Fenestral

David Sheppard

(The following poem has never been published.)

I

The clouds of content open from above
Casting holes in the charmed darkness of a world.
Traces of an omen fondle the figureof a spherical surface
And we stand in space
A statue in the dawn of creation
A drifting shadow of the universe.

Such is the situation that we are the doors and
Our closing echoes down
Dark halls of the eternal rattling
Gates of empty courtyards sending
Shivers through the frail edifice
And all around in shrouds.

The veil of a blushing world caught in the act of innocence
Raised to kiss its cheek
For this is a door, lost in space
clutching for a hinge to swing from
searching for a frame to adorn my frail edge.

Stand with me.
I am the empty room
The silence between thoughts
The rapid smoke of blown candles.
But come,
Bringing barren hands
And closed eyes
To live a life beside this one
And to witness a death within.

II

I have traveled
A land lost of the past
A time set in a sunset
... sailed those golden rays
In a craft of orange dust
Cast on a hot wind
... distance in a billowing sail
A land lost to childhood
And a struggling gift of life
... Sadness adrift on a haunting loneliness
Dry of tears

... left a part of me there
Even now a waif
Floating on a whisper
Wasting and waiting
Drowned on a yellow powder
Where only a child can be dead.

III

A tarpaper house
Chicken-wire pocked,
A silhouette on a haze of pale blue sky
Recalls a childhood of old people
Terror of war in their eyes.
Laughter from empty mouths
Echoed from hollow walls then
Dropped silent, followed
By raspy voiced whispers
Of war fought but never known
Of ritual death at a distance.

A hollow wind blows a
Surface of sand on a desert floor
And a loneliness of dry winter
Through hurrying tumbleweeds that
Struggle through slack barbed wire.
A dessert road of a journey half filled
Carries the fast whisper of a car's black rubber
Into the feigning of foreign horizons
And falters in the course haze of the distance,
Halting the promise of another quest.

In dreams
I frequent high places
Peer down the edge of cliffs
Climb hills that are too steep
And cling with elbows
To the ledge of life.

IV

Within the granular silence of a breath
Is the roaring wind
That scrapes the high country
Down a tundraed pass.
The water flows only downward here
And the cold feel of its fury
Untouched by human hands is born
In the gray distance and forever falling.
All is quiet and waiting
An uncertain sadness captivated in silence.

Within this movement works the hand
Of a once troubled child
Caught with a wonder struck stare
At a green veined leaf
Torn from a wind raked tree.

There too lies an uncertain sadness
Elutched within that silence,
Revealed as a secret without the flow
Of thought or word.

The thought of this
Lingering dream reappears in the
Misty image of a vibrating string
Played by the gentle space between the
Strings of a silent harp.
Thus does the gap of forgetfulness
Fill the void and standing hidden
Naked between the eyes.
Such are the reaches of internal stars
That know not of silence
Tor of the sound that samples grace.
This glimpsed fenestral image
An apologue of celestial space.

V

Old eyes at the window
Lost in a simile of yesterday.
Quiet frost on the rust metal tongue
Of the three-tires-and-an-axle trailer
Slumping in a saddle of crisp dead weeds.
Old eyes and a picture
Reaching for a reason
Within the midnight madness.

The old with a tombstone smile
Eyes traded for a glimpse of tomorrow.
A seed wrapped in a summer blanket
Hiding among retreating fall grass.
The old people:
Where have the eyes?

Sprinkles of stellar dust
And the tail of a comet
Condense into the laughter
Of a grandparent and child
And the open mouth cackle
Of a hyena.

Changes - always a silent movement:
The crunch of the earth's crust
Echoing unheard for a million years
Or the tender touch of a child
Upon a face of the dead
Whisked away by the galloping forces
Of a shifting order
Or the flow of a milky quartz crystal:
The sounds of evolution.
The fluid crystal of humanity:
Let us make an assumption:
We have been here forever.

VI

What frail thoughts flower
The edges of your jaded mind
While standing at the threshold?
Lost and alone
A skeleton before the gates
Of the teeming precipice.

How fast the hesitation
When her shy eyes catch
For the first time, holding
With a smiling flicker.
How fleeting it comes:
The ring of a church
Bell through the courtyard
A silent room alone, clouded
By the slam of a door.

They are the similes
That float free
When your chest's
Fast swelling and pushing
Of hot air drives the flow
Of your laboring heart.

But what thought will falter
Halting its charging pace
And hover...
For a billion years a standing
Consciousness
In the stone
Of your dead
Mind

VII

And why should this echo
Belong only to then.
The gust in trees
Provides dust between stars
And the tanned hue
Of her draped breast
Once and forever churns
The spiral galax
Soon to stand along side
The childless bedroom
Holding captive silent laughter.

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