The Drum That Beats Within Us – Excerpt

May I Meet You There

Life is simple
knowing
the right words.

You are
the sun in my life
the joy in my heart
the gem in my soul.

When I met you
twelve thousand six hundred
days ago, I loved you
from the first moment,
the first look and sound
of your voice.

We’re all sentenced
to death, you say.
What greater victory
than to love another
more than oneself.

The days fade like rain,
poisoned like wolves on the prairie,
eagles fall from the sky,
the sea dies
before our eyes.

If anything comes after
the Hell and joy,
may I meet you there.

Golden Gate Bridge

The burden of the days is lifted
from her shoulders; night has sifted
her solace in the sea. Dawn will break
with only memories of her, a lake
from which no river flowed, and bridged
by solitary steel, sharp-ridged
with suffering. At a time
when all was naught, a turn sublime
of the elemental shoulder, from which she slipped
down like a bird, to die
in cold sorrow, beneath an unlit sky.

The Drum that Beats Within Us

The drum that beats within us is primitive as stone,
the song of one who fears not death nor years alone,
who hears the velvet hoofbeats within the willowed glade,
and tracks the sorrowed unicorn beneath the laurel’s shade.

The drum that beats within us outlasts all sense of time
and limbers to no earthly tune, no transitory rime.
The politic is not its stead, nor earning, nor the wise;
it abides not reason, nor in dimension lies.

In the lodgepole canyons, before the day’s alive
you hear it in the flicker, the creek stones and the hive,
you know it in the winter wind that licks about the boughs
and sifts the gifts of years and bones the forest floor allows.

The drum that beats within us is steady as the Bear
who sleepless guards the whirling skies around his northern lair;
although we cannot see him in the glitter of the day
We know that he is visible once light is swept away.

As when the buck has bounded from his needled mountain bed,
his footfalls echo through the pines long after he has fled,
so does the drum beat after us, although we travel past
the touch of every star and space, the wish a wish might last.