my serenity

i.

i became vexed
by your capture
and the menace of
your leveling domains

foaming torrents
coalesced
beneath your brow and
exuded an eliding patience

i in my swagger
pranced in a boast,
delighting with
the purples of hubris but -

soon weighted and cowed
by the sway of
your scowling lectures
and fisted ragings

you wore me to the
thinness of a sighing
wafer and in my arms you
unspooled chaos

dispersing from your
coil certain hymns
to a sympathetic
yet minor god

until in a softening
light i hardened into
a pearl of a man
called father

ii.

i make of this life
that no road really
ends and no road really
goes anywhere
but people end
and people go
that a prayer is a possibility
a dream a song
a dishonesty a knife
that life is the prolonging
of an affair with god
that you'll know the meaning
of my life at its
broad dusk
that you'll sit facing
it the way a
cat faces a field
of tall grasses
in late august
toward the anonymity
of all those blades
all those wisps of
loitering blades

iii.

daughter of my daughter
sighted softly

in a vague rain
emerging out of a lurk

a firedancer and
frolicking waif

scuffed toes pouring
light from a genie's cloak

no beholding pride
no forged facade
all wonderment
beneath a cascade
of fragrant life
and yearning flower

a certain belle
beneath a parasol

of an unsculpted mother's
enfolding serenity