no wind with answers blowing,
no raiment, bread, nor breath of air...

our footprints,
pristine, eternal,
mark paths of to and from.

we lie here motionless,
our backs pressed into chalky dust,
reposed on slope of true tranquility.
no one owns this desert sea,
the only waves are shadows
stretching darkly.
interlaced fingers behind
two reflective heads. . . .

in a silence
of vacuumed, black-space sky
one planet of pearl floats,
blue with stormy swirls of white
and worried gray -- we'll stay
in this, our place of calm,
no gusty violence,
the only hint of breeze,
the exhale of our solitary sighs.

T. Emmett Mueller, an educator for 26 years in Michigan, retired to Florida seven years ago. He currently holds the position of Submissions Editor for This Hard Wind poetry magazine and is Associate Editor for PoetWorks Press. Recently, T. Emmett was a featured poet at the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival and the Austin International Poetry Festival in Austin, Texas, where his work appears in the festival anthologies Di-Verse-City 2000, and 2001. For more about him, visit his Web site.