mike hiler poetry

  A Day In The Life  /6.   When the eastern star rises   into the eastern sky   and those colors which ring the world   at daybreak travel on by,   from there to here before going on,   After the cock crows, after the wind     turns again the willows and the     one or two unknown creatures murmur the events of night   Followed by the first cautious   streaks of light. The long shadows   in the tall grass break their   favorite smell by this verdure and turning once through the heavens   gaze square-eyed into the blue.   There is now a single spot before     which all else heats past noon,     a darkened stone with no shadow And only for as long as the   afternoon grows that the body   of a million evenings will fall from   the sky and not return.   It departs more quietly than it   came, on paths of stone   and grass, in a basket   of clay and sand.   But now the world itself fades and     these streaks are known by night.   And night? Night has its own mysteries.    6.

  Clear and Subtle Mind                                                     Photo by Jo N. Miles Clear And Subtle Mind  /5.   There is one fact on which the Universe turns, unspeakable, unspoken, known through metaphor or the senses of rhyme and rhythm.   One view of that symmetry deals with the varieties of procreation in the hollows of life's landscape or the dark brooding Olga as she slides toward the sea.  Another possibility, (and only a possibility in passing) is the short and quaintly equidistant rhyme which spreads the canvas of her closing flowers and sky of red.   If from this soon forgotten, brightly colored lamp the diary reads itself, like the color blue looking up from the lake bottom, or the wetness of a much beloved frog in heat.   Beyond the infinite possibilities remains one which is not included, except as a secret unguarded moment among relations:  The cottage floor with its cracks and pegs, the orbicular now, the pierced ear lobe, the periodic.  And each to all

                                                                                         Surface  /4.   It shapes the surface of the stone, leading in all directions and away from self into a world too large to follow, and a place where the darkness grasps the closed fist.   Though the blind color of reason holds firm that door from which you might return through time and time again, adding once or twice the skilled architect of numbers in that valley of faceless but not nameless, homeless but not blameless others.   From the top of that huge rock the sunset spread in both directions and the sunrise was a pebble, caught in flight by the moment's reason and allowed, as a river is allowed, to fall and rise with the tide of stars.   Once again the impressions of a hasty retreat were left in the sand, were scattered to the four winds,  were interpreted in a context removed from which impressions gather dust along the shore of ten thousand lakes or huddled around that pebble   which you

      Deer Lake  /3.      A year ago it was the rain on my roof reminding me of the lives I have led,,, and the other places I have lived.   Tonight, on my tent, the same drops in exactly the same random pattern which never stops until I sleep,   seeking harmony. (also published in   Buckskin Larch   /2011)     3.  

                                                                                                Reflection On Water  /2.     The price we pay to water for its being two thirds of us is, in thrust, saturation.   The colors of the blood, each separately, mirror the curtains from rage to delight.   Saliva, stickier than a toad's (which is the tongue) bleeds on into the conversation of what we are passing through.   Oils, enough to dot the ground for one winter and then dry out toward the Earth's center.   The protean of one mountain or one estuary seeking resolution. The episode of the search for the body of a friend lost at sea, a sunset, a pearl, an opal: all aflame ---- .   To rise upon a triangle of satin, Stretch across the web it casts at noon tomorrow and fall, in pieces, out of that rainbow of reason there on the surface, reflecting sky. (Photo by Kristin Hiler)   2. 

                                                                                               BREAKWATER'S EDGE   /1. (Photo by Kristin Hiler)