OPENER AND CLOSER OF OUR EYES | PETER STRAYER
To the opener and closer of our eyes,
The one who paints on the canvas of wide skies,
The one who strums the greening trees with hands of air
To ring of chimes and patter rain on window sills while hushing the earth,
Whose sun is shone in his eyes of fired orbs,
Vivifying all things to cycles of life and death and life again.
The speaker of first words amplified by breath’s invisible gift
Then born on pages of curling lines and vines of ink,
Soulish containers of thoughts and emotion,
Symbols of the unspeakable and somehow spoken.
The lifter of seas into curling white billows of watery force,
From that which ripples and returns the sun via facets of gloried light. The hearer of heartbeats and subtle sounds of an eye as it turns to a loved one.
And every sigh of a world caught between terror and transfiguration,
Listening intently to releasing sighs of every final exhale,
And the first glorious gasp of air to a baby’s lungs.
To you, I speak.
You must love the infinitely small as much as the interminably grand
And as you hold the cosmos with as much care as an infant’s hand.
You must sense the depths of the loneliest sea-buried cave where water and Distance slowly diminish the grace of all light; our caves. My cave.
“Where does one go where you are not there?”
If I traveled by thought into the recesses of what makes a human real;
you are there.
And so…in the impossibility of aloneness, I write:
All I can offer you is the welling water of my eyes -
And you return my tears with those of your own.
All I can give is the pathetic warble of my voice - impelled on chords in a throat around which the hands of care tighten so as to choke every groan into Discordant noise and gasping.
And you return those sounds as you utter the words of one also forsaken.
All I have is the lofted thoughts from a mind so beset by the high squeal of Frequencies no one else can hear.
And you return them by speaking into in my solitude-locked soliloquies of lamentation,
All performed in the angel-filled amphitheater of a solitary soul.
I give whatever this word could mean - praise.
Nurture all this scrawl might suggest - gratitude.
Surrender every piece of my person - fear.
Freeing the completeness of my incompletion - awe.
And the eucharistic reversal of all that’s dead within me - love.