Category: Poetry

Red horticulture of Light
You bestow a betrayal of
Softness, an assimilation of
Daybreak into cloven darkness

Beseeched before this dawn
I run unencumbered by your
Fragrance of thyme as timelessness
Engulfs the very footprint

Of sunlight upon your face, escaping

Our horse crosses the rhythm
Of her gait revealing a fire of plight
Of lonely losses bemoaning our reach,
A cast of azalea reds as pale duplicant

So soft ascension to this lofty path
Begins and ends with us, our
Matte of cause released by Summer’s edge –
This moss covered forest consumes our way

 
© K. James Ribble

In the wings I keep see(k)ing a
Connection to the young man I
Once was [decades ago] his charm-
Tethered smile, a lineage to the sun

A sardonic mischievousness
Staged in life_nonplussed by
Rapid-fire riffs of Bonham
Or Streep-delivered dialogue –

Quipped by the Reflection of time he
Crosses me downstage to an under-
Standing that I am here because of him
His overage of heart nesting within like a

Sage to millennial reverie unrelenting,
Character of soul lost to a whim
Struck with vision his Thought and mine
Blur-to-clear from the proscenium, now
Catches the Train Of ____, exit stage oblivion.

© K. James Ribble

I look eastward
Towards the face of
This mountain I see
I am drifting
Now in a silence, in
The harshness of
Winter’s hand as
Stillness everywhere
Along the cloak of
Snowfall suits a slow
Impassioned warmth
Falling upon this land
As if it were you – let me
Encompass all of you
And I will become finite
To your infinite sunlight
As the hills praying
In transformation, as
A lullaby unmoored
From within, sits beside you.

© K. James Ribble

Reminiscent of patriarchy
The echelons of our singing
Are desolate unto themselves, like
Reluctance in the stare of the eagle

Intermittent flame of incessant desire
I become casing of petulant failure, a
Madman mending a sad moon in spite
Of a coldness unlike today’s rain

Open to the statement of the dreams
Comes to a relative point in time
Where faith becomes reason unto its
Own revelations – divine relevance.

This, as I Become, afraid only
Today as if satellites coalesce,
Clandestine moons peak-flow
Their dalliances like peach sentinels

An escape to every pause I set a risk
To be even one-tenth vulnerable –
As if Ocean aire elevates us all, like
Singing a sole vision in grains of light

We only get this one chance
Our ghosts before us lost to lore.

© K. James Ribble

As I embrace you, the
Slow Light of Fades

Spills a Jasmine silk of air,
Embraces night into wisps of

Knowing that I must leave you now
Here in the amphitheater of this time

This catacomb of our restlessness,
Astronomy of our hearts a map

To collisions of us the way stars
Belie the shadow of exile

Of illumination, a library
Of topology our loving cannot follow

This shortness of time becomes
Brackish as water beneath us, my gaze

A window to the candles’ whisper, their
Shadows dancing like leaves

In the flutter of night the way
My sorrow casts its imprint of your face

Upon me – the same light of softness for
Which I cannot be without

And yet your kiss shapes all of me
Together as we rise and dress

The night foregoing our hearts torment
Captive to the daybreak of dawn.

© K. James Ribble

In Hue and Value
The specter of
My voice camps
At pitch to resolve
The surrounds of us
//
A Sun-Dial day
Of Vineyards
Languishing
The hindsight of
Morass in thalo blue
//
As Fire begets regret
A castle of religion
Could not contain me
Once enamored am
I always revealed in
//
Gold Lake of Mirrors
Asleep in the lap of
June – my birth in a
Zephyr of warmth
Now(here) we sighed
//
Of this occurrence
This charity entrusted
To our budding mend like
Salix by our lake I
Weep in Familiar wind
//
Beckoning to me to you
Kept shorn of Luxury
All those memories,
Childhood moments
To all of us, once
//
As passages across
All time each journey
Like children, like
Natives on the road
Of our Return to a
//
Senescent scent of
Sweet susurrus past
On, past all of us:
No one shall be taken
No one shall be lost.

© K. James Ribble

I was dreaming about you the other day …
Caught glimpses of you so vivid
I could touch your face,
Feel your smile emboldened to
A blaze of light, glazing ruminations –

Blinding image washes me again
A baptism in the memoirs of you
Unveiling the never-ending notion
That I am –have always been—
For you, and you for me as

Aquatic rush in thought-rhythm
Polishes all recollections become
The heirloom jewels of inoculate
Protecting me with your carnelian heart,
Your laughter like the infinite summer sun

My waking hours merge now with quite slumber
Acquiesce of sleep lulls me to note that
It’s always you along my harbor of dreams
Your signal light on the pale of every path I walk on
Every journey, every ascent I embark unknown

© K. James Ribble

Count the days
In fire time like
Airborne tourbillion
Of sanguine elevation –
All escapements in
Tunisian Blue as
Sea birds dawn
The mountainside, a
Mediterranean motion
Our chronos of chaos
This love, this
Ocean’s pulse of ours

© K. James Ribble

Before I was young
I kept having this vision
An entropic precognition
Fading beyond unknown
Familiarity, recurring each
Time I thought of you . . .

There, I am floating
Above a vast golden desert
Embraced by fuchsia’s light
Across rain-yellow sloughs
And tangerine buttes
Reflecting an expectant sun

Upon these Hesperian mountains,
Like a coruscate of coalescing dreams;
There below me is a road, a
Single road with a single white
Carriage sloping through this
Luring vision-scape, a final

Framing so complete, I can
Smell the desert air and
Feel the sun’s warmth
Stroking my skin
Ever so lightly; at which
Point I always wake to now

Where I see you next to me
A treasured reminder that
My travel all these years,
Through all these Visions
Have brought me to you,
And these mountainous treks

Of my Life I keep crossing,
The mountains of my self
Find that you’ve always
Been within me, just above
The horizon of these visions,
An amaranth of love’s sweet arrival.

© K. James Ribble