Empty Envelope

Empty. Blessing or curse? Tabula rosa, I'm not thinking - am I? Candle flickers, rain bullets rebound from glass inevitability, cider sits half-empty, all empty, a night as silent as the moon hiding behind these clouds. In the rainy night: no clouds, no stars, no moon, no sky, just a blank slate heavens, unthinking, leaking, a perfect mirror for my mind.
I stood in an alley of trees, the smell of fall finally arrived. Fall sits, patiently awaiting the heavy rains, where the redolence is freed. Emptied, a heavy breeze carried the rain and a torrent of leaves, and I simply stood, catching the leaves as they traveled by, pelted with colors. Even a barrenness, an emptiness is beautiful sometimes: a ghastly beauty, a transparent, phantom elegance like dust and cobwebs in abandoned homes, like ancient, cracked mirrors, a winter wheat field,  shrouded in heavy mist, hands having given a gift, winter trees with fallen leaves, violins, wordless and minor in an eerie whisper, wisps of fragment dreams come morning, silence before a storm, the wordlessness of knowing, staring at the ceiling on long, quiet nights, mountain devotionals.
An emptiness of something makes room for a fullness of another.



may I be, awakened from my slumber
you slice, with gentle knife,
my blankets and my cover
whisking me from beneath
my veil of mystery
unwrap me in your soft
fingertips, smooth 
my wrinkled edges and smell
a delivered world
pen-kisses, thumbprints, a lick
of love, each dot, jot, tittle,
our hands held distantly
caress me, hold me in your eyes
closer, fondly, my heart as paper
in your tender hands


my heart is rent and sent as missive
mailed down rainy river
in return I found a pen
which doth my blood embitter
my ink-blood blue
pen-heart stained, too
please current soon deliver

Well, that was uglier than the first...
Listening to the rain: is there anything more peaceful?


Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?
~ Milton - Paradise Lost

What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
~ Milton - Paradise Lost