Beneath the Art

Days fade like old words.
			Their poetry
dissolves, dirges unto death, that borderless garnishor.
		
		*
		
			Literalism that excludes
chokes, narrows, sometimes masticates those lines saints,
in their hushed roots, draw from. Words can scarp granite,
carve exponential eucharists, and the divine
			cherish,
that odor which ennobles home, of silence.

		*

At night, in the intercourse of rain-chiseled trees,
there assumes a weightless mask, one that hides
a beatific face, the way resurrection leaves
its accents, its generations, in time-kenotic molds.
			Days may resume
once words for once are forgotten, reconnected to the silence.

		*

Out in the receding desert, grateful in the sand of memorial courage,
a stream hisses and gurgles undetected,
having escaped without travel guides to the usual questions, and,
reeking of tenderness
			tunnels a nothing but light,
tumbles ever so gently into a refined mist, into no-words.

Richard Alan Bunch