Anonymous Monks and the Graveyard Silence

A few sentences too many, perhaps.

After midnight, the moonlight turns bedroom blinds blueish for a change.

And with the sun now strangled, there are only the odd juxtapositions to consider, like snow on the boardwalk or houseplants staring outside at dead relatives.

Answers once etched in fragile frost are covered in the graveyard silence of hibernation.

Yet every once in a while the Great Horned Owl gives testimony just before dawn in deference to the anonymous monk that used to slide scraps of wisdom under my door.

Who isn't here matters. And yet, who is here remains steadfast.

I stretch out forever gray – beyond graves, beyond horizon – as wounded winter squalls cry throughout the night.

Here and there, moments of light dab the granite sheath one cannot shed.

Still, the intimate intrusion of poetry and image.

Or cardinals nesting in the rhododendron.

And the constellations' unframed cartography watching over the pulsating escape of heat.

It is all okay.

It has always been okay.