The Full Truth
A Poem
Memories of rain, several days ago now.
Shifting beams of light across a forest.
Not an ocean of turbulent sentences, just the silent band of sand on the shore.
I retreat to the morning hillside, sad from conflict.
I seek a definitive. Get a thrumbling grouse song instead.
The constancy of the hover fly keeps time at my knee.
Watch the nodding grass stalks, make the movement of surrender with them.
Juncos chase each other through the warming rocks.
Deer bound out of the shadows beneath the arbutus trees, arbutus blossoms falling like rain on that young one’s new antlers.
They bound across the slope, old oak wood and grass cracking under their hooves.
I lay back in the dry leaves and think of slippery tangents.
At the bottom of my grasping is a fading triangle, The Platonic Triad.
It makes a strange bed and I am restless on it.
Epictetus slouches his winter cloak off. He is going to meet Rumi in that field.
I too shrug a weight off. Feel a lightness moving through my trellis of bones.
When I sit up, Jane is sitting with me, her mouth crunching buttered toast.
“Still you trust me,” she says, winking as she chews.
No one gets the full truth.
Only vibrating beetles, filling the glade with their strange song.