Late at night upstairs
in the Western hemisphere
Anna's sleeping beside me,
the balcony door a crack open
to let the cool August air into the bedroom,
with an almost imperceptible nuance
of the wind soughing in the tall pines

I've just read Stephen Truelove's
Paean for Tsoai-talee

The contoured silence
of his words
and the calm breath
of the sleeping wise woman
next to me
fill my moment
with recollections of chords
out of La Monte Young's
Well-Tuned Piano

and in a moment in Cosmos
in no need
of a cruel and jealous Yahwe,
dreamed up by ancient Middle East men
hungry for power,
I perceive a soft smile,
the width of the Andromeda Galaxy
and a gesture of care and compassion
through these fragile times,
my body a starship moored to the Earth,
and I drift into sleep
in the Great Ship of Dreams
that I sail with Anna

---

...and in the startling presence
of great distances
and the rumbling of the rolling stones
of how, when and where,
the shining hot rod of consciousness
and self-awareness
rises through my sentience
in the glaring immediacy of being,
and everything slips across the threshold,
into a new day,
revealing eternity out of a new angle,
Anna already out with the horses

The ventilation of the house
on it's hill of moraine
deep in this northern countryside,
and the wind soughing in the pines,
communicate with each other
as does the wild moose
with the domesticated horses
across the electric fences in the night

I gather the pages
of Stephen Truelove's Paean for Tsoai-talee
left spread-out across the bed,
for a slow, attentive morning journey
of my senses,
and sense his open mind
communicating with mine
on a backdrop of vastness
and immediacy,
as I smile back at existence,
take a deep breath,
and rest for a while before breakfast
in the caress of gravity

In the nudity of my conscience
I lay bare all my indignities, misdeeds
and raging cruelties of younger years,
without trying to hide them
from myself,
as the cat jumps up onto the bed
and inches up close
under my face
with his tender, unconditional love,
with all the distances surrounding the closeness
of the moment

Atonement is a flash of morning light
through the pines,
everything stripped bare
under the loud purring
of a red-furred cat,
merging with your life
out of a series of unlikely causations