Emerging

There is a world of unwashed dishes
and a well-used breakfast nook
holding onto its sunlight over morning tea.

In parallel are the half-forgotten fragments
now tended by the undusted self.

Engulf

In an embrace where you and I
shift endlessly in a timeless blur
I can no longer feel the difference between receiving and giving.

Nurturer

In the first round of hearing,
like the words caregiver, provider,
it rolls off the tongue with the usual blandness.

But in truths that come from dreams,
self-states that seem alien to one another
can finally conjoin as one.

Ambiguities

They meet in a tangle
in skeins that on a rare occasion
I could trace to a provenance
hidden but never gone
giving rise in a bed of uncertainty
to a new way of seeing.

Drinking Li Shan on an overcast morning

Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire