Here, in the shapely sand, I sink my feet.
It is blue and cold, with a crunch of shells,
little, brittle bells that held the sea,
with the ages fused as one out-breath.
Let them crack! the sound that knows itself
contracts, and shells, worlds, minds go black.
They go: as when a thought cannot resolve itself
and then the baby cries to nurse. You nurse and
the thought returns, freshly cast, and as
her hunger ebbs, it swells into verse.
That curved power supports one work
and then another, the relay of a single

torch. It waxes and slows like a pendulum.
And here are the open ends, the rests,
that let the pivot happen, driven by itself.
My self, in every aspect, is its course...

© 2009 Alicia Vandevorst

Obdurate and mean, the way of hate
that hews and fells. O human hells of greed
that grate away the peace of windy breaths
and breed a host of early deaths and pests
af need unleashed by fear, O uneasy dears,
listen now, a sound so common and so near,
the trees, the trees will speak and sing.

Rumble darkly, breath of bark and humble
roots; you wake new shoots.
Earth, farraginous bag of birth,
lift and fall with breath, with all the shifts
of substance settling — the pain of parting's
heavy in your long skin. We bevy
into leaves and buds your sorrow: blinking
thousandfold– the blooms, the bold brows
of branches. We swallow every fallen sorrow
and break that knotted bulk with flossy quakes
of sunsap, bright as filaments, slightly spun
in spiral motion, the sweetest potion-fire,
and all succumb to its hum, enthralled.

Water with its pummel shifts the matter
scatters pieces, ceases after
ruptures, gashes, streams and flashes sculpture
worlds of masses, sashes whirled
of ceaseless washes; water tosses, teases,
fractures lifeless structures, rifles factions,
and fills the globes, the lobes of cells
responsive, slippery with whispers, constant
transfers; water traces, soft and dancelike,
life and ruptures rootless structures, slices
like a master, each conceit with its disaster.
What is forced will fall will fail.
The holy life is the only grail.

Breeze and toll upon the folds of fleeting
winds that bend and hurl, wend and spin
from pole to pole and hot to cold, and blow
inchoate, empty arms and empty moans:
no bone, no form, no cup, no cornerstone
but music, dry and curved as the leviathan flues
of wind so infinite and without hue—
the hush that crushes, writhing up through us
and flushes free with the roar of leaves, the rush—
our breath exchanged for yours, arranged from lip
to leaf, reused, we share a wreath of music
that brea thes the furls, the pulse, the whorls, the beats,
the central cord of life and lord of senses.

We crack, snap! Our backs wrap in black
and red as the robes of heat lobe and spread
and the incense of our sap uncovers fins
of flame that flick and prick and stick our veins
and suck with lips of smoke the quick of us
and rise, as incense we ascend the skies–
like birds of feathery black, withered, wordless,
spent upon the firmament.
Slower burn our leaves to auburn
as bent as britt l e snags, so riddled, rent
by rot they sag and fizzle as the lock
uncoils and all the sunlight walled in soil
alights to grace another face of life.

Ah, flight of angles, leaves entangled, bright!
The webs of leaves, the arcing heave of webs
of green; the change of edge from flame to seam,
from dark to bright with windy flight we harken
to the melody of day to night, of swell
to trough, of bloom to fertile tomb and off
anew to rouse the blood and dowse the root
of space and time, a pulse alive, a baseless
thriving consciousness that conjures lives
from bliss and binds each mind to miss
the truth of what it is. It cuts us loose

but never loses us. Our muse is ever
spooling forth our clay; the source we tool
with powers like her own that cycle round:
creation, sustenance, and thus decay,
concealment: the root of mental fear
and gracious revelation, blessed aim!
You, the art, the act, the artist, you,
the instrument of will, to mess the whole
into opposing themes. You pose as you
and play Macbeth, the man, and yet the daylight,
rose and leafy green, the sea and coastal
scrub tenacious, all the faces of
existence well up from you or else desist.

© 2007 Alicia Vandevorst

In the grasses, the day of clouds passes.
The tips of breezes on our lashes
flash warm then cool and fly
along our neck, catch the frayed tufts,
then disappear around
the cellophane of tiny wings

into the blue that does not change.

Yet from this hardy blue
the puckers of white lips of cloud
express.
Again the fantasy begins,
the torsos, seahorses, prows arrive.
Life is this
passage of phantom ships, and the music of the wind
across the ears,
the dissipation into rain, the fresh new grasses.

© 2008 Alicia Vandevorst

Faster and lighter
than ever she knew,
the wind whisked its tail
and a sunflower grew!

She saw it.
She blinked.
She saw it again.

She smiled her first smile
and did a quick spin.

She flew to the flower
with all of her haste.
She felt in her heart
she had no time to waste.

She settled down lightly
right on its face.

© 2008 Alicia Vandevorst