A Candle in the Window

Where your carnival parked last night,

its ferris wheel arched against the stars,

this morning there is nothing:

no trails the caravan cut, no scuffed

grass, no imprint in the sand where

the hawker's booths and the balloon trucks

and the cotton candy vendors rested,

not even emptiness which is a kind of something,

but a deeper sense of vanishing.

We exist here, a village of sorts, in

a liminality between real and imagined.

Music lives in that threshold as do poems,

philosophies and memories, as does love.

Perhaps all friendships are this way.

We straggle here, magicians one and all,

drawn by the sound and the light, the reflection

on this virtual sky of our own looking glass,

with the click of the mouse we say

"I am, here, this is me" and if we choose,

magicians that we are, we say

"Presto, I am gone."

I don't give a fritter about saving the world,

integral spirituality or conscious capitalism.

"If I had a long enough lever and a firm

place to stand I could move the moon"

No such lever exists. There is no such

firm place to stand.

I came because I was lonely. Because I know

loneliness as an ice cube in the veins,

loneliness as a thorn under the fingernail,

loneliness as a tree, on whose broad limbs

I've climbed to watch Jesus pass among

the crowds. Because I know the shades

of loneliness and have carved my initials

in it's trunk.

You came as a gypsy, with caravans

of thought, with embroidered blankets,

jewels formed of colored seeds,

a traveler's dusty feet, a kiosk of

feathered dreamcatchers with witch ball

beads dangling from rawhide strands.

It occurs to me that perhaps you were

lonely too. The Rose of Sharon forms

three blossoms: one white, one coral,

one white with a claret throat. Today

I plucked a blossom of that third color

and set it adrift among the minnows

in the clear spring that meanders

from here to there.

Donny Davis, August 2007