Sonnettics

What aches to be released is filled with doubt,
constrained by love and faith, contained by time
which in its turn concedes a life without
such weights would be a life beyond sublime.
Take love, like some Gibraltared coast of hope,
unyielding in its ambiguity.
Take faith, like some eternal length of rope
tied off to some obscene eternity.
Now lift your love as high as you have strength
and toss it in the ocean’s shallow tide;
now follow faith along its tethered length
until you find the place where angels hide.
In time both love and faith will be released,
but doubt will be eternally increased.

If this, the road at dawn, becomes my choice
to sanctify my heart with one last glance
into the twilit memories: your voice,
that chair, a song, some final circumstance.
If this, the dusty red that fades to gray,
becomes the time I travel through my doubt
as faith becomes the night, I choose the day
to rest within uncertainty, without
the fear of loss.  This road is marked as well
as memories remembered from the past
when you and I communed but did not tell
ourselves that night and darkness wouldn’t last
If this is life, the spirit of the dawn
releases me and I will travel on.

Each wisp of life that rises with the day,
ethereal and metaphoric smoke
that haunts the morning air, the pall of gray-
not-black, that ghostly spirit we invoke
with every pulse and every breath we take,
each day of days we clarify at dawn
with dreams we chase in sleep and then forsake
to wisps of smokey life, still linger on.
That wisp of insight smoldering in ash
which sacrifices life, a brief decay,
exhales a breath of beauty, seeks to pass
its essence through the dawn into the day
while day inhales the beauty of the night
and wisps of beauty dissipate in light.