with eyes cast down
by padma

please tell me the way I can be a friend
with eyes cast down, I stand before you
I bathe your feet in rose coloured water
and bring leaves and garments, swans and flighted birds.
let us sit now on rugs and woven fabrics
until they become like sand and stream

absolute this time, without substance, care, or love,
sleep now that I may rest,
sleep in clasped fingered silence
we talents of the air, soft and tongued
in this mist of times remembered,
present of times, remembered. 

Padma & Clogs at Tonic, New York City. November 2005. Photo: Brooklyn Vegan

I prefer a gentler we,
I prefer a quieter presence.
Some small transient gathering upon an evening wooden reach.
A moment where dwindling lives beneath a severe moon
Cast their ashes upon some New England mudded pond

The best memories are those that linger by choice
or by casual Autumnal imprint
Skeletal leaves, little Cara's hand, or the brush of the Conifer in my ears.
Not some jagged bloodied scar thrust deep into the soil,
And the leaves sharp shudder at our passing.


* A setting of this poem is found on Clogs' second album, Lullaby for Sue,
available at www.cdbaby.com

I love them best, my friends, as they sleep.
My small heart contracts a tenderness beside...

If sleep is like death
I love them to it.
come quiet and cease
as I bring the sheets to their skin.

It is a passive love, I know,
safe and abstract
and only barely human

but perhaps one evening
they will awake and
see me standing
gaze clear and my mind's hand on their brow

understand

I love them best, my friends.

Shoreline outside Mallacoota, VIC, Australia