Sunday, January 01, 2006

Response: Where Once the Waters of Your Face

Joinings come to life to be undone.
Four polished tines reverse the point of gathering,
until an eachness hurts back to a solo line.
Time is flush with warm excuses for taxonomy
until we wend our way to tincture
that will transcend mere twin lives.

You made me whole before I learned to die.
The brilliance of your shadow warmed me
as no sun had done.
I still wander through a recollected heat
to keep my hands from chilling young.

At an early point of living one replaces thought with speech.
The listless pairing of named reach
recoils at the indelible demand field
that makes leaving life a gesture of infinity.

When we have loved we have assigned our souls divinity
that draws strength from future keep.
And if the comatose indulgence of our sunning
spawns our sleep, we will be tamed
by what is possibly equivalent
to every gleaming symptom of a sun too deep.

3 comments:

Michelle M. Buchanan said...

Great response. I'm in awe of the responses I'm reading tonight!

Sheila Murphy said...

Thank you very much, Michelle!

nancy said...

Hi Sheila,
I especially liked the second stanza and the phrase in the last one regarding our "comatose indulgence."

I need to stop reading these response poems. I'm intimidating myself and will never write one of my own :)

peace,
nancy.