The golden grass shines as if from the inside.
The leaves dance to life. A strange woman greets me
With “back again?” at the familiar place
I’d never seen. The dreamcatcher medicine
Hangs in the courtyard with sentient carvings
And cushions of stone. The stucco walls glow
As if all things will dissolve soon into light.
Every embodied ghost who floats through
Carries with her so many more she might just as well
Be invisible, the turnings of her mind so
Inaccessible, the material just a shell
Like the postcard barber pole, the sourball emporium.
For behind the colonnades, in a greater world
Hierarchies sit by marble pools, and slowly turn
Their boughs of eucalyptus. The sunlight honors
The empty streets, makes the closed Playhouse marquee
seem
A gateway to another realm, turns the liquor store
Into a painting. It’s like the luminaries
Have convened inside this silence and stillness,
Which throbs with a promise that the infinite virtue
Of patience will resolve like a mighty chord.
