Foundation
This garden of mine
is wild with
seeds.
I disorder the bed for spring,
grown tough, uprooting
weeds
grown deep under a thin sun.
I am out of time with the
seasons,
have forced a habit to dig,
continue to sift
where
purification is never perfection
under a cold sky.
Hard clouds repeat
and repeat,
cast by the wind across winter.
The acts of an old
star
are constantly with me,
shooting and dropping full
from the
Virgin's sheaf.
In my living
is their foundation.
I reach
rock
where the roots clutch dry,
a confusion of need
sunk sure in the
fault.
Time's web locked
their wrong growth.
Ripped from their
bed,
they maze in my hand
and unlearn the way of the ground.
The
stone looks pristine now.
I rise up from the split and cut of it
where
matter is form,
a custom held by impending earth.
It shadows and
tones
under a new plane of the sun,
a continuation of stardust
beyond
my ordinary gods.
Understanding
I find a page at the century's
end
where time climbed out of the cosmos
into the petals which fall on
my hand.
The wind ruffles my neat book
back to beginnings,
to God who
rocked in the bone.
Leaves flap across crystal,
ripple the facets of
famine and war,
flutter the Moon's play over a star
in the grip of the
law of substance and work:
there is a diffusion of lives
through the
passage of peace
where earth is efficient with lace
and the intricate
weave of the prayer shawl.
The heart of matter
holds to its
binding:
this woman who sits
in her cool home,
waiting and
waiting,
her spindle idle,
reading her book of hours,
while I
bring
bitter herbs
and gold.
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