Category: Poetry

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

There is an understanding
when the voice of the
wind calls out to you
encountering the seat of
all your fears laid bare
by the longspur’s call, where
an embrace of great length,
like an unspeakable founding,
recalls the fog of rote collection
remembering all the things you
could have said
in a moment of bravura, like
swallowing the feeling you sense
when inhaling the cool fall
air of Autumn’s copper sky,
you release and let go the breath
of contiguity in a claret-rose
acceptance, a veneration
of delivery from Time’s healing hand.

 

© K. James Ribble

In the final moments of the day

I often find you waiting

in a manifest pause

Filled in warmth

of the sweetest summer

Where even now

in the cold, inimical

bindings of the dying day,

– still

the light in your eyes

-spent in time-

crosses the aeons, and

Tends to me in a missive

from the depths of your heart

with the concision of

my breath

And I hold you there –

the day in its finality

unfolding inside me

like a tutelary

lessons of love assigned

to learned halls of my life

caste against the

stark silhouette

of Autumn’s setting sun

 

 

© K. James Ribble

 

“

. . . and the mountains –

looking like horses

running side by side,

Lay the sky

in twilight blues,

their feelings long

above the clouds,

Stand chaste before

a horizon of silence

straddled gracious

along afternoons

in songs for sorrow

“

 

© K. James Ribble

No matter how hard

I try to forget

there,

in the future of my memories

it is always you that

appears in a forming,

-an effortlessness-

like desert rainfall,

like the way obsidian

catches light in the truculence

of its own darkness

you are placed in mind

like a sonder locked within

the story of your topaz eyes

and I find you there hovering

above the vast precarity of time –

within me

breaking, like

discovering fire

its origins at the root

of your heart

 

© K. James Ribble

 

#savageprompts