote and shooting star whose tears streak dustfully across the sky in a sprinkle only the weeping angels know—and I want to honor these same dust motes and cottonwood spores as bright, tiny churches all their sparkling own as little, drifting vestibules and antechambers of the one glorious and unbroken truth waiting to be spoken or revealed with utter awe and devotion teaching us how to drift and be light as they are along with the rhapsodical singing of birds and the raucous croaking of peepers at the end of April where my soul and every soul is meant to hum and sing in the sudden childhood awareness and alacrity of the glory of creation come back again as if for the very first and only time and it is always, suddenly the only time, which is now and forever, blades of grass like green waves of feeling rippling out in tides of pure sighing rising aloft in overwhelming but gentle grace, and here to roam on the blank empty page slowly filling up with loving nonsense and the gibberish of an almost holy fool whose degree is a B.A. in bowing to glory again with my face down on the ground so that my whole body is commensurate with the loving earth, gobsmacked and amazed at the love of one woman and the shamelessness of men to quote William Merwin and April not just the cruelest month but somehow also the most faithful for its first buddings and blossoms and bouncing with Bud at the keyboard with Keith Jarrett, heartbreaking and alive even as it leans into ever deeper lyrical May and June and the lilacs summoning butterflies from South America and other parts of the world and the rising of fish and then grasshoppers pogoing all summer long into autumn and the blank empty page is open, the blank empty page is capacious and bow-legged and loving of all forms and doodling galore along with prayers and miracles and love letters and to-do lists somehow turning into to-be lists in sweet, intimate concert with every stillness—for white flowers sing at the gate of the heart as prisoner #1010001100 Valeriu Gafencu once wrote in a Romanian prison and I am singing now also at the gate of my own heart holding and trembling a few white flowers whose genus and everafter I cannot name or label except virginal and forever, eternal even, pure intentions of a flowering love and utterance spilling out across the blank, empty page which is also snow-laden and open and trying to be kind and loving in all weather and all forms of handwriting, even if I can’t verily make out the words—and fish are rising (oh, always somewhere), for white flowers sing at the gate of the heart and I know this better and more deeply than I know or can even recall my own boyhood summer days open to eternity on dusty Nebraska roads on a bike for hours in the long lit miles eternal even then in love with a girl in pony tails sashaying all the way to her waist and the color of honey and straw and central most of who I would come to love most in this world as my future wife and best friend and lover decades later, and the blank, empty page, the blank, only page in the sheet of a murdered tree, what testimony or praise may I offer to the life-giving spirit of the whole world, how to say or sing or sigh all the gratitude, grief, heartbreak and make of being alive just this little while in the tossing, turning dreams of brook trout and brown trout and trout I have never hooked, only read about, cutts and golden, what nonsense and heart-sense may I make on the blank, empty page, what account or telltale as white flowers sing at the gate of my heart and every heart on the blank, empty page here now swept clean and always like a bolt out of the blue or the great unknown that beckons us to come home and be wild children again, to play all day in the fields and forests and books and then, oh, most holy, to listen to the dinner bell calling us home, calling us from all dust and tiredness and the great, heroic swinging from tree to tree in our restless climbing to somehow learn how to soar, how to fly, how to truly touch and commune with the sky, and how to come home again with clean hearts washed anew by play, by hunger, by the wonder that never ceases only deepens with wonder and by the desire to be hugged and to be teased and to be around the loud and clamorous dinner table before we hold hands in grateful prayer before taking the first sacramental bite and the scent of dill or pepper or chives, swallowing our joy and happiness and even tears one slow and grateful mouthful at a time.
Phocas lives in central Michigan.
