Any Other Way

Should we sit on far sides of the river
to remember that we are in love,
or think that one of us is fallen, and buoyed
at last amid a thousand petals
in the customary way?

Should I want you to be surrounded
by hungry and lawless things
or lost in the endless repetition
of a black wood,
that I might fight my way to you?

Would the random growth of cells
or mouse-trap chromosomes that
stiffen memory and my marrow
somehow stitch our hearts?

My love, don't be afraid.
I am yours more for our convention,
for desire's wildly ambitious and weary march,
for the urchins of habit
and the fog of familiarity.

For you, I light a sentinel beacon
many fathoms across the blue.
This is the way of a poet
who gives his heart to you. 

Long Distance

You are from here and I am from there,
we drive again from your state to mine.
We've been together four years
and we have worn out eight tires.

You moved down here and we'll move back there,
we give up our places to find each other.
The sweet rain outside falls like tears,
the engine internally combusts my heart.

Though weary, we'll miss it, somewhere down the road
when together forever we sit in the house,
the only traveling there a pitter-patter
of the four little feet of one local mouse.

Breakfast

I am much more inclined
to meditate on attachment
in the last few bites
of an English muffin
than at the beginning.

Hunger is like that,
hard to let go of
when it is whole.

Clouds

Horsetail clouds comb the blue bowl above
and I half-remember some insight about them.
Something about change
and their dear and wide view.

But they have no eyes, or if they do,
no mind to map the rivers and towns below.
As I age, my memories dry and fade.
I am drawn across the air a while,
sweeter for the less I know.

The Office

The cold circle of the moon
cuts me out of bed like a cookie,
bakes me under the hot stars,
sets me out to cool in the dark,
dots me with my own wan eyes
before setting over the horizon.

Tomorrow, I want the sun to ask
if there are any more of those.

Captain

I want to be the kind of father
who died crab fishing in the Aleutians
in a perfect storm.
Afterwards, he was known for the following:
1) Saving a deckhand at the last moment
2) His view of the world which was that
we can make our own way no matter what,
and that we can speak our peace with God.

My son's mood on the plane home today
makes the deck slippery again.

Present

Paper put beside the presents crinkles
as I wait for my gift to be opened,
and I wonder if he will like it and if
my expression will be alright, easy, light,
appreciative and not arrogant.

I open a gift not too carefully, not too quickly,
taking care to appear interested and excited.
But I am excited, this is Christmas,
where I learned of the simple joy of gifts,
and waiting breathlessly for dawn at age six.

I think I over-analyze these days.
I am like a wrapped gift
with no one to enjoy the exchange. 

Chess

Last night was the big party, tonight is close family,
my sons, my sister and her boys, and my wife.
My sister's husband is leading the church service.
We are having fun here, matching definitions,
challenging, guessing, and making canny jokes.
We should be in church, perhaps,
waiting for the birth of Jesus,
singing the praises of God's gift,
drinking in the silent night.

But the wise men, I heard, on this night,
played a round of chess,
because mortals need friendship
and a sense
that there may always be a way to win.

Grace

Grace kisses her ladybug
with showmanship and delight.
Then she tosses it to the floor,
as if to say This is but a ragged thing.

I ask to hold it and Grace
gives me a cocked eye and holds it out
and takes it back at the last moment.
Then she gives it to whom asked not for it.

I look at Grace and I love her
because she is beautiful and fickle.
And I notice
just how close she still is
to her maker. 

Tubing

We link arms with nephews, cousins and their others,
flying down the rare Minnesota hill
like we are skydiving.
We are made to be together
in gravity's fierce friction
softened by the snow and hands.

Solstice

The wheel is round, and thus
within itself has no ending.
Here on the ground,
we feel the rushing by of seasons.
The light it seems, has no color
but for the way it is bending.
I circumambulate the stone with you,
for what is brought forth without reason.

Change

If the world ends tomorrow
will it separate me from the things I love?
Will flowers bloom on another world
from a seed or molecule traveling light years?

Sometimes I am glad I do not have tomorrow,
so that I can know what it is to hold you.

Being Here

Now looks like a light headache,
tinnitus in spreading silence.
sometimes I dodge Now,
and don't entirely know why.
Now is the narrative of me
in the thought of every sound.
Now is the angel in the rose,
the release of knowing,
the remembering
and it is tears.

I am ever your servant,
though I forget the
colors of your raiment,
and your gentle and ever-present eye.

Nonsense Poem

Llamas, vicunas, alpacas and guanacos,
cats and dogs, canaries and goldfish,
cashews, salt, tortillas and avocados,
love and death and a dream and a wish.

What is the weight that a llama will throw off,
which is the pet that is sweetest to own?
Bake me into the bread that I'm dough of,
how long can I last as the bubble you've blown?

Setting

I let go my moorings tonight,
untethered myself to what may come,
green springs on quiet islands
or storms that tear the sails away
like witches at sacrifice.
I lifted the anchor of this port,
the streets of homes with golden windows,
and sweet smoke rising heavenward.
I unbound the line of regret
from the bollard of the past,
all of this in the middle of a thick fog,
which I hadn't seen until I began to let go.
To my surprise, I was more set and stable,
sure and true as the dog star in a sextant,
and filled to brimming with the thirst for salt.

Angels

I'm worried I'll look silly
crying before angels,
that kind of expression
where the heart
squeezes the love out of bitterness,
glory through the crust
about this unclaimed flesh,
ruptures bright red blood
onto the mantle of time.

But I no longer care how I look
when I am around angels, 
one of the gifts of aging
that takes me back to childhood,
where the sun flickered from above
as if through wings and I looked around
and no one was there at all
to speak one word of certainty. 

Abstract Impressionism

Somewhere in the garage of my mind,
I imagine a reckoning at death,
of the good and reckless choices
we have made, maybe Jackson Pollock

was in Heaven's green room thinking
he shouldn't have done so much drinking,
but then God is no random regent
of forgiveness and of fear.
Like Pollock,
he usually has an idea
of how he wants the image to appear.

Massacre in Newtown, Connecticut

They were scared for a moment, I'm sure.
That's the part I can feel the most,
because in me still is a little child,
standing in awe at the good the world brings,
another yellow sunrise, sweet crayons,
a blue globe, pencil boxes, books
about the love mother whales have for their babies
on their journey from Mexico to Alaska and back,
the voice of the teacher, warm as mother
but leading me outside to find my true place.

If I could, I would lead the ghosts of twenty children
out of their graves to play.
As it is, I can only be with one.

Snail

A world of poetry whistles away
outside my walls of straw and clay,
while presumption shackles my will
with arcane and absurd laws:
No walking barefoot in the grass. 
None of your business. 
No loud music and please, above all, 
No separation from mood.

It is strange, isn't it,
how the ownership of
an anxious reverie
can imprison a prescient muse.

Serving Myself

Evel Knievel,
Alaska crab fishermen,
coal miners,  
soldiers of fortune,
Indy drivers and firefighters.
I'll skip all that
and be eaten by a lion for money.
Millions from Coke, Red Bull and Pepsi.
At last I can go to work and say
that I am brave and I am tasty.

Being an Expert

It's all about specialization out there,
the world's foremost ant observer
knows the skinny on supercolonies
while I drive to the food store
and consume public radio.

Later, the bilingual brain,
struggle pumps, inherited traits,
goosebumps, repetition, graphpaper,
snowflakes and ears.  

After all this time listening
I know a little bit about a lot of things.
I must find something to study,
perhaps
the screen we are projected upon. 

At the Eye Doctor

She says I have Ocular Surface Disease, or dry eyes
and will need to eat fish oil every day forever.
The oil will turn to fat and keep the fluid in.

In a serendipitous twist,
fat people will look thin to me from now on
and I can lay on the bottom of the sea and look around
for as long as I like.

Colanders

We both don't say what we mean sometimes,
you ask me if I'm upset when you mean
that if I were cooking, I would be
serving you eggshells instead of omelettes
and from what and where did that come from, 
and I say nothing when I mean that
I've assumed that you were criticizing my cooking.

But later, we laugh over a mixed-up dessert
that somehow came out alright,
that we share the leftover steam in our hearts,
and the black baked-on defenses,
and even the dirty dishes. 

but that is because we know
the bowls of our woes have holes.

Catwise

Our cat has only six lives now,
one less from the shelter,
one less from being lost for a week,
and one lost to diabetes.
She looks right in my eyes and says
You are a funny animal, 
what with all of your worries.
It's hard to let go but c'mon,
let's bump heads, smell the dawn,
get some gravity into our rest,
let go of this whole idea
that there's something better to do. 

Joy

Usually, joy is a peeling away
like an orange rind off an orange
or it is a lifting off like a bird in flight,
or it can be going in to sweet sunlight
from a wintry shade or passing cloud.

I want rock-solid joy that doesn't move,
can't peel, is comfortable on its foundation,
need never fly or even become warm.

I can make that joy happen,
but only out of myself,
by carving away all the joy
in which I am nascent.

Pine

Out the upstairs window
in the field across the road
is a big lone pine.
I am so quiet I can hear her.
She says
There is nothing else to do. 
There is nowhere else to go. 
It is a message
from outside and inside.

1983, Totowa New Jersey

Harriet, the wizened director
in the crumbling State home
said that the Board was like a mermaid,
prone to looking good on the surface,
but with an ugly tail that does all the work.
It seemed incongruous in her case,
as if through bad luck
she had to swim upside down.

But that's how things were there,
only thirty years ago.
I'd caught Mrs. Thompson
snapping a rubber band
in the face of a client,
and the union didn't like me.
Dr. Carter said retarded people didn't feel pain,
and Dr. Nelson accused me of being in the KKK.

It was as if I'd found myself in a sea
of upside-down mermaids,
struggling to breathe under water
and hitting everything under the sun
with their angry and ill-fitting tails. 

Today's Headlines

2015 Fed Rate Increase Back in Play,
The importance of which is huge
for interest-rate futures traders
who shriek above the mumbling dead. 
This as
NASA's Hubble Spies Galaxies Near Cosmic Dawn,
the interest of which is puzzling,
but I can feel it pulling, the headline,
on a part of me that has nothing to do
with keeping me fed.

Thank you.

Whom do I thank
for your sweet arms
that hold me up
so I can be a good pear,
for your round eyes
that I, a buck exhausted,
drink from in the deep wood,
for the third hand you have grown
only for me, that caresses the heart
I have grown only for you?

My love I thank you,
and not the spirit, not the muse,
not the creator, not this kind and open hour,
not the earth and air of our home,
not what was written long ago,
nor the bright and blank book before us.

My love I thank you. 

What You Must Leave at Heaven's Door

Fresh cow's milk over toasted rice,
A photograph of Zaragoza's high plain,
where your lungs filled with frost
as your legs tumbled sweet blood
up through your young heart,
a thick blue sky over a green spruce forest,
the dark songs of owls,
your lover's musk, fig, and coconut skin,
the masterpiece you wrote this time around

and the satchel that it came in. 

Tolosa-Hunt Syndrome

I'm having headaches and my eyes hurt.
Let's review the conditions I could have:
Tension headaches,
Diabetes,
High blood pressure,
Lyme disease,
Orbital tumor,
Glaucoma,
Corneal abrasion,
Conjunctivitis,
Uveitis,
Neuritis, 
and Tolosa-Hunt Syndrome.
Now, in Tolosa-Hunt Syndrome,
you also have swelling of the fingers,
making it diffi;;ji; to;l;n ; lpe.
This is followed by
death within fifty years,
doubt and ennui,
ecstasy twenty-nine times a year,
and cats.

Abiding

A river has a wellspring,
a river has an ending.
Even here, in this eddy,
bubbles are rising, falling.
Look carefully, the river is like you.
Everything is like you, wet or warm,
windy or solid as a mountain.

Look with disdain
at the picture of the world
you have been given.
Look with abandon,
in the way the body turns to stars
when it has been freed from captivity. 
Look because your eyes are here.

Look until the river shows you its name,
and why it cannot be spoken.

Madness

A young man showed me pictures
in a worn blue plastic book
of himself, at fifteen, lifting weights.
He was smiling then, and rippling
with his carved body and the bright stream
of his young, unworn and able mind.

Then, a picture at twenty.
Nine years ago,
when in his dream, he said, an angel alighted,
black, winged, and huge.
He said If I see him again in my dream, 
I will kill him.

I know what happened.
The angel suffocated his mind
and stole his smile and the light in his eyes.
He told him When you wake up, 
you will find yourself in hell.

Fire

Lines of fire run through my center.
Mostly, I miss them while I dream,
but they are always there, burning
the tattered little tapestry of me, but then
setting it alight with beauty as well.

The lines connect out of my head,
through my feet and palms and groin
to roots and leaves of great trees,
to the meandering rivers and streams
that write the fortune of the earth.

Therefore I am the earth, held by spinning lines
around the sun and galaxy, ever outward
to the edges of God's skin.

Tonight I let the fire burn
and it speaks no longer in riddles.
It tells me of the settling of dew,
a little sorrow for this ephemera.
It tells me of the current and the little spark,
like the preposterous courage of dawn.

Whom

Delight comes knocking
and who would not let it in?
Who would not see her
standing in the half light 
asking shelter from the wind
and offering you good dreams?.
But her embrace becomes
the want of another door to open.

Pain, rasping, comes to the step
and who would let him in?
Who would dare to face him
when he is this fearsome
even before he arrives?

Who would call on Rumi
to spend the night
and talk only of the world?

Residing

I want to be in the center
of the circle that you build
like all women, of spirit.
I'll be shaman or sachem,
or just your brave, sharing the pipe.
We both know the creator is round,
like a tree, or a lake, or a stone in the river.
We will bring others back home,
lead them to the green valley,
where it is good to begin.

Meat

My sons come over for dinner
It's black pepper tofu
and nuggets of deep orange squash,
prepared lovingly by my wife.
I am the only omnivore, a tuna
in sweet waving grasses.

Saturday

The couch hurts my lower back
on a lazy Saturday.
I forget to do enriching things like
writing letters, reading or guitar.
The watercolor kit sits in its case
since we bought it before vacation.
The paints are in their tubes,
ochre, cadmium, and Payne's grey.
They are bored, with sore backs too,
unable to get out and about, mingle,
and make something of themselves.
Why do I miss it, this wide world
full of the ingredients for creativity?

My second cup of coffee
inches off the table in despair,
and as it explodes,
the guitar in the corner
throws out a sympathetic twang.

Swift River

We belong out here, me and my wife,
her sister and husband, along the river
among hurricane pines, snapped saplings
that grow stronger and taller than oaks,
strong hemlocks halving the sunlight,
stone farmhouse cellars, dewdrop mushrooms,
profuse ferns, and a big pile of sticky shredded cones
chipmunks must have visited many times.

Our energy returns after weeks in the office
or in the house,
just a few hours outdoors
and we breathe like water, earth and tawny grasses.
Our eyes lift up into the sky, our bodies crack
like the grey boulders, our thoughts find moisture
and befriend the little worlds they find themselves in,
the dark under a stone, water trickling over moss,
the sweet smell of a blanket of needles.
We head for home, a little more wild,
bubbling.

Thanksgiving

Today I am grateful
for being slowly cooked until I am dead
by the flame of hunger within me.
Without that, I would be a bushel of dust,
a bushel of water, and a little wind,
and would have little opportunity
to know sower, sun, and reaper.

Sybil

My life falls gently into place at night
when I sit quietly,
the good far outweighs the bad
and while the poles may shift soon
I'm far too loved to be lost.

And so I am puzzled by my nightmares
although it may be true that they are not all mine.
My mother was Catholic, not me, and yet
sinful sirens, apocalyptic apparitions,
and judgement by fire leave me in such sweats,
my relief at finding my warm wife
in the worn walls of our bedroom is ravenous.

I have such bad dreams,
I've decided to take up arms
but am at a loss as to how to prepare.
Perhaps I have been too careful,
worshiping as I do Anatta, who of course
carries neither sword nor shield,
which I need on the journey
to the boundless country.

Ah, that's it. fool that I am
not to see that I am still part of a play.
In the next scene, I call on the Oracle
who speaks to me in needles of pine
which I collect, place in my pockets.
Right now, I am laying out my costume
and reciting my lines.
I will need to remember them,
rehearsal begins at moonrise.

Taliban

My friends have all gone crazy,
returned to alcohol,
or lashed themselves to irritability.
They are like the Buddha statues
blown up by the Taliban.
In their youth they were carved
by inspiration and persistence,
stood out in noble relief from the cliff. 
But they grew tired of that serene nobility
staring at them every day
while they were taking up
the subjugation of nonsense.

Baruch

She died yesterday and will be buried
in her traditional way at sundown today.
She was irritable much of her life,
yelled about the potatoes if they weren't right
in the middle of our meal out,
did not want to see me until I was a Jew.

Oh but now I remember.
Her family was torn to pieces in Russia.
Her blessing as a young woman
was only a little chicken fat once a week,
but with it she could make a few potatoes
dance like they were at a wedding.

She grew kinder and weaker with age.
She accepted me at last for who I was,
divorced, older, stronger, and a stranger.

Today I pray for her as a Jew,
for the broken flowers of the Testament,
for the good of the house she made,
for her kind and obdurate daughter,
for the wandering we all share. 

The Path

The river is blue-black,
bubbling with whitecaps,
running downstream like me.
Lean ducks land
in the water's lean hand
while underfoot dry sticks snap.
There seems so little fire
under this brief pot,
but at least out here
the fat burns
and the flame licks higher
into a grey blue day.

I kick up little stones on the path
as I and the path meander.
I rub the ground like a low cloud
I exhale the last of ire,
rub my heart with sweet cinders.

To Everything

One November
I found a very slow
preying mantis
in the frost
on the bushes
in front of the house.
When I was young,
they seemed bigger than me.
Green, fresh, and strong,
like summer.
Now I see
the compass of their season.

I have lived
for fifty-two summers
with enough brains
to wear a coat in the cold
but not yet enough heart
to don the wrap of Ecclesiastes.

Prayer III

To bend a note against the air
with ribbon of throat and tongue
or electric string of a guitar
under sky made blue by sun

is almost all I want, this warp
in the fabric of myself, like crow
in the tall pines at noon,
to owe my voice to no one.

Of course I sing and play
so poorly that I mostly listen,
but now at last I hear what matters
and do not ask for what is missing.

It is not a coincidence
that I pray in harmony
with the sounds I most love.

Alms

Your T.S. Eliot book
lies quiet and new
like a fresh white egg
on the mottled windowsill,
a birthday gift from my son.
Already a month ago
your smiles over candles
sank into the west.
It's a new printing,
The Waste Land, 
a scattered prophecy bound
as the water of life
that goes tumbling over
and about the life of us
so quickly now, and yet
you pause and dream with me,
inhale the dust
that tends to gather
wherever there are things,
and be with me, my son,
the world, however thin our wings.

Drought

On a thick syrup mountain
I see brambles roll by
and through an amber haze
I love them for what they are,
but I will not trade bodies with them.
Later, ants take away the honey
leaving only what is dry of me,
and I become a bramble.

Here, today, the world
it is evaporating, and for that,
I walk with the wizened
but I will not trade bodies with them.

When I am gone
I will wish that I had.

Cruise

I am teaching mindfulness at a psychiatric conference.
I am beset by worry and then it happens,
the video skips at part of a scene,
a boat leaves the dock We're constantly marinating in corrosive hormones
a boat leaves the dock We're constantly marinating
a boat leaves the dock in corrosive hormones
but then suddenly
I am floating free for a moment
I have no work to do,
even the great screws of the mind
that turn my propellers
in this sea
let go of their rust.

Intuition

You are teaching again
at our little Buddhist group,
of noticing.
In the Friends Meeting,
in a circle of chairs,
four hundred miles
from where you came
to live with me here.
We were married by your teacher
in your meditation hall in Cambridge.
I hear her voice in yours.
I hear the Buddha's voice in yours,
the one about noticing warmly,
the little voice he heard in his head
when he knew that the Dharma
would be made into hallucinations.

She whispered to him
and pressed the seeds of the heart
into the lines of his palm.

Shimmer

I love you on this grey day
in the gathering weft of tears
on the slate where I chalk my joys,
your skin, the stayed lances
of the nervous natives you passed,
your chestnut eyes that today
I don't mistake for distrust
no, today I see them only reaching
to touch my eyes.

On this grey day I love you
with whatever must pass
in the mingling of joys and tears
on an equator, in a cardinal flash.

Impressionism

It is a perilous time,
full of uncertainty
where clouds rush by
without stopping to talk to the sky
and scurrying ants
fret about something so large
it pulls at the colony like
an invisible tornado,
this thing, this inevitable thing
that goes flying by an ant,
the tiny nerves knowing
the last leaves are falling
while the cities in our heads
know nothing but soap operas
except in dream,
where the actors begin to become narrow,
noticing the churn of the strange,
the brushes of god dipped in the wrong color,
pressing onto a fraying canvas,
about to make a picture,
about to be seen as one trembling whole
when it is stepped away from.

The Road Home

Another work week is over
and I am driving home along
the highway that twists
because of the cool river,
and the ratio of trees to people
switches almost instantly
and the eels in the river go by
and they talk to the trees I'm sure,
the river joining in, bubbling,
about how they made the curve
that the road must take
and I hear them ask if I am listening
which I am because I know
that my sense of hearing
and every growing thought of mine
are made by the world outside.

Myth

Work looms, something might not work,
ribbons need cutting and I've no scissors,
the wellness of bodies is evaporating,
like big tuna and the ice they are packed in.
The only thing certain is worry,
successful, persistent and parasitic.

Lucky for me, I keep a little myth
wrapped up in a box on the shelf.
In cases like this, I take a little out,
make a dragon and knight diorama
and let the battle for the heart unfold.

No, I don't really have any myth in a box,
but even the idea of such a thing
is more real than worry.

Vow II

Marry me again my love
marry me every day
only you are my rising sun
that warms the wheat
waving on the plain of me
only you, you are the only one.

You open the vessel of my heart
and make sweet blood to flow again.

It was the Spirit that joined us,
and I bow to you, her jewel.
She made you in a rough furnace
as once in a rare while she might,
rare you are, as one mother star
in a frozen universe of night.

She left you warm and moist,
and when you are around me
I begin to be born again,
for I have been dry, covered in dust.

When you turn to me,
the pendulum shakes,
and the chant begins again,
the one I had forgotten.

Election

I am not sure I have been a wise leader.
I have put me in harm's way
with a vague and wavering foreign policy,
I have burned through resources
for short-term gain,
and overspent on the exploration of space.

Tonight I ask every cell to vote for me,
that despite the economic downturn
and the certain debilities of aging,
the threats from without and within,
that I hear you and will be a strong leader.

I pledge to take you as far as you can go
in this very life, to set the conditions
whereby you can grow, multiply, and do your job,
live to the fullness of your destiny
bearing the torch of a venerable life
and share the brilliant beam of the life of sanctity. 

The future will be difficult, this I can see,
where blind leaders bargain for Trojan horses.
I ask you, in this narrow veldt we breathe
to lend me your nucleus and vesicles,
your mitochondria. 

I am not asking a lot of you, 
I am asking everything. 
In return, I will lead facing the future, 
standing firm with each and every one of you
on the rich ground of the past we share
and walk onward, not without questions,
but with unswerving courage
and the magnificent awareness
that we are only here because of one another.

Dream V

I dreamed I found the jewels of dream,
honor, friendship, love, ecstasy, space,
the warmth of sun and wet of clean springs,
and the love and life of other living things
without the stones of legislation
or the vagary of decay.

Of course by degrees the goodness failed,
and not because of its establishment or lack
but because even in fantasy there is a space
albeit small, between the actor and the act,
and what things really are and what they seem.

The Wind

Somewhere, the wind waits to be born.
It is pale and cloudy there,
on a high and sharp mountainside
where it is not yet warm enough to move.

Here in the valley, the wind is blowing gently,
It is bright and clear through the trees
in the middle of the sun and earth
and apples sweet and blushed.

Tomorrow the wind will die
in the frozen eye of dawn
and I will wrap myself in a black shawl
and blow out a black candle.

I have learned the way of the wind
and hold her in the sail of my will.
Yet, like her I am only passing
and will write of me what can be read
only by
a winged and fleeting eye.

November

The north wind slides down
the hillside
like the last touch of father's hand
when he died,
through a cloud of white
his great hand on a white sheet
where the last of his blood
fled toward his heart
the way summer leaves
rush to the ground.

I am running to stay strong
in the change of my seasons.
After a half an hour
I can no longer bear
the bluster of each half lap
where the wind slaps
away the warm sheet I wear.

I pray to him
give me the grace
to praise the space
in which I can still run home. 

Special Today

Right now, sweet petals
of inebriating peace
drop with gentle kisses
on the outside of my cheek.

I've always been able
to find nutrition, somewhere
in an hour of day or night
at seaside in the clatter of shells
from the spreading fall of waves
or in the company of owls
in the fading crescent moon
or the popping of the sun
out of the mud of dream.
Yet there is a remainder
of a thing that is nowhere
and it is sharp like a knife,
bitter like chicory,
waiting
with the patience of the dead,
always almost ready to be served.

Day of the Dead

When you die they say
you get a bird's eye view,
looking down from above
at the mean and meager form
that is quickly cooling
from the inside out.
This is the extent of the report
but I suppose it goes on,
the dead seeing

more and more clearly with time
the fading of things,
the body mingling with earth,
families formed only briefly
and then taken apart
the way cells die.

But then, they must also know
that death brings space,
the space between fingers
with which we hold one another.

Wisdom is sometimes very chilly
when it comes to rest on you
from somewhere you cannot yet see.

Halloween

Razor blades in apples.
That's what my mother
said to watch out for
when I was little.
Who wanted an apple, anyway?
But I wondered,
who was that guy,
putting those thin, double sided blades
with the keyhole between
inside a bright red apple?
You'd be surprised how much
children know at a young age.
I figured it was unlikely and besides,
I could see tampering.
Maybe, I thought,
there was one guy who did it.
But I forgave him.
After all, he was lonely,
didn't fit in, probably was bullied.
I wasn't afraid of anything then,
even bad things hidden inside good things.

Knight

It smells like Christmas this morning
as the storm has demolished a few spruces.
Every colorful leaf has been taken away,
and our power, if it was ever ours, is gone.
We watch cars and trucks go up the hill
and come right back down the road
that now dead ends at a horizontal pine.

It's hard to have faith in some kind of order
when so many things are broken so quickly,
when long-used pathways are blocked.
I feel like a chess piece taken off the board
before it has been fairly captured, but then,
such can be the whim of an impatient master.

Sandy

Winds pick up and then howl.
This is the behavior of the air
when it is given temperature
and the touch of body and branch.
Movement is not known
without that which is moved.
Foolishly, my heart breaks
as a hurricane dismembers the great spruce
outside the corner of my little house.

These conditions that spin me
up into Oz,
some leftover heat from another life
and the fragile desires I have planted,
why did I think they would last
and not take up with inclement change?

Of course, the wind, my heart, and the world
will all stop someday.
For now I must be content
to catch little branches
of knowing that go blowing by.

Student Body

Did you see
what perturbation
profuse and unruly
proceeds after the body?
After what?
After squeezing or twisting,
after a fever or chill,
shaking or exhaustion,
lightness and warmth,
fullness and release.

Like very bad children
who have skipped school,
truant echos ripple outward,
they fall into the world
and pick up foolish points of view,
including the strange belief
that they did not come from you
and that they do not belong. 

You must be a wise headmaster,
and not fall for pretense.  
They will always be your students,
even if they do not study.

Things

I was thinking of something today
for a poem
but I don't remember what
perhaps
it was the crack between worlds
or that
we no longer worship ancestors
or the anthem
that the trees sing to the wind
or it might have been
the sweet blackness
that you appeared out of to love me
the same blackness
that eats my eyes and my memory
or anger maybe
at a certain lack of resonance in my poems,
a certain distance
from things.

All of Them

The dead are heaped up,
worms on the track this morning,
a hundred squirrels on the road.
Leaves, yellow, red and brown
falling like boats, screws,
coaster cars and darts.

I am on my knees
with a new chant at sunset
in the touching of her eye.
Oh, I did not know,
forgive me for my mean grasp, 
Mother you let every child go.

Casting

Today is your birthday
and we walk
through a garden before dinner.
It is raining lightly, you have a cold
and there is no one there but us.
We sit by a wire form that drips
rhythmically into a green concrete pool.
Four peacocks meander
along the wall beside us.

We are happy with each other,
like the drops and the water,
the peacocks and the wall,
the drizzling rain and your cold,
our little plans and the soft surprises
that always seem to follow.

We love each other gently
and rest in nature's hand,
the same hand that made you
and brought you into the air
and placed you just so,
by the raindrops and me.

The Field

I will make this mine
I said to my mother of my body
and so I was born.
They will beat me
I said of the other children
and so I was afraid.
I am far from the black city
I thought yesterday
and someone was murdered
and the wave of misery
spread out toward me.

I sit quietly all day
and let the air take my mind
up onto a canvas of smudge clouds
and I await a meager rain.

Crows III

At middle age
a man is wise to watch crows.
They are bold
and alone or in company
they are at home.
They carry no bible,
they make politics
only one day at a time,
and the sky is their roof. 

Men face one choice above all
and that is how to die.
I will die like a crow,
out of doors, in a ruffle
of feathers and dry leaves
one eye at heaven
dry and fading like fall,
with nothing in between.

Revel

The decades gyrate
like a crooked ferris wheel
in a colorless carnival
where the drunk and blind
throw baseballs at cloth cats,
toward the black future
that will take back
every hue we have been loaned.

You did not know that?
Yet you have been warned,
everything made for you to play with
was cast in sorrow
and engraved with a mark
not that of the maker.
You must wipe away
the accumulation of oil
to know the truth.

Bluebirds

Outside for hours this warm weekend.
The sun laps against my aging skin
as I run around the track slowly
and the air is filled with a golden glow
from our star, our trees, our grass.
Bluebirds wait on the fence and then fly,
chirping gently when they take off
and lift by my head into the blue sky.
They look for moisture in the bugs they eat.
They fly mostly for food, or mating
but they extoll the glories of their bodies
in the middle of the air.

I drink a half a gallon of water
and I touch the sharp balance
in the sweet middle
of wet birth and dry death.

Our Own Perspective

Is something like freefall,
nothing to hold on to,
the world rushing up to find us
and the wind sucking out
the habits of the ears and eyes.
Or it is like a caged tiger
who knows he is not home,
who is angry at the passing
of time and of those who
wanted to hold him this way.

We look at magazines, television,
the road out the front of our car
and we see nothing
but the habits of our mind.
We drive toward satisfaction
but other drivers make us late.
It may be time to open our parachute,
time to open our eyes,
watch and wait for the right time
to kill our ephemeral masters
and escape.

My Place

Gotta get ten acres
down in the heart of the state
where the hoot owl hoots
at the setting moon
in the old oak tree
at the edge of my own little lake.

Sure, it's all God's,
every spinning proton
of every lonely element,
but by God I'll be damned
if before I'm gone
an owl won't fly round
a little ground with my name on it.

No Idea

I thought it was all for me
as I rounded the black asphalt path
at the park and stopped a foot away
from two surprised deer.
We both had that rare
and momentary interest
in something other than
running away or running toward.
Maybe they thought 
you were there for them
said my wife.
She says things like that
because she is there for me.
I stopped in my tracks
and noticed how the words
hung there, round and open.

Pity

Once, a girl on the swing
had half a face, the rest a boil
and I stared and then said
to her mother that I was
a social worker and could I help.

I am still red
from the strike of her eyes
and from time to time
people take pity on me.

Conversion

Soon, I will worship wolverines
by chanting to them in the wild
because I would rather be
bitten in the face
than supplicate what is warm and safe.

Draining

Underneath the city
flows the blood,
almost the same way
it runs in bodies,
but with only
the memory of touch
and no purpose,
no longer bound
to quicken legs,
blush cheeks
or warm lips.

Find this blood
and ask it
what was it like
to serve
such blind masters?

Lazy Sunday

Every inch of ground and air
is filled with scurrying
black beetles, little red ants,
a wasp stuck to my soda,
a brown camel cricket,
a schoolbus yellow butterfly,
a great big green shiny dragonfly
two flies, one of which bites,
all in about one minute.

I must be an enormous thing
in the middle of their world,
taking up three hundred
bug backyards.

To them, my occupation
must consist mostly
of slowly taking up space.

Afternoon

What remains of us,
the fingers of God
when we are gone?
What were we, under the sun
smiling, loving and
as quiet as the twilight?
What remains of us,
why were we outside here
in the middle of the day?
If I knew what I now know
of time and gossamer bonds
and if you had asked me
If I wanted to be here
I would have said yes
because I wanted to know
the rhythm of your heart.

Gift Wrap

When we let in things
that really don't fit
we still don't break.
Crows fly by
without any doubt
about the path they take.
I was worried about
being poisoned
by drinking your pain
but even the baby inside me
it turns out
can be left out in the rain.
A crow dashes
in front of my car
and takes off with a bagel
I let all my history
make off with circumstance
as soon as I'm able.

Dino Dollars

I remember the swamp and palm trees
in the Golden Guide to Dinosaurs
where I walked in their great shadow
because they were more than biological
and not yet fossils.

The green brontosaurus' long neck
rose above the triceratops at the edge of the swamp,
plants dangling from his firm mouth.
He loved his dinner there
in the grey clouds peppered with pterydactyls.
In that picture, the volcanoes were settling,
becoming more friendly
after their violent birth
and I didn't really think about
where the tyrannosauruses would eat.
He was happy as the Sinclair dinosaur
and he did not know he would power our
Dodge Dart, where I sat in the back seat.
He was like me, not yet part of any particular world
that he had to make useful.

Transpiration

In Juarez, a mother's arms
are too small to hold
her son and the world
that promised to save him
from a little cardboard house.
A metal river of guns
rolls south through the night
to water the terrible flowers
of mourning;
Blue-eyed terror,
creeping brown hunger,
and golden opportunity
that is said to grow
somewhere upstream.

Our Right to Vitamin C

Why not raise taxes
on the middle class?
They are like oranges
and they are full of juice.

Dreams

I dreamed I put
everyone I didn't like
on C-47s
and flew them to New Mexico
at night, past the gold cities
and dropped them in the desert
where they clustered like crabs
and tore each others' claws off.

I was so happy with the result
that I left the house
like a bluebird on a sunny day.
There was no woman in Starbucks
yelling at her child
just because he was a child.
My passive-aggressive workmate
was now assertive, and also taller.

I enjoyed going out more
and everyone wanted to be with me.
I was surrounded.
By degrees I had trouble breathing.
I went home and sat
with some bad electricity in my spine.
There was something in there I didn't like
and I only had one option.

I woke with my beautiful wife next to me,
the sun on her chestnut hair
I woke to a world speckled with woe
in the pink and particulate air. 

Angel

What angel made this and me?
Oh, for her I touch again
fresh wind, brave dart of crow,
and the shawl of time caress.

Without a giver still can a gift be,
and ecstasy an eye retain,
in the thumping heart of now
her bones are mine to dress.

Adopt-A-Highway

A scratched up thirty-days-sober AA keychain
and a hundred bottles of beer on the road. 
The drivers sing the endless and foolish refrain
excepting one and just maybe, but that's how it goes.

Fall

My father died twelve years ago today
in the flame red trees of Vermont.
He saw many flaming fall days
and he grew like a maple tree
and he was full of good syrup.
Now the trees are even taller.
I have not been there since then
and I miss my father and the trees.
He did not tell me the story
of the old man
reflecting on his falling life
on a crisp October day,
in the middle of the chapel of trees
that will call him back home.
I will write that story. 

Being In It

If I lived in the Old West
I would have a whiskey,
a revolver and a horse
but I would not have nostalgia
for the Old West,
especially around doctors with only
knives and fire for operations,
a cold and drafty cabin
and travel through Indian territory.

I can almost smell nostalgia,
something like oat and honey bread,
the drying of the crimson leaves and
the musky perfume of your soft skin.
Despite the layoffs, the aches of age,
and the ragged ripples of the road,
I'll pose with you for a sepia print.

Hump Day

The middle of a busy week
accumulates around my head.
I remember Saturday mornings
where the clear and clean space
of the green yard and blue sky
grow bright right with me.
But then, without the rest of the week,
Saturday would have no name.
From the need for rent money
I would have no rest.

A fat fly cruises around my office.
I take off the screen, open the window,
and he goes right out.
He went back to work, I think.

Deer, Still Warm

What if I stood over her
and commended her to heaven?
I would be arrested maybe,
for not following the way
of all that is already dead;
Paper, numbers, the past,
the future, regrets, opposites,
structure, hope, worth,
city hall and steeples.

So I drive by and a pink X
will be sprayed on her hide
like a profane cross.

Tennis

You are leading discussion
on the four foundations
of body, feeling, mind and phenomena.
The group discusses sound.
Tennis players are being banned
for grunting is where
the observation ends.

When I ran 'Club 56' at the Y
in grad school
the kids had smeared the place
with their sundaes,
ran out screaming.
Good job
said the director.  
I wonder where the kids are now.
I'm sure one of them
has sat for ten days as you did
to know
the clamor of the mind.

It is better
said my director
to be a coach and not a judge.

Awareness deepens,
the game continues. 

Just What I Wanted

You got me a barometer
for my birthday, not so
I would know what the
weather was, but so we
could be together
no matter what.

So Colonial

Sometimes we bother others
like a mold on the walls
that keeps coming back
and they want to scrub us out.
We just want to live
a beautiful life, hug
Benjamin Moore,
who is so smooth,
so colonial.

Consideration

I considered the joy
in doing nothing but
bringing joy.
Old friends had become
oblique at best,
angry and cynical
at how time pulls
everything apart. 
All I needed was
just a little shift
to call friends, say hello,
listen to their pain,
offer some positives.

But before I could do that, the laundry
was not in the right place
and I became confused
at how something so small
could make me shrink.
And yet I tried, I reached out
and moved the tier
of shirts and socks
neatly to the dresser top.
They liked it there
and they were in harmony.
I think they sang
a little song and
brought me joy.

Over There

Afghanistan is filled with valleys
because of the squeezing of plates.
Time will institutionalize the USA
because of the wrinkles in fate.
Outside the light falls from the sky
the same on everyone
excepting for the valley
where the hills outpace the sun. 

It's Just Human

It's birthday week at work
for me, the nurse,
and another social worker.
It's odd because we sneak
cards around to sign and I'm sure
I could accidentally sign mine.
Getting older is a surprise no longer.

I'm glad we get sweet cards,
like "It's your birthday, CELEBRATE"
and not those rude ones like
"You're almost dead!"
The nurse gets them in bulk somewhere
and we get half of our sunshine dollars
back in the card.

If we were all on an island
trapped by circumstance
we would do the same with shells,
write on clay with sharp sticks,
and share a nice fish lunch.
We would take that time,
in the middle of the gathering,
the shelter-making, the hunting,
and the cleaning,
in between sunrise and sunset.

Night

What energy has black night?
The strike at last of an owl,
or the silent pattering of mouse.
The stars are too distant it seems,
and tonight there is no moon.
But I am here like the moon,
dragging the song of the day
into silence as if it were mine.
I must learn to sleep
where sleep finds me,
and let the light I cling to
seep out endlessly.

Time

It's another September morning
and I'm walking across the lot
to lunch
in the cool dry air
just like last year
except I cannot remember last year.
We are together, sweetly,
we say I love you all the time
and you are closer now,
but I forget last year.

If we were here forever
I might start to remember the days.
I might be still
I might grow all the way close.
But more than likely
I would forget that there is no time or space
and I would be only a little awake,
again.

Deer

The deer, I don't know
as they wander in creation
and sleep without walls
and have children with big eyes
and nuzzling noses that rub
against their mothers,
do they tell stories?
Do they remember the dead
and the lost and the found?
Do they stand in an empty field
at the close of day
and know that
love is moving its quiet hand
even around the ears pricking
at the sound of cars, gunshots,
or the silence of night when
the fawns have been lost?
They do, I think
though they have no pen.
They whisper on the wind
about the life of bones,
a rhyme not here
when there were only stones.

Equinox Haircut

A handicapped woman in her wheelchair
waits with me at the haircut place in the strip mall.
She bends over her book and nods off a few times.
She has thin blue legs, bent wrists, a face in a red rash,
and pretty blond hair. She is waiting, I think, for her ride.
She seems more content than I
but I am not tempted to contrast myself
with her mood or her body all that much.
I take her in, with the poorly dressed cashier
with the purple streak in her hair, and a bad bird tattoo on her shoulder,
with all the hair on the floor
and the last humid day of summer.
I am an older man with hair in all the wrong places.
Ursula offers to trim my eyebrows and I agree.
You know how things come around, someday
I will be trimming hair or taking cash for it
in the wrong getup, or all bent with dying legs
waiting patiently for help or asking a man
if I can cut back the wild hairs of age.

I may start drinking again
but this time all of life,
whatever is flowing, whatever is growing,
and learn
how very gently to style it. 

Beer

Cars are lining up for spaces
in the beer store lot at five o clock
in the last dusk of lingering summer.
I remember the warmth of having
the sweet malted wheat in my arms
my throat, my gut and my blood
on Friday nights so long ago.
There was slowing of the clock
and the softening of its hands
in the little ocean that I took home.
I remember the movie in my head,
some kind of hero's journey,
that flickered in the crack in time.

I'm glad I did it, though I'm
twenty-two years dry.
I count the years now,
and I imagine less. 

Pausing

Whence the boiling of the mind
that cooks the alphabet soup?
Whence the letters that pour from my pen
with the quivering of nerve and finger?
Whence the finger and the nerve
that sprout from roots within?
Whence the stone and tree and rabbit,
for the words of allegory?
Ah but they have always been,
the stone and tree and rabbit,
even in the single point
that trembled dense and heavy
that was before the opening
of the yet blank book of things.
It was just the mouth of God
was pursed there for a bit
just like ours in hesitance
before the grace of all of it.

Morning

Morning and my dreams alight
back to their black forest until tomorrow
and you are gone in the clear quiet
of another day
that rolls like a whale in cool water.

It is the quiet where we met
that I remember
deep as a wishing well
and to this day I lower my bucket
with the fat smile of a boy.

It is the same quiet without you
that saturates the dark red things
in the blanket and on your paisley shawl
and makes waiting for your return wakeful
knowing that we will soon

walk together in the wash of quiet, our teacher
who will bid us time alone
while she does her cleaning.

The Sun

I dreamed I could change at will my mood
easily from foreboding grey
like light at sunset on the clouds
that surprisingly do not rain
to quiet silver in the rising moon.

I lingered in a hale repose
and saw the majesty of stars
because of such a wide and open view
that lets in light from light years far
as dew upon the open rose.

Later as the swoon progressed
I wore the cunning of a fox
the running unseen through the brush
over rivers full of rocks
to steal the quail eggs from the nest

and later still the play of love
of vixen, kits and sturdy den
the way the air the willow bends
the way my cat and I are friends
the cooing of two mourning doves

and then before the morning light
the sadness of a mother quail
without her children ever more
moved my heart as if a sail
I grimly tacked back to delight.

Strangely (a word not strange to dream)
I tired of the moods I made,
the brooding loneliness of power,
my deafness to what nature said,
the veiled grace of the fixed beam.

Crickets II

Crickets are still going
in the bushes outside the hospital.
They have lived their whole lives there.
I would like to do that.
I often try to live beyond my means,
but the crickets sing under the boxwood
where the faded red chips
meet the faded red bricks,
honey I want you
honey I need you
at exactly the right time
in exactly the right place
at exactly the right speed.
Never mind that the new wing
will destroy their habitat.
That is next season.
In this season
I envy them,
wink to myself
because hearing them
was the most excellent
thing I did today.

Replacement Referees

This season, the refs are on strike
and their replacements
from high schools and colleges
are having trouble making the calls.
There are so many referees in the world,
police, judges, vice-principals,
rules and regulations, traffic cameras.

If you are an eagle and steal fish
from other birds
you will be chided in the afterlife.
Also, the US Government
might let Native Americans kill you
for your feathers.

It is unfortunate that in general,
we can't play nice. 

Bee

A bee drinks Jeanne's leftover blueberry stains
in the bottom of her oatmeal bowl.
In mid-September, there isn't much fruit around
and I can imagine his surprise.
Oil and fresh water are running out around the globe.
Closer to home, it certainly doesn't rain money anymore.
We look out our backyard at the green trees
waving in the dry blue air and swift silver clouds.
One of our cats died in February, and the one that's left
just barely survived acute illness.  She is fourteen.
We feel our own age rolling down into shade.
We read the radical scripture, there is nothing to be released from.
To practice, we notice the unlikely grace around us.

Things You Are

You are a warm blanket and
a dollar with a big smile on it
that was hiding in the grass
you walk at my pace (mostly)
you are a wax record
for my first and best pressing
you are a weathervane
and I am the wind
you help me say
where I am going
and you are the soft curves
of the mountains that hold me
as I lift the river's tongue to you.

You are my family
and a layer of skin
I cut the crust
your boiling fruit is in.

Swallow

Crickets sing all day in the ditch
in lavender grasses and goldenrod
under red-tipped ivy and a lemon willow.
I run down the winding grey road.
It's like me, old but not broken
under the deepest blue sky ever.
I never know on a long run
when my body will take off
in a burst of energy and pleasure
that takes me back to my twenties
and I feel like a swallow
tearing downhill
in love with gravity
and the narrowness of incarnation.
Above, the sky is bluer and bluer,
and it has always been blue,
the essence of blue
that wants to drink in
the gossamer light of the eye.

Bargain

The voice of a good poet
is not easily won.
There are mumbling ghosts
between you and the working of words 
who in their withering desire
offer you nothing,
drooling and slackjawed,
ravenous for your attention,.
You can spend your life arguing with them.

When you have walked resolutely past
and have become very quiet
suddenly god and the devil will both knock on the door.
You don't have to let them in
but if you don't you'll never know
if you could create
something with tender flesh
that is sweet and sinful.

In the end you must sit under the oak
and trade your eyes for the autumn day,
sewing the yarn of your mind
into falling yellow leaves.

Pink Haze Before Fall

Clouds rise from the Delaware
like overripe peaches,
the lingering warmth below,
a cool western breath above.
Today in Seattle somewhere it is like this,
and in Nova Scotia and Utah,
a time when fall approaches
and summer kisses it goodbye
with tears and best wishes
and a love at once particular
and shared by so many places.

And while so many are dying
or living in hand-held devices
this lingering peachy morning
is with them all,
with every thinning leaf.
I offer myself to this morning
and it holds my summers.

Dream III

Suffering is the boundary
of everything good.
I am in the presence of death
and the rising of the lost city.
Only He opens the gates
to begin the journey to the oracle.

Plenitude is brought by broken angels,
but I am full and grant them liberty.
I have an appointment with She
who knows the back of things, She
who grinds the scythe and
will show me
the Grey Room, where He sits in repose
as She looks in the gazing ball
and the hourglass remains full,
but for a single quivering grain.

Football

The pigskin flies back and forth
on the small screen.
The team is up, the team is down.
When we take sides in any contest
defeat is always suited up
on the sidelines, ready to come in.
I am watching with my son
home from college.
I remember the first half of our life together
and the first downs, our strong defense,
our bold playbook.
Now it seems like there are more injuries
more third downs, more Hail Marys.
I get nervous but I know we are on the same team
and we play for the love of the game.

Paterno in Purgatory

Did he wake up there?
Did he find out they removed his statue?
Does he know that now, he's won nothing?
There's always more questions than answers,
but the devil will tell you different.

Fancy Restaurant

Dinner was overfused
like glass dripped on concrete,
smoked, baked, sauced, noodled
minted, peppered, and aiolied,
Japanese, American, Spanish
island, continental, undersea
salt, honey, lemon, garlic
puffed, hammered, split
dribbled, coagulated and toasted,
roasted, blanched, boiled,
creamed, dusted and iced,
with a side of
rhubarb ginger chili sorbet.
Just another sign of the
one world government apocalypse
I tell Jeanne. 
 

Insulin

The cat has been diagnosed with diabetes.
Now all is more difficult
as I drive to work in a needle
passing other needles
over the river that won't flow
toward the work that will never end
with a mind that must be punished
for being too sweet.

And yet, is it really about me?
What of the struggle to survive
in her body, her aging prison?
She is older than me in cat years
or people years, I never know which.
Perhaps right now, she is writing poetry
. . . he is sad for my plight
and he'll stay up all night
with that stray ball of grey in his head. 

Indian Philosophy

It's on the windowsill in the bathroom,
.95 in pencil on the bottom right of the title page.
Following are thirty small excerpts considering
the underlying order to the universe.
At first the eye is the sun and breathing is the wind.
Later, the arrow of meditation sends the little self
into God.
Arguments begin among those who dislike
learning this kind of archery
and persist until the Buddha
points out the arrow in our eye.
As I sit, I browse through the pages
and bright sunshine strikes the words.
Snap the flower arrows of desire
and unseen, escape the king of death. 
But I practice like a Lokayata,
that there is only sensation
and nothing to escape.
I keep this sharp thought
strictly private.

Weight

Why not hang regrets off your face
like weights on little brass hooks
to pull down the corners of your mouth,
the skin around your eyes,
bigger ones for the failure of your arms
to hold the pain, fight the power
and a brick to pull your head down,
curve your body, too soon, toward the earth?
Then we would know what to do.

Grace

I sent my judgment down the road.
I let it make a bag on a stick first,
it put a banana and a bottle of water inside
and took off, bruised and muttering.
The thing never paid rent, mostly just
ate my snacks and complained.

The first thing I noticed was quiet,
which was great. The night sighed,
and then an owl had more space
to hoot in than I'd ever heard.  And
I just let who be who.

Later, I got a little lonely,
I thought I heard an echo of his voice
but I noticed
it was more like lack of familiarity
and that was steep, dark, and there
was a spider or something there too
but it was also natural, free, and vital.

And then just tonight, Grace stopped by for tea
and thanked me for waiting.

Renting

You are around me always now,
sexy, sultry, sassy and sweet
and I keep pinching myself
because it is such a good thing. 
We rent the house, this little wooden place
in the deep green with the crickets
and it is just the way we like it.
We talk about how lucky we are
even though we don't own it.

Outside, it rains wherever rain forms,
because of clouds and wind and air
that depend ever so gently on each other
It is pouring out.

I have a sore throat, but it is getting better,
so I can let go of it during the day.
Yesterday my throat
was entirely mine.

Saturday

Birds are rising in the air, in song and wakefully
sing of seed and mates and they describe the dew.
These Saturday morning hours I do the same.
I brew a pot of coffee and walk outside,
to arrive nowhere, to reach only the soft green
of robin-dotted grass, the pines twined with ivy,
the deepening yellow light of the sun over the road.
My cat says never go to work again. This is better. 
If we lose the rent, we will find a shelter of bent trees,
and I will bring you mice.
I think how naive she is, not knowing weekdays.

Meeting

My cat is so fluffy,
my fingers get lost.
Her eyes are golden
and drink me in
as she pushes her back feet
against my bare foot,
claws out just gently
while I scratch her jaw
and she smiles with
closed eyes and perked ears.

What if I woke and she were hairless?
Why I would love her still
for the heart is not made of hair.
And if her eyes were occluded forever
with milk she could not taste
I would love her, for I know
that love is more true to feeling
than it is to vision.
And if she were rabid by some awful chance
and bit me
I would love her,
because the mind 
is a temporary thing
and not liable for its infections.
And when she dies I will love her
since this body is just one waystation
that the soul rests in for a while.

So I am left now to wonder
what it is I love her for
as the morning passes gently
in the fluttering of sparrows.
They chirp a greeting, a welcome,
the simple apogee of any spirit's arc.

Feelings

It may well be
that we touch nothing
for the vast space
between the tiniest things,
or that we see only thought
or that time has curved everything so
that today happened yesterday
and yet specifically,
if you don't mind
what is the reason
that we make feelings
stay in on a sunny day,
hide them from the good doctor,
feed them bones
when they are the one thing
we are actually in touch with?

Satellite

I am the satellite
who wants to know you
more deeply now.
I send you waves of information
through the tenuous atmosphere.

I have no time
to need things to be different
I no longer need other places to be.

There is the atmosphere of course,
which I grant my resistance.

Ways To Be

I am sending you a greeting card
or sprinkling hot foot powder
where you are walking.
I am your nurse
or narcissus.
I am up in your gallery applauding
or I am shining a poison apple.
I am a keystone that knows balance
or I am a whirling tempest.
I am these things around you
and I am them around myself.

And since, no matter what we have done
or who we are
we have no right to judge
and no boundary to caring,
I will pick up the sweet ways.

Birds III

Birds sing in the woods.
The master hears them.
His body is moving by.
The sound is pleasant.
He knows the timbre.
He identifies the bird.
He has many thoughts.

Yet he wants nothing
and he does not compare
even in the heap of his mind.
He is like the forest,
made of many things.
He lets name be name
and form be form.
The illusion of their meeting
is a pathway through the forest
dappled with song.

On Retreat

I decided to lay in wait
for my next thought
to observe from where it arose
to thus see better how it was made,
determine its function, its duration
and its decay.

I waited and no thought came
despite my strong and thorough eye.
I cast a net, a searchlight, set a tripwire,
I even was a spy
who could not be seen looking
like on a streetcorner in Paris in 1940
with a poison-tipped umbrella
outside a small and dimly lit cafe.
But no one and nothing appeared.

I became angry
and called out the thought from its lair.
Step outside, I screamed.
I'd vowed never to be bullied again
as I was as a child, victim of Egghead
and the fist and the boot.
I am wiser and also prepared and unafraid now
to use brute force to overwhelm a foe.
Still, no thought came out, no response.

And by degrees I became more and more lost
as if I'd stumbled into the cavern
where the object of my efforts should be
but it was cold, barren, lifeless,
dripping with unformed and cast off liquid
which was once the bright and bilious world
of the mind above.
I became terrified, as I once had when I was very small,
my curiosity had taken me away from camp
and I could not find my way back.

Luckily I remembered that I was squarely grounded
upon my meditation cushion
and I beat a hasty retreat back.
This was something, I resolved,
to discuss with the master.

Chapel

If I could design the world,
I'd leave some of it wild and unpredictable,
like a freshwater pond
with a thin barrier to the tide
that will become salt, fresh
and salt again in one short lifetime.

I would make breath and blood give life,
but not forever because here
is at last a lonely place
like the middle of the sea.

I would give one opportunity
the size of a grain of sand
for true love to be found,
if there is the kind of effort
that lifts terns across poles,
that keeps walking all the way
through the fog of wanting.

I would lace the blue bowl of the sky
with linen clouds
and let them grow dark blades
that stir the wind and sink frail ships.

I would honor the sky and clouds
as I imagine Michelangelo did
his ceiling and his paint.

Routes

I met your ex for the first time tonight.
I wanted to tell him he had good taste
or that he was an idiot for letting you go.

But all three of us have been divorced,
we are all on the same wide road of life.
I followed all the signs of my heart to find you,
but idiocy is always waiting.
Its why there are white lines where the curb falls off,
and double yellow lines where
it is not safe to pass, even when its not good
to stay behind a truck for days.

Around the heart are nightmares.
They tell the heart where to go,
with its wise eye on the lines,
and its occasional need for risk.

Full Pot

I told myself in deep meditation
that I would never
be attached to things again.
But the next morning
I forgot to put the carafe
in the coffee maker
and coffee went everywhere
and my resistance
became stuck to my tension
and I could not function.

I am not surprised
that the coffee maker
is more awake than me. 

Seasons

I have been with singing birds of spring
and apple blossoms and new grass.
I have watched crow on his way home
under silver skies in fall
over brown and yellow leaves
and the dry assembly of trees.
I have felt the sweet pinch of snow
in my nose as I ran and fell, laughing.

There is little else I wanted.
I suppose my memories will go back
to where they came
which is the only way
I am allowed to have them.

Lion

I woke and there a lion in my room
which was not there before,
or hid perhaps amid the gloom
til now absent of his roar
did send my eardrums to my heart
to warn me of a meal
of which I was the meaty part
and not a guest genteel.
Did I mention this was long ago
and for a while long
I hid amid the dust below
the bed, afraid of him so strong.
But through an exercise of wit,
endurance and resolve,
I came to touch the hide of it
and even came to love
the beast whose hot and hearty breath
and deep and savage growl
were never meant to serve my death
but there to make me whole,
for courage is an empty thing
without its trembling reach
toward the thing that lions bring
our wall of fear to breech. 

Checking Out

I have trouble checking in
when I am en route,
even answering Are you hungry?
when I am walking upstairs
coming home after work.
I presume I may be hungry
but the real question I cannot ask
is what would happen if I stopped
to consider the question.
I'm quite sure I would stay in my work clothes
halfway up the stairs until I was dead. 

White Eagle

I am in Nova Scotia
in the house on the rocks
below the center-pole
next to a wooden crate
filled with little pieces
of swift-burning driftwood.

I drift back to an imaginary time
when the crate was filled with ginger ale.

Oh the hot mid-August atmosphere
of 1951 that might drift through
the stiff aluminum-screened door.
Sitting around drinking
White Eagle Pale Dry & Golden Ginger Ale.
The tales of the past I might hear
as I write today on another humid afternoon
next to the box, stamped and registered
by the White Eagle Bottling Works
of Chicopee Falls, Mass.

I could almost be there,
sipping a cold White Eagle
with a few friends in their late twenties,
somewhere west of Boston.

Andy has a leg blown off in the war,
Terry's body was blown off his leg,
and he is not there at all anymore.
I am alright, thoroughly because of luck.
Bobby, pale and dry, is still shellshocked,
and hung over again.

We might talk about girls,
dirty millwork and fishing.
We might put the box in some corner
when we are done.

Prayer

That when scary things find you,
they will be very tiny.

When you see a baby bird that
has fallen from its nest
you try to help
but you understand
that freedom and love
visit wild places
and their breadth and depth
can even encompass them
if you will let go very deeply.

That you rejoice
in sun-warmed land
and your body brings you
the strength of terns, monarchs,
and starlight;
The body that feels the rain,
that finds shelter,
that finds the body of its one true love.

That you find the ecstasy of being one
with the breath or a stone or with sound,
and that you find a way to stay there
through ecstasy even to the end
of all that is made in wandering.

That when you reach a sea of glass
you will not be alone.
That if you must go,
you have one last sunset
to say goodbye.

And when you finally decide not to return,
you send your spirit
to those who do not pray.

My Life

I have lived many wonderful lives.

I was a little boy in England
and I ate Christmas pudding with real money in it.
My sister got a firework stuck in her dress
on Guy Fawkes Day.
My parents were crying in the old townhouse
on the day Kennedy died and I was four.

I was a Boy Scout in Spain,
and I made a rubberband gun
to catch dragonflies
and fed them to chameleons,
right out of my hand.
I ate sherry grapes off the vine up the hill,
and they were golden balls of honey.

I traveled to see the Grateful Dead in college.
I walked in a boy and walked out
tattooed from head to toe in prayers.
I can still read them.

I worked hard and had two children.
They were irrepressably happy,
good as Macintosh apples in Vermont in October.
I backed away from my marriage
until I had one step left behind me
at the edge of a high cliff.

I stopped searching
for anything outside myself.
I sifted the wind alone,
blistering and blinding.
At last I found you,
round-eyed, amber, and moist.
With you I write new stories.

All of my life is extraordinary, and yet
I wish I could convey the feeling
of being a minor character
as yet unaware
of the center of the wheel
upon which he is a spoke. 

In Nova Scotia

My wife is arranging beads,
considering which large one
might work in the center of a necklace.
I am telling her stories about John Cage
after skimming a biography,
painting a picture of what
I really don't grasp.

Cage let a fire alarm go off all night, 
resting comfortably
as he considered its place
in the silence around him.

I couldn't do that.
On the ride up to the cabin
I almost drove into a bridge
just to change the tempo of things.

How about this one? she says,
holding up a brown shell disc.
That would look good on you, I say.

Under Starlight

The world I am upon is accelerating
and thus it is harder to be still.

I asked to know what is behind this world
and now I hold what burns my palms.

When we were dew-eyed children
the wind and the animals would visit,
the sun dappled across our new hair
and we let rhymes and stories unfurl
like morning glories.

Now we forget where our ancestors are buried,
we ask for a lot and listen a little.

I am sitting in the black night by the sea
after my tongue is too tired to move
and I can no longer grasp my plans
because they are saplings grown full.

The world spins more quickly
because it now moves
from the magnet of its own birth
to the magnet of its death.

Tonight I ask for less,
I open the little book I was given.
The words, though written in fire,
circumscribe the garden at the shore,
and tell me how to set out
a quiet and sturdy boat.

Red

A man became red.
He was not angry.
He saw the blood-red wall
of a barn set in the dappled green
of Nova Scotia.
The barn-side cut him
and he became the same.

Later, he squeezed his eyes shut
while he looked up
at the balmy face of the sun
and her hair caressed him
yellow, orange and he squeezed tighter
red deeper and deeper
and he let go at the edge of indigo
and he held it there
in the afternoon of his hot short life
and he kissed her
and it chapped his lips terribly,
but at least he was not blinded.

At sunset, he spread out on clouds
and then winked behind some fir trees
that might be cut down for barns
on some bright blue day.

Hourglass

The time men spend
waiting for women
to get ready to go out
is roughly equal to the time
women spend waiting
for men to return
from the sea and from war.

This is why there was
never a woman as fine
as Blackbeard's lady.

Plum

Somewhere in the middle
of my mad search
for love's sweet, tart, and blood-red plum
I notice you finding me
and I let love grow, ripen and burst
and at last I find that

love needs no search at all
it has nowhere to go
it has branches tied to a trunk
that is tied to roots
that are watered
right here
by everything we let go of.

Hyphen

Some supplicate the cobra bite,
the dust of thirst,
or the lion-paw,
that stop the gathering of the body
into the army
of its own kingdom.

Some find in death a fine prayer,
excellent of pain,
the lion's head full of bees,
the bone-white of the empty temple,
the grim hiss of expiration,
the equal height of everything
under the scimitar.

Others walk the stepping-stone
of what is release,
what is breaching joy,
endless dawn.

Others, the hypnosis
of a thousand turns of carving-knife
in the white walls of the palace

as the river runs through its fat-homed bank,
by rude ravens,
in the buzz of hungry dragonflies.

Aizen

Kevin pulls up a picture on his droid.
Aizen Myoo, Lord of Passion.
Have you been to the MFA to see it?
He transforms attachment into enlightenment.
That's like Jesus, I reply,
to not be of this world anymore.

Secretly, I want to tell him
that I meditate every day,
that I know many enlightening words.

But I hold my tongue,
for to blunt
the sweet taste of pride.

Any Storm in a Port

When the mind is a lost boat
in a milk-white fog
in the body of the sea,
flat and green and empty
and wishing for a friend,
a fish, a flutter of wind
or anything to drift by
then let go
of this fog, this sea of glass,
this lonely one.

Meditation II

I remember exactly where I left off,
when I was stabbing away at breathing,
trying to become one with it.
Naturally, breathing was moving away,
while I kept jumping forward,
restless and exhausted
with the sum total of who I was
arguing about what I was not yet,
and me just moving, because
standing still might tear off my head.

I remember the arguments,
mostly about proof of my expertise
at playing marbles, at being right,
at being innocent, at working hard,
at hiding, and at arguing.
I was trying to take apart a house
with a pile of bricks and some mortar,
bathing in layers of mud,
throwing targets aimlessly about,
and sinking fast.

I remember where I left off,
and I know who to let go of.

Poesy

The breeze is a good nurse tonight,
snaps a clean cool sheet around me,

I am in leaning over the parapet of ecstasy
from the sweet medicine. 
Tomorrow, I will eat the names of things
and become ill again.

Listen, dusk birds,
I sing of insight
albeit in borrowed tone,
and snatch the fibers of context
to line my nest.

Daydream

I got a Dodge Dart, like dad had, but I got it now,
and started acting like dad.
I cleared my throat a lot to announce I was here,
but secretly Oh my God I hope we don't die
like his father did in the crash before I was born.

The Dart was an impermeable boundary
between my soft sons and war,
love and hatred, sanity and schirrohis, 
and we rode around the hot roads,
in June's lingering lime green trees.

They knew I was being dad, and it was fun for a while. 

Waterfall

I am falling like water,
from fifty years up,
into an endless pool.

Many lessons on the way
have I gathered into drops
that I hold with moist eyes.

All is change,
that is what collects the most,
and as I let go,
the rocks below soften.  

Spirits

What a fool I was
not to notice the spirits
running beside me in the sun,
lifted out of the trees at night
by the hand of darkness,
dancing on my head in sleep.
And there have been little ones
about my big cat
as she thumps down the stairs.
Around you, bright fairies
at dawn, a little darker at noon,
but always moist, quick, urgent.

I could not see them
for my residence, my constitution,
my name, my Caliphate.

Here they are, like the mourning dove
nesting outside my window at work,
unbidden, working for our peace,
unalloyed,
unlikely to sit at council,
and yet to our opportunity
ever inclined.

love

Most poets write of loss and call it love,
today I kissed you and I lost the one who finds.
I followed your tongue, I waited,
I stripped my mouth of its hunger
and felt the bones that hold my face
and the heart that lifts them
to awake in your fair and foreign place
to find you waiting for me,
not to soothe or salve some wound
or to pull me out of harm,
but just to love me,
just to give me, just to share
that moist and moving thing,
a wisdom of accord and calm
so deep and unabashed
it exceeds even the Balm,
I at last abide, I bend to song of me
your tongue does silent sing.

Just Because

Everything comes to be
from its recent passage.
Swallows dip from the sky
to snatch tawny moths
that rise behind the mower.
They fly out of hunger, both,
and this is why they have wings.
Mockingbird listened
and this is why she sings.

Listen, do you hear her?
There is one voice here
that comes from nowhere,
and needs nowhere to go.

Anemone

If doubt were an animal
it would be large and grey
like a whale, only not as benign
as we dream them to be.
Perhaps it would be falling
to the bottom of the sea,
victim of a stroke or swift senility,
a shadow looming on anemonae,
knowing even less its fate
than its waving victim.

A battle known is half a battle won.
The shifting tides of life
make shifting half of victory,
and so and sometimes sinks a thing
so large it blots the sun,
and it seems to me that half of doubt
are legs too firm to run.

Opening

The Olympians are marching
and their flags are flying,
cream, night, amber,
honey, sunrise, seashell, bisque,
mocha, cashmere, bronze,
sandstone, porcelain, pink,
and olive backgrounds
behind green, blue and gold stars
crossed with glowing strands
of black, gold, red and brown.

Oh to bear this banner firmly,
to hail proudly,
to agree to compete
and to win or to lose.

What I Am

I am suddenly outside myself
like the moon and the air
thick with crickets.
They sing to each other
and there is not one note
about me.
I was a scribbled journal
left above the coats
in the meeting house.
I was like the coats,
having been adequate
to warm you.
I was like the huge sycamore
that has fallen in heavy rain
that even moved the ground,
and was talked about for a week.
I am moving farther from
what I thought I was,
way into the country,
where I sink to what is chaste.

I let my body be a hillside
by a mountain stream,
tickled to the brink of bearing.

Leafhopper

A grey leafhopper with a very tall head
climbs up the finial on the deck
upside down and over the bulb
where it meets the rectangular beam.
Here, he cannot walk upside down,
there is no room. He looks right
he looks left, he knows it is the same all around.
He wants to go up.  He waits a second
and then he hops, upside down
to the bottom of the beam, and continues up.
He is determined, careful and wise.
He looks ahead, calculates, and deduces.
He executes, he is brave, and he is successful.
His feet are sticky, he is light,
he is strong, he is precise, and hard to find.
Listen, I'm not going to write about
how I wish I was like a leafhopper,
because I don't.
They don't have fancy meals, they don't enjoy music,
they don't fall in love, and they don't write.
And yet, leaves might taste incredible,
sounds could be ecstatic to them,
I really don't know if they fall in love,
and they don't write, but they are written about.
Whitman's Leafhoppers of Grass, for instance.

Someday

The brother of a shooting victim said on tv
If hate did this, imagine what we can do
with love like we have in this room.
Someday, I will get in the car and go to work
and I will not wish to be anywhere else.
I will come home and hold you, sit beside you
and not imagine anything different.

Sitting II

My reflections are wax
and they burn all night
with a thin wick of desire.
On bright candle!
The flame does eat the dark air
and illuminates the repose of
the good things on my altar
that was washed out by
our sovereign star last noon.

But for doubt I am immortal,
but for love I am lost.
I bend to the grace of the senses,
to serve them a little while
as they open like nightshade,
flutter like sudden green moths,
and lift water like the moon.

I burned when I was a boy
and I grew with the twilight.
Now I am sitting quietly,
surrounded by a bell, dried sea urchins,
and a little buddha.
They seem alive in the flickering light.

Crows II

Five crows wheeled before rolling grey clouds
and spoke with wing and caw
This is the mouth of the thunderbird,
and his whistle that makes us to rise, 
here we are falling and wheeling in fits,
and soon it will be time to hide.
My wife and I watch them from our seats on the porch.
I point out how clouds are turning like tornadoes
and she brings up the charge in the air.
We are close to science of how things work
and so far from the wings that we wear.

The Middle Class Leanings of Whales

In town on an indigo summer night
walking to the movies with my wife
by century trees flanking uplit green doors
on sidewalks safe and clean
vertical gold neon under a sliver of moon
chasing saturn through dear heaven,
I have enough time to breathe full the
oak, dust and grass air and all the sharp outlines
of a clear night.

Whales float peacefully somewhere
out of reach of harpoons
without wondering if they should love their lives,
their big-eyed spotted calves,
their sweet swirl of krill
or the sea chasing their powerful tails.

Of course there will be lean times,
oil spills, whalers and old age.
For me, blizzards, lightning and layoffs.

But right now, here in this fine flood
this breath
will not drown me.

Yogurt

In psychotherapy at twelve I think of yogurt,
cherry greek yogurt at the cafeteria,
sweet smooth cool white thick yogurt
as Andrea chokes on the word boyfriend
who drives drunk, laughs about her illness with her son,
and she does not know who she is
because she worked like a slave
for her foster family since they took her
from the Philippines when she was thirteen.

The group is paralyzed and
cannot speak healing words or even
lift their eyes.
I let go, eat the bitterness, the rocks,
the heat, the blackness,
and eyes begin to lift as if out of a spell,
and none of us wish to be slaves any longer.

Buffalo Nickle Keychain

On a teardrop leather backing
was riveted a noble Indian,
a gift from my father
and I had it for all of my twenties.
It folded over the keys just so
and kept them from scratching me,
took me to work with some
connection to the natural world
my father loved so much.

I don't remember when I lost it,
but it has been gone for decades.
I will give my sons something they will cherish
and then lose to the dust storm of time.

Today I feel my father in the wind,
his firm hand around my shoulder,
whispering  
life gives life
and so is never lost.

Breakfast

It's the first wave of hunger that gets you,
draws your stomach up to your skull
and kicks your brain onto your empty plate, 
turns talk to babel, the cafe into a jungle
wherein, if you had planned to eat
you are clearly lost.
Predatory anger rises. The waiter
looks somehow like bacon. 
Even tigers would be reasonable
if they weren't kept waiting so long.
Every plate is full but yours.
The fork begins to look like
a perfectly reasonable hunting implement.
The meal comes just before cannibalism,
madness, or divorce.

You eat and forget. You dream of lunch
to the anthem of the undulating tongue which has won the battle
and preserved the union. 

It's breakfast that gets you. 

Humidity

In the thick air off the hungry green corn
I wobble up the path, in rivers of sweat,
by the swelling mushrooms on the stump
and the thump of distant shotguns,
bursting like aneurisms
in the fat body of the park.

I started running in the exodus of Friday afternoon,
light,  the bonds of work trailing behind,
parting clouds like a jet,
a prime number in a mist of division,
present and accounted for,
borne on the steed of effort,
drawn tight as a kite,
matched to my charge.

But by the inclination of degrees
I was enveloped
in the daughter of fire and water
and her languid majesty.
She bends time and wrings out space,
she is hallucination,
she pulls the head into the intestines,
she makes eyes to grow on the dead.

My heart took its place,
an oar on a canoe in the river,
my muscles but so many fish,
and my perspective itself was removed,
still quivering, for her supplication.