Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs to No One: Thirteen Poems by Richard Cronshey, Part Two

Lost in Probate
to my children

I leave you a mirror in an empty house.
Keep it near you.
I leave you my disappearance,
a place of pilgrimage to which you need not travel.
Be still and it will find you.
I leave you this body and conjuring solitude
sister of the widowed cities
sister of their black windows
an uncreated wilderness
where emptiness seduces emptiness,
a ring of quicksilver singing itself to sleep inside you.

And here is the sound of waves breaking far out at sea
and here is the mother of this motherless opacity.
Here are the black windows and the snow,
delicious emotions, rogue energies, nested silences;
abandoned casinos of delirium where you exist,
the ghost of a ghost for centuries listening
to the inconsolable pulsation behind the stars.

To The Root of Itself

Chapel of salt,
the night sky inside of you.
This is the blue
and motherless honey
that comes to you.
Now you are naked, like the days
undressed of their names.
Music swims through music and through you
And this is what you have now.
And this is how you live
with this transparency and this ripening.
At last, you are like the snow
that is only snow
and the snow whose nude and holy
iridescence
belongs to no one.

To Eternity's Sunrise

Indentured to what remains
after the smoke clears.
Now that I'm a ghost ship,
a mausoleum made of steam
sold to the rain on the temple stairs
and all the places I am at once in the rain.
Now that I'm a secret I keep, even from myself,
invisible, a whisper
hypnotized by the clockwork of sorrow
and sold to wrecked pianos in the rain,
and wild lavender with the weeds by the freeway.
Now that everything releases me,
brilliant poverty, blowing snow,
bird on fire in a cage of changing bones.
Indentured to buried iridescences.
Sold to every dying breath. Ah
the light blossoming out of the light.

Solstice Poem

Derelict melody
mansion of clarity
we are just lost in long grass
There is a horizon hidden inside my life
from behind which my life keeps streaming
a still light on the lee side of the ridge line
where the little life sings to the big life
like a child lost in long grass
The voice, the moving silver energy there
is the wind between black buildings,
a song circling back on itself;
grief, like an eclipse,
a river, or a mirror.

Here is a song for Mother Sorrow

Mother nothing, sorrow, shepherd me.
Let me be bread, medicine, energy, presence.
In this very body
I will bear our bleeding history
high above timberline, into the clear light.

This is the second of three parts of Richard Cronshey's thirteen poem collection, Whose Nude and Holy Irridescence Belongs to No One.