If You Love Him

If You Love Him

 

A song for decades

I don’t know its story

It’s sung in its own shape,

A ladder

 

Every verse goes higher (, higher)

The notes rise,

And we climb carefully

 

When we are there,

What then

We have arrived, the final rung

Our last accomplishment

Unless, like angels, we have

Assignments back

Below

Though I don’t know how that delegating

Be transpiring

 

But

We are climbing

We are climbing

We are called soldiers

The kind that fight in a spiritual battle

 

The mortal consequences

Well, there might be some

But it’s the soul

That is the heart, the aim

Our campaign

 

Victory for heaven

And new Earth

 

Sing with me

No amen until it’s done

 

C L Couch

 

 

File:The ladder of life is full of splinters.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

 

Lighter

Lighter

 

I was watching a war movie

It’s Memorial Day, and so there are

Lots of war movies on

And two military guys are lighting

Cigarettes

With a metal lighter, and

I remembered

 

I’ve never smoked a cigarette

And never wanted to

The smell is enough to stop me

But I always liked the smell of

The lighter

Steel and lighter-gasoline and oil

And whatever

As I watched, the lighter clicked

The smell came back to me

It’s childhood, and someone must

Have had one of those lighters

Not my father who smoked a pipe as

Pipe lighters are different

And he was just as likely to use matches

Someone, though, because today

I know that smell

 

I should try the lighter again

After all, a fine Pennsylvania product

The Zippo lighter

Will it smell of oil and substance,

Will it smell of memory?

 

I’m not sure what I’d so with such

Equipment

I guess carrying around a source of

Fire

Might be a good thing

A needful thing

As prudent as memory

Sometimes

 

C L Couch

 

 

 

Cool Zippo Lighter Wallpapers Many HD Wallpaper

 

 

Air and Space Museum

Air and Space Museum

 

Light and space

It’s physics,

And it’s Arabic

It’s need

A vision helping me get by

In a crowded world

That doesn’t breathe enough

Plants to air

Us to carbon dioxide

Back to plants

It goes ‘round, and when

Done right, it’s good

 

I want to be at the Alhambra

Or the Alcázar

Without the Christian overparts

Not to abandon faith but

To find it in the beauty

Of healthy building

 

I don’t know how to reconcile

The tyranny that built it

 

Somehow-dimensions cast to God’s own

As if the architect had been

In Eden when

First designed

All was lush

With light and air

Imagine a veil

Blown under the arch

Of all creation, which was

The promise of

 

How close we might get

Toward living with life’s own

The movement

Without angels yet

To keep us out

 

All is green behind

After we rest, breathed upon by God

We get to go inside

 

C L Couch

 

 

File:Alcázar de Segovia-9.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

 

Universes

Universes

 

To understate,

The universe is huge

And there might be many of it

All around and through

Makes one wonder how matter can

Be dark as in absent

Where’s the room

 

But I guess dark matter is a substance

Of its own

Like tiny black holes that might be

All around as well (and through)

If so, they must be pulling matter that we know

 

We lose the universe we know,

And does it go to feed another

Body on another plain

 

And so they have such openings there

As to release their atoms

Skittering across astral dimensions

That might sometime land here

 

Is it all one give-and-take

And is there balance

Or is chaos confirmed

As part of the regularity, the normalcy

The paradox in making

In keeping everything together

While it all moves

 

It’s not covalence

It’s a dance

We all are partners

Everyone has a turn

Each one owns steps

And talent is in measure

And it’s all approved

 

Do you see

Whoever you are

However you’re arranged

And I can’t speak to aberrance

But someone can who calls

The dance

Does not control the steps

But gave us the hall

And bids us, as an invitation, to take part

In something wonderful

 

C L Couch

 

 

Honky Tonk Train Blues | recording by Lewis | Britannica.com

 

Sedimentary Thinking

Sedimentary Thinking

 

It is a kind of blue and kind of grey

A cloudy day

I have layers, too

The trash that needs to go out

Larger things I do not need

And someone else must take them

Then there are things I never went through after

I brought my office home

They need places and a purpose

Somewhere, if not here

Then there are things I must reach through

The others to use now

The daytime things, the usual things

Coffee cups and dishes

Some desk space

Lamplight without so many shadows from

All the extra piles

I’m used to that, living among piles

Stacks of things to use, though

It’s my file system, too

My own patriotism

I have the right to stack

If you come to call, I’d like you to take something

Away with you

Please and thank you

I will not track

Do what you like

With what you have that,

Detritus or treasure,

Used to be mine

 

C L Couch

 

 

Colorful layers of sedimentary rock in Makhtesh Ramon, Israel.

Rhododendrites

 

Transcontinental Railroad

Transcontinental Railroad

 

In a slow place, I wonder

 

I know, places are for walking

Wonder with an a, to wander, then

But the movement on the inside is

What seems to matter

The value in introspection, of hiking the

Mind on another side

 

Thoreauvian travel, as it were

I was told he walked to Concord often

From the pond, a matter of some

Miles

Not many

And this defined great travel to Thoreau

Because of how he trod

Through the

 

Interior

Pathways and passageways

That were of value to him

Through illumination

 

Pegging a lantern of discovery from

One part of a dark way (now lit)

Into the next

 

It’s like an empty railway

The bed and ballast, maybe ties

And

Will a set of rails

Then a train course over

Or course through

A plain, a valley, and

A tunnel

 

Maybe new passageways

Unvehicled

Lacking mechanism

Discipline

No timetable needed

Or requested

 

Ambling through the corridors instead

And hollows about discovery

‘Til a slide or lack of entryway

Makes us

Go ‘round another

Corner, a bend

 

Take an unmeasured angle or,

Who knows,

Set up another platform

 

We go

Out of order,

Unprepared

Or maybe all aligned

 

To find

Anew

The course

Or, yes, the track

Of inner life

 

Less taken, maybe

Maybe difficult but

Brave to try

 

Take it

Like the flyer (Dixie or

Overland) upon the rails

 

You

Be the kind

That must stop to rest,

Out of respect

For human crossings,

Not to freeze up at

The borders

 

‘Cause

Neither they nor you

Have to

 

C L Couch

 

 

Arne Hückelheim

Railway tracks in the sunset. Taken at Frankfurt Central Station.

 

Summering

Summering

 

It used to be a teacher’s

Time for other work

Some went to school, some painted

Houses, some worked in greenhouse

Stores

Some never stopped with learners

In the classroom

Some took the learning outside

 

Now with age and the inexorable slowing

Down,

New options must emerge

I sit and write and share

A little of what emerges from the work,

A pinhole in a tube

 

Is this real, too

Only creation without a

Contract?

 

Or if I should sit still for the season,

Would that count as substance

Let alone abundance in

The universe

Or would it be

Simply in between the numbers

On the line

If

 

The calculations that matter

Only come in the fall

 

C L Couch

 

 

https://pixabay.com/en/chalk-blackboard-chalks-color-paint-672187/

 

 

Why Try at All

Why Try at All

 

Is it crap,

I wonder

 

But I don’t think so

There’s an earnest heart somewhere

That asks an

Honest question of creation

What might we do for you?

 

How might we fix

Then use you better

How might we love

All your demands

The needs and cycles you must have

To realize

Before we take our measure

 

In fact, maybe we could work together

For a change

If you might still be for us

And open to alliance

Maybe we could be neater

Kinder

Practical in the way of

Mutual prosperity

 

To ensure today

And a justified way into tomorrow

Reckoning the stars will

Want negotiation, too

When we go to visit and

To stay

 

C L Couch

 

 

http://mariafresa.net/single/2342192.html

 

The Autumn People

The Autumn People

(title and litany inspired by R. Bradbury)

 

World of stone

Ancient, difficult wood and sometimes glass

Though passageways for

Light and air are

Mostly shuttered nowadays

 

It is an age beyond the last

Ancient, classic, invasion, modern, after-modern

Mires of agenda

That refused to die

So that the next time had no name

No one after, either, to name in distant reason

This last time

 

In anarchy, all freedom’s lost

No one in safety alone

In groups of tribal bands

Joined for number

 

There is no core

Nothing on which to ride an atom or to

Split its parts

 

We came together as we could

Or nothing

 

Nothing, nothing, nothing

To have into grey days

 

Summer without

Winter long past to be accounted

No one remembers spring

 

This is what we are

This is what we left one season

Now only one time of year

 

Forever fallen

Ever falling

 

Who are we?

Once we were leaves

Attached, belonging to the binding of

The book of life

 

Where did we live?

In colors, living textures

On a primal world

 

What is left now?

Ghosts of patterns

What might have been

 

Why do we live?

It’s all that’s left

The spine is broken

 

We exist, barely assembled

What is left of

Dark matter, once

All light has been erased

 

The litany has ended

We return below ground

To sleep uneven with rude weapons

Close to our faces

 

Failing eyesight

Hands no longer trustworthy

In holding what is left

Into the evening of the Earth

 

C L Couch

 

 

https://schietree.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/imagefeeling/