All The Trembling Shadows

And all the trembling shadows, the waylaid verses, how darkening they become me now as I lean over this page, the shadows before me and beneath me and all around, the shadow I wear like a shroud and then off to the side like some throw rug cast from dark heaven, trembling next to the light and framing it somehow, giving it depth and color and ever after, giving it moon beam, marking the edge of ever brighter, ever more becoming in the roundness of a spoon, the outline of every verb and noun which is also shadow, word-shadow and hush-shadow, all the delicate darknesses where every shadow grows, all the trembling shadows who run after horses and deer vaulting with them into athletic heaven, brief soaring of bone and sinew and long glossy fur, all the trembling shadows one brother of darkening prayer and one sister of inmost moan whose privacy is assured forever as the year moves slowly into winter and the hushed silence of snow where breath is visible again and always rising into manifest miracle of all-embracing sky, all the trembling shadows as sometimes darkness is a comfort and a secret wound and a way to come closer to God through these mortal fingers writing these words and fumbling with shoe laces, letters on a keyboard feeling for the right and feeling key, c-minor, e-major, electric slide and def-con 4 and the tender caress of anyone’s jaw and the partially torn dress of eternity, collecting branches in the yard after a storm so shadow-branch, shadow-bending in ink mercy on the grass and many months hence picking wild asparagus with a few clouds overhead brighter then darker then brighter again, oh, all the trembling shadows like these words, teaching us how to pause, how to mercy pray get on our knees which are bent shadows of body, to rock back and forth and sway as human church, to consider how our very breath is a living tree and human stem trembling in the breeze grateful to be touched like this, to love what passes over our bodies and bathes us with the bright sweeping air of this ever changing earth.