Month: January 2019

I speak in frozen language
borne of a forlorn calling
to this deficit of options

like the night’s shade caste to
an enemy of every doubt,
lingering on a path of my own

questioning, have I lost my way?
have the snows of these desert
reaches, clutched in a caliper

of time, rendered me soft
above the sun’s golden grasp?
now superimposed in the memory

of your smile, I find the earth-brown
golds of your eyes lose me in that
time again with you – in that time

whose temperament belies
the Passage of midnight
where I remain
lost within you

 
 
 

© K. James Ribble

There is an edge of the sky
scored with the colors
of you my friend, my
lover, my igneous flame, you
spar with the winds of a
liquid desire, and in my life,
you love beyond poignancy,
beyond this nostalgia,
unraveling in a totem of gifts,
becoming sentient in the
key of Light, as I learn
the rites of wonder in a land
of Self, a mountain of my
own rising, showing me
that with my own actions,
always like you, I am the dawn
 
 
 

© K. James Ribble

We are so bereft of time
lost among the stars, each his
own, in manifest | buoyancy as
light balanced in the night’s last
dance of luminescence, a wit to
curation of constriction, yet
our camp, dark with the
shadow of night, is a fleeting
Image of time standing still,
as you come to me now,
release me into the vapor
of Time set to the blue
scale of winter, eager for
the longing we’ve known all
along; your whispers, like the
mountain aspens, sing to me
as a voice shuddered in truths,
in sweet aging of desert sage,
brisk as the bright I see
reflected in your southern eyes.
 
 
 
© K. James Ribble

A currency of light washes like satin
against a silver mist in a slight of time,
delicate as the moon is long in emotion –

I become this lunar salience and reflect
the silklong of whitesong, like a fallen timber
in Elements of my life, like a tandem star

within myself, I am mirror-against-mirror,
a cameo whose admonition of unresolved
feelings melt into the constellation of my birth,

creased like a truth unknown until that very
moment of awareness, a prefix to inner
knowledge as an understanding – even

before conscience was a thought, so I grip
the talons clean of my birthright and assail
the night in a solemn phrase of ascension,

an abhorrence of elevation, the twilight
of Self in emergence, and carry the gilded spark,
like I was handed the Olympian sun in winter.
 
 
 

© K. James Ribble

Nothing more churlish, all
Confrontations in adagio,
mystical methods
of Time’s opera –
Of keynotes in blues and greens
glissando’s long enough
to sign in the partisan
second of gossamer pines –
so kiss me now, it’s not too late
bring me to the threshold,
the portmanteau of gold in its
doorway awaiting expectant
moments of Life
 
 
  
© K. James Ribble

Just a look across the room is all
it took for me to angle weightless
towards your pull’s direction, aligned
cardinal East along your cherry-brown
eyes, for the night’s blanket of stars
meshed with the waves of your
hair when I knocked on the door
opening; that look in your eyes –
like the way the afternoon’s sun shone
lost against an abstruse angle of pure
declination, revealing imperiled golds
above the lost pinks of your lips, those
agents of Ache within a cloak of dawn,
you became the unforbidden fruit of a desire
I never knew I had until the first kiss, like
Endlessness had gathered in the small of our hands

 
 
 

© K. James Ribble

I never wrote a single line
about you when we were
together, lost in each other

in those weeks and months
when there was Time –
the air took on a different

flavor, each moment choosing
it’s guardians as cherubs in dusty
homage to the City’s spring –

while the war we watched on TV
became an afterthought, a glance
toward our own mortality,

our lives becoming lost in car
exhaust & vendor foods, and
a thousand moms of laundry

yet I reached for you and touched
you, touched gracious clouds
through the blue silk of sky-smell

where the komorebi illumes the
cottonwoods of a brittle moon that
we feast on, like Chacoans, we journeyed

into the mountains of a vanished
river wine, traversed to lands of a love
set vertiginous and utterly unknown

 
 
 

© K. James Ribble

Unraveled in a fall

For all the angst, anguish

and anxious root

of every thread

of self-doubt I ever had,

the nebulous remonstrance

of an unsure footing in my life

finds that time has deceived me –

inveigled by its measure of matters

like ribbons of a river

succeeding all others

as pathways to an ocean,

I am laden with the obligation of

sun and the Canons of Light.

 
 
 

© K. James Ribble