The tai chi windchime’s melody plays without ceasing. Spindly, naked branches atop towering locus trees sway. Grasshoppers chirp in a choral counterpoint to the bass drone of the Friday evening rush-hour. Shrivelled, potted daffidils bathe in the late afternoon sun. A hawk soars in a tight circle high above the tallest Locus. The warmest day of spring emerges from the routine cold of winter’s corpse.

second wind chime

Mira’s rest on the chaise

after gardening

It is like that, this art of poetry: The clarity of sunlight wavering across a rippling pond; The rhythmic hum of wheels spun upsidedown; The swallowing darkness brought to heel by a bonfire. The witnessed moments of the unseeable Way, forged, in the complementary fires of imagination and consciousness, into that all-too-human construct–language.

Words, clay vessals so hole-ridden that the precious water they hold spills down on the parched earth. Somehow, they hold enough for another to drink deep and be satisfied.

trembling branches

so still the forsythias

in the sun

Spring that emerges out of Winter. Poetry emerges out of reflection on the sheer experience of Mystery. Craft in language the inexpressible, in such beauty that it breaks hearts: This is incarnation of the way of poetry.

This is the ultimate Ars Poetica.

Mountain silhouette

the ephemeral song

of the wind

for dVerse Poets MTB–Ars Poetica, Paul hosting

#GloPoWriMo2018 / #NaPoWriMo2018 13/30