Timepiece

My tarot cards fan out

before me, the pattern of my life,

these cyclical roads

all mankind in all the

world knows.

The Ace of Wands,

an unknown Knight, lovers,

crossed by swords and

pentacles.

I am leaning toward

my future with little in

hand but these tools

and my spinning

shadow.

For now it is beside

me--opposing this star.

The cars slip by, this

morning migration

over the surface of the earth.

A dark bird spreads his wings

over the metallic surface of

a pond.

Beyond, one million faces

slip past in unison, there where

the sun has begun.

That will be my card

today,

I say to myself and to the

lean path of tracks beside.

That source of shadow and light

that now is everywhere--

across the sky, tracing crows feet

on our faces,

caressing the ironwork below, the

slick water's

surface.

When we open to it, it is everywhere.

That clock, that card, that light

in my line of sight;

The omnipresent

timepiece of all this.

We tick forward--cars, and birds.

You, Another Day, what do you

hold?

The day our train was delayed

I'd like not to dwell on the written word worthy

events of the day--

the body covered in the

yellow plastic sheet beside

the train tracks,

the policemen with their 

notebooks and measuring tape;

the wars, the news, the way

we are all heading, somehow.

Rather, I'll pause upon the way we 

read our papers in the train,

these sips of coffee and 

lines of sliding traffic,

the way the sun slants 

in, and the air is cold

on my morning face;

the looks across the aisle,

the smell of our human

breath, rising in one early 

cloud over the span of our creations;

The way we hum and teem across the 

surface of a fragile rock

amid the middle of a vast nothing.

That haunts me so

            much more.

This first one.

The world awakens, these silhouettes of

trees.

Planes hover on the road of

the sky.

I am fulfilling my routine

the way I know how;

dreams cling sticky inside me.

This system of living.