In Ondine’s Garden Poem by Chris Robideaux

Something in the way the furrowed canyon lumbers gently down to kiss the foamy waters,

That surge Pacific-ward beside the oleander, honeysuckle and sour grass that gave me eyes outside forgetting, and tendrils atop the sepulchral night;

Something about the innocent, tender ministrations of Persephone and her hummingbirds to our seaside winter,

As the thunderous tide snaps, the rip-curl savage-tossed against the siren grottoes and grainy tarmac,

Something hypnotic in the rhythm of the tide, as I stare at the wrath of Ondine, the great ameliorations of Light, and time itself guarded by saintly dolphins who blow to see the pelican mirth of this aquatic dynasty,

As distracted potentates pour their billowing leisure into Shakti’s prayer bowl,

As nautical flirts amble like sand crabs towards a mysterious sea harvest (that may impart all of Neptune’s secrets, wraths, or assignations) ,

The surrendering tide fills up sea-grottoes with pools and rivulets running wild as children, who cry to sentinel parents, “Look! A river! ” and the overjoyed offspring race to experience these wonders energized like crusaders,

As silent thunder canyons us and laughing pilgrims swear, the smooth tide mows this terrace with its briny heart bare,

Where assaying the sea from whence the great miracle shoulders me, the pink candle delicate dreams of all fallen leaves, all sodden lives who stretch to glow inside all moments now unified,

called rain O Gaia giving, called beach O grainy worlds, called sea all tears the sorrow living, called lust the blood of pearls;

where all timepoints have merged to one, and so one is now, now is life, our eyes never death shall smite,

where spotless dreams of mercy & waterfalls of light splash laughter on mystic-clean shores,

when world-wings move us to stellar homes new and space-fold rhymes carry us through;

while whale mouthfuls Jonah-ed today, and stretching into the eternal chamber where I lay my flame I breathed a Titan's breath of song.

As these nightfalls enthrall us in a world of novel light where they must brighten their depths, these dialects of hypnotic grace;

where emptied into hopeful sluices a Solstice deluge is lullaby to wide-eyed children of the great seeing,

O owl-sight of the seasonless delta make us real in the ascendancy!

- Yes, you are made real. You have heard and followed my feathered hoot of life-clear verging. Yes I have heard your endless calls enduring and you have consecrated your once-imagined reality crystalline,

Where candled rooms of long ago are as real as this evening’s imago, (the mind may satchel, trove, or cudgel carry, a voiceless cannonade of soft ordnance falls…)

- Luminescence only, un-learners by the estuary.

Where the futuremakers hoist a nationless flag along the sapphire boughs of plenty,

beheld by the un-vexed, clockless eyes of these many,

endless. endless. endless.

Called rain O Gaia giving, called beach O grainy worlds, called sea all tears the sorrow living, called lust the blood of pearls.