SOUL-JOURN
(to the muse that inspires the poet)

I rode my bicycle up The Old Road the other day
toward snowbound castles in the sky
and everywhere else in the universe we had been
and on through the canyons of the Soul
where I sought to repose among the remnants of your Spirit
and the many scattered traces of your Presence and Beauty
which flower abundantly along the riverbanks of my Mind:
Crystal, like streams, they flowed through my Being
and because of my pounding heart, cascaded like waterfalls
over the brink of my grasp, and I gasping and panting for more
was swept with the floating blossoms over the edge to Infinity
into Freefall through currents and forces where the only Reality
was the fragrance of your flowers pressed like tattoos inside my Senses

Emerging from the whirlpool as if from a Baptism,
a flood of emotion burst into Mystic Sweet Vision
like the primal flaring forth when all the stars were melted together:
There, in the Meadows of flowing Memory, where all past lives are liquid
and myriads of souls grope in blind and fathomless amnesia,
You and I recognized each other amidst the eclipse of vast and distant horizons
and danced to the rhythms of waves rolling from Eternity past to beyond Forever

So brief but deep a fleeting dream, like a wish in the Mind of God,
spills over the boundaries of all rational categories of Thought
like a kaleidoscopic tattoo of roses and orchids fragrantly and flagrantly
over-surging the synapse, the souvenir of a caress with which you once reached
into my shy and sheltered refuge and made me bold as the axis of the world,
made me flow into the seamless reality of Heaven and Dreams
from whence swirls these golden rings, symbols of all that has been and will be,
tokens of a Grace beyond words, beyond Space and Time, beyond Beyond...
It is like the whisper of "Adieu" in a windstorm of nostalgia for Paradise

--RLC