qarrtsiluni

by Jeffery Beam

(Lines extracted from four decades of poems,
placed inside homemade fortune cookies
for our friends on my husband’s and my own
50th birthday celebration, 2003)

Transfigured by spider webs & sunset.

* * *

Open the windows! Let the wrens in!

* * *

For all this to happen. Becoming landscape.

* * *

Into flowering expanse world without blooming end.

* * *

The white thoughts are tiny fish in your hands.

* * *

The end of the universe glistening, a silver spoon.

* * *

Through winter’s wet mess & slump…love always.

* * *

Light shining in darkness. Darkness which cannot hold.

* * *

Earth’s lovely darkness. Water’s clear rinse.

* * *

With closed eyes we feel the clouds.

* * *

The golden empire of the grass.

* * *

We are all waters, all unfoldment and melody.

* * *

Suddenly, you see everything behind you.

* * *

If you look carefully through the vines you will see it breathe.

* * *

One day a man came. I am not he. Observe.

* * *

Stone drums & their echoes.

* * *

To enter. The heart must shatter.

* * *

The song itself. The only audience, the song.

* * *

May abundant storms comfort you always.

* * *

A maple tree’s fired leaves.

* * *

The one prayer. Before & after. Precise as distance.

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Jeffery Beam’s many award-winning works include Gospel Earth, Visions of Dame Kind, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, Midwinter Fires, The Fountain, and a spoken word CD with multimedia, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001. The song cycle, Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby, continues to be performed on the international stage and can be heard on Albany Record’s New Growth. Forthcoming works are The Broken Flower (Skysill Press, England, Autumn 2012), and The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969–2012― an expanded version of The Beautiful Tendons (Spuyten Duyvil, 2013). Beam is poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review. Find links to all his projects at his website.