Poems Of Emediate Moment

Sunset At Hawk's Nest

Platinum pupil and golden orange iris,
   Pure rose and turquoise the lids of the eye,
Lashes of evergreen and the gliding hawk's wing,
   Dark umber brows of the rustling oak bough.

Plato's puppet dances without strings,
   Tracing the shade of the fair plane tree,
Yet under his gaze nothing is new
   But shadows cast from high platitudes.

The eye of Horus gleams in the hours of twilight,
   A thousand eyes dreaming now wake to the sight:
A crescent smile, mother-of-pearl and silvery bright,
   Beaming with warmth on the face of the night.

Jon Awbrey
Glen Arbor, Michigan
August 25, 1990

Chrysalis

Memories of being held
   In closely knit spheres
And guided beyond the orbits
   Of childhood fears
Entrusted with a word
   That rustles in a breath
And warrants respect for
   The not yet beautiful

In Honor of My Parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary
Jon Awbrey, Amherst, Massachusetts, March 21, 1996

A Well-Known Rock On Tour

Suppose you come to a rock on the moor:

That may or may not have fallen there
as a meteorite burrows out of the sky,
or lava drops cool in a vanished lake.

That may or may not have rolled there
on the impulse of a rough-hewn hermit,
or the reverence of a primitive tribe.

That may or may not have been crafted
as an architrave, a bourne, a caltrop,
a dolmen, an epistyle, a fenestration?

That is the sort of ambiguity that I have been wrestling with,
the type of uncertainty of type that arises in trying to read
the "Book Of Nature" (BON), the unsettling noise that will at
turns shock, surprise, and surround us as we strain to pursue
this "Dialogue Involving Nature" (DIN) as one of its partners.

This is not the brand of sort of type of ambiguity that will be
extinguished by our impoverished attempts to control the speech
of our neighbors, nor would it serve us well even if we succeed.

Jon Awbrey
October 16, 2000

*ships of yore

on the trailing edge of an icy winged age,
semele lies enleved in the foils of hades.
when shall we see her depart the departed?
when will i mark my recue from the shades?
not till signs of spring charge the skies,
not till summer gives voice to the air --
a dove outside my window this morning?
if only it were that kind of year!

jon awbrey, 11 march 2002

My tables,
My tables -- meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.

~~ Hamlet, 1.5.107-109

Meet it is -- or is it join? --
That error and information
Bear our cognate strife
With us in the middle,
As ambits torn from
A singular womb.

But leave the space
That promises peace,
With wile enough and
The wareness to boot:
'Twill amend thy selve.

Jon Awbrey, 18 Feb 2004

Coriolanus

Banished at birth,
The wings of your soul torn off,
You are but a block of wood
To be carved by the makers
  of chessmen and marionettes
To be placed on boards and stages
That cannot be won
  with the pieces that are left.

Jon Awbrey
Stratford, Ontario
July 25, 2006

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