The intimate common

Hello my friends. I bring you this month another poem, which I wrote as a kind of inversion of the weariness we are collectively feeling right now. The weariness stems, it seems, from imagining ourselves situated deep within this mess, tiny and wretched amid the tangle. What if instead we situate the mess within ourselves? As an intricate puzzle at the center of that familiar chamber we each visit time and again, one after another, but always alone? The poem is called Sea that has become known.

On the plateau at dusk,
up over the shoulder toward that fireline
guttering orange, orange lifts
to green to still-blue.

Over the shoulder
see rise the golden disc,
a secret god rising from the mineral body,
whose gaze familiar but
startling in its candor —
an intimate image
risen there
to the sky.

Sky blue to obsidian, and below
a gleaming lake among the hills;
still water lit silver against
black earth.

Moon disc, that intimate common
come down as round lake to drift,
such that to its shore we might descend,
and lift some water
in cupped hands:
mare cognitum.