immanence

wow

In the night, I went out searching It took me three years and a girl We was blinded by the stars that hit Our gentle little world The rocks turned into water And what was clear become a blur We was good, but the bad got worse The sinking ship began to burn So I shook across her mountain face 'Cause I'm a liquorlip loaded gun Look and talk through eyes that sting And then a stranger to me sung

I am the one standing in the rain, Invisible beside you. I am the one in the dirt which now is turning to mud around my feet. I am the one weighed down by each of our partings and the one lifted up by each meeting, reachings that could not be completed, that nevertheless held up the force of their hunger. And, yes, you were always a seeking, an unknown, a mystery to me. And not less than I to myself- beginner that I have become all over again on the paths and mountain slopes of this journey. I watch my mind watch each moment in its passage, it fades into, blends, with what came before. Nothing remains as it was in the mind after the path has been seen and walked upon there is always the next thing arriving as if from behind, catching up with one's sight, surrounding. And all the while the snows of memory are falling, covering the roads of the present. The past overflows this moment without meaning to, just as your face is more real in my remembering than this present one sitting next to me, just as each of us hurt the other without intending it. And after a time we thought experience might bring us to calm, and we see we are standing in the river of passing, each waiting for the warmth of the other's face, unable to understand why they are not with us, startled by their absence, traveler and traveler distant as two dots unconnected in a yellow field. William Kistler

“We Were Running” in A Small Clearing (Aureole Press, 2016)