Author: Thespian Drummer

Blue stone of longing combs
tumescent ‘long the tree line
moist with last night’s rain –

valence of aspens cloak me
in a garland of memory, as
a crosswind of morning

skiff the clouds margin-white
in a silence of caution
-while I dine on moonlight-

ripe with the treasure of
your starshine, your bouquet
of lessons in arroyos, ascendant

in the branch of dry open oceans
forming like the agave morning
mist in your carob eyes

and I gaze the lip of time
at the feet of love’s nymph,
this vision known only to us

in the quiet, riparian tracery
of our souls’ carnal birthing . . .

© K. James Ribble

If I were to know
The whole of you

I’d clamor the night
Unceasing, the quick

Of day on its edge,
fast approaching –

There, in the veiled,
Conscious moments

Of our choices, a
Revelation of heart

Becomes our home –
And it is in this place

We merge, become
One in understanding,

Lost souls found
As daybreak sets the
Skies asunder

 
© K. James Ribble

Mountain, sky and
windsong converge now

categorically confined
no more; treewind and

birdsong fill me in
a deluge of daylight calm,

pressed into the palms of
earthcrease like a branch

of time on the fortune of
its camber as we become the

hagiography of these
mountains singing,

Glistening among the
gleam of their own silence

in this palace, this crown of
healing as the canyon,

breath of my lungs,
inhales the story of aspen,

their history laid bare
by the aurorae of my own
self-discovery

a never-ending repose aside
these quiet hills I walk with you

 
© K. James Ribble

From doorway’s time
we walked the
hills of mystery
adjacent yet elided &
placed in origin on a plate of
before-the-day-was-done
-never alone-
we stride with our delights
as if singing to the sun
on cloudless mesas
in long winters
of white where
there are no calm waters
(inasmuch as
we’d like to believe)
yet we surrender
ourselves against
the teal downpour
of evergreen in our own Light
reaching the dawn of dusk and shadow
to bask in the Flower Moon tonight.

 
© K. James Ribble

I’ve found the yarrow mountains

they sleep with me tonight

among the stars like gilded

diamonds, exhaled contemporaneous

in a sea of capstone blue –

I’ve been mentioned

among their peaks and rifts

the mountains have concealed

my name between their ever-ending

retreat into the canyons’ bosom

of time in elevations of grace

and the tectonics of heart where

I feel home tonight with you,

dreaming of just Being

without hesitation, efficacious in

these acts of life, upon this stage

written from the sweat of my ancestors

made current by the light of my descendants

enfolded now in this instance of

profound consciousness to a place

I’ve walked to for so long, as I

cross time blushed calcareous

on a new pathway, calm in heirloom pinks,

emergent to the love I seek to find you.

© K. James Ribble

Staring at the wall calendar
I see uncharted territory

my life in a vast overture
of unknowns like finding sea

glass in the frequency of hours
fading on the shores of lost time –

In the distance I see a
vision outlined in counted

numbers of chance and risk,
a viewing of the open plain

and the horizon cast in thunder,
a sweep of clouds pouring rain

on an endless plateau bearing
the view of uncertainty, emerging

from the cirrus that forms the
sum of my life – but in a way that

powers me forward no longer
counting for the gravity of fear

or aversion to risk – So my time
here becomes a founding, a patient

regard for sacred promises made
to myself long ago – as the calendar

keeps it’s infinite future I begin again
as witness to an understanding:

my time remains the art and practice
of Love – learning to love myself as I am

and loving you in the gift we call Life.

© K. James Ribble

A haste of sun-drenched shores
quiver from your infinite love,
fills the cumulus of time
In a stand still of air and light –
a motionary tribute to the sounds
of your heart, in subtle movements
of longing, quenched by your
Dreaming, forming the fragrance
of water, air and the rains of Spring
in a candor of our glistening romance
the incarnate reflection of memory
becomes the sunlit blue of our forever.

© K. James Ribble

Before I knew you, your
breath within my eyes

an inhale of your heart
that forms a façade of light

in words left unspoken
falling to us in generations

placed in edifice
of stone and stripe

the glare of western light,
as distraction in deflection

placed blithely at our feet
of these glass mountains

as reminiscence forming
our memory tipped in

the lace and veil of night,
from the very songs of you

your melody washed in the
morning light of Innocence

borne of yesterday’s youth
forged in the pain of living

matured by the grief of
understanding

now revealed in a longing,
these lost years of I

vaporous in the corridors
of my time without me,

jeremiad as the
cedars of Huron where

our ancient mythos
enshrines us dreaming,
long before our time.

© K. James Ribble

The languor of sunrise
strikes me found
calling to lost segments
of a dream diminished
now discursive as
the platinum-grey of memory
becomes the afterwards, garrulous
in the current, fluid
waters of life –

a taciturn instance this
          flow of my heart
now swells with the
         summer’s silken winds

cantilevered & married
in a tempest of thought
bearing precious thunder
rolling like a
godhead of my days
a variant ilk
scorched in love
(so much love)

that I dream awake,
in the flowering of my
own life’s loving,
the crimson blues
aloft a star-filled sky
hung as light-trains
scattered
in a rear view mirror
of every decade
to every Now.

 
© K. James Ribble

Your hands, your light,

the sustenance of
my heart
as me giving way

Arriving as vapor
in visceral transparency

placing me
in a stave
of our cadence

a bold-flow choice
viewed behind

patterns of
hydrangea blues,

like a melody motioning me
in a cantabile of chord

and movement,
keys the pitch

smooth as acres of eternity,
riding damask waves of

trusting decisions
in a knowing
in a razing of

all pedantry and ego
with sweet dollops of lucidity –

like remembering the
smells of August in a
New York City of 1988.

© K. James Ribble