Italics, Mine
in
The Silent Partner
by Greg Williamson
Story Line Press
Hello, up there. Thank God you happened by.
I'm touched. I've
been beneath the covers
For so long now the light is stark,
Where honestly I thought that I might lie
Alone forever in the dark,
And this is a
place for lovers.
By night I dreamed about the day you looked
And read my
thoughts and would
agree
To spend some time with me, and talk,
Since all the flights to Paris have been booked,
Perhaps you'd settle for a walk
To see what we shall
see.
You see that oak leaf there? I always sense
A kinship with the leaves.
To me
Each one portrays a little oak,
A fragile replica of an immense
Black oak, itself a lush, baroque,
Green forest of a
tree.
And at the shore let's walk the water line,
The ocean's
flexing, outermost
Advance, where the seawater laps
A sandy beach, plotting a jagged line
Whose every subdivision maps
A continental
coast.
Or looking backward toward the mountain range,
We see the ridge line's
collarbone,
Comprising summit and ravine,
And holding up a rock we find a strange,
Profound affinity between
The mountains and the
stone.
If I seem to be beginning to repeat
Myself, it is because the
world
Repeats itself in hidden laws
Whose figurings and fractals the exegete
Tries to articulate because
In the beginning was the
word.
As with the sense of humor in a laugh,
In every word a poem
survives,
Abundantly rich in ways and means
To build the sentence and the paragraph,
The rise and fall of little scenes,
The stories of our
lives.
The coming home of walks and talks and stories
Discloses what we came to
know,
Where the changing fortunes of a day
Become a lifetime's sadnesses and glories,
A stranger's face to which we say,
As to the mirror,
"Hello."
Hello. I hope you pardon my conceits,
But I have dreamed on my
nightstands
From all these little rooms to build
A home where we might lie between the sheets,
And I declare myself fulfilled
When I am in your
hands.
But this has all been talk, I know, and I
Can tell you are about to
turn
And go your way, while I repair
To darkness and a dateless night. Goodbye.
I will be saying a silent prayer
That one day you
return.
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