Details

I am at a loss for resonant details.
I can't find any lately, they aren't there, or
they've vanished like a gray, starving ghost
standing in front of a rusty mirror,
unable to see itself, no one to haunt,
in an empty mansion, finally letting go
out of sheer exhaustion, as did its erstwhile home
and body, having sadly found
that spirit itself must in the end,
like all muses sweet or terrifying, shift.

Free Things

The way the sunset bleeds gently
into the body of the horizon,
the way little birds swing up together,
right here, outside our house,
clear pale blue winter mornings
and their lingering silver stars.
I love these things more than
any thought of other lands,
any dream of dappled seas.
Yet with the fire and wind
that quickens my tongue, I say,
I love you more than all of these

Mail

I get letters.
I got one from Love,
a sweet almanac,
signed we miss you.
I thought I'd been in touch.

A letter from the well of Sadness
asked for a donation of
as many tears as I could spare,
but I kept them inside,
for the funeral of my next cat.

Later, one from the company of Death
arrived registered to me,
a bill I could not pay, nor fix,
and from it cannot turn away
until one uneventful eve,
it will finally come due.

Last month the Firmament dropped me a line,
in hand-lettered script,
leaning lightly in the box.
I'd been invited to write
a screenplay for the Upanishads.

And so I read them a thousand times,
a thousand times a thousand,
and scripted the journey to the door
behind the heart of space.
Yet I sit uneasy and to some extent undone,
for every writer knows the self is
too painful to cast.

Antlers

I wish I had antlers.
"They're too heavy," you say,
but I could handle it.
Antlers are bold, I mean
just try to dis them in person.
Once a year I'd snap,
smash into things, especially
other guys with antlers.
It'd be super majestic.
I'm tired of walking around
with a plain head.

At Mercer

I saw a Blastoma or whatever
genus of mushroom by the hospital,
and on a January day, no less.
Maybe I was thinking cancer,
I make up names for things
with the dust of memory
and moist scrutiny,
some wry, some wrong.
It was a straight stalk with star-shaped
leaves under a blown-out ball.

Language is of two minds,
neutral and warming with attention,
and hot and ready out of nowhere.
It's like all these little things I see,
shy from a distance,
proud and bold up close,
blushing in a sobriquet.

I get restless and I get tired.
Thoughts bloom and explode,
stream out asides.

Rosie

Outside there is light rain,
padding down gently
the way she used to walk.
It is warm, but there is no
soft firebox curled next to you.
You cry when I bring you her blanket,
want her back, but
she is outside now,
wild again,
in clouds, in sweet air.

Until you see her again,
may she bring warmth
to your sadness,
love that has no distance,
no condition, no passing.

Goodbye

The light has winked out,
a cloud has passed
over bright sunshine.
What will you do now, my love?
Will you drag her broken body
to the gates of heaven
and ask why?

That you must go there
is the answer,
you see heaven is not here,
but loss, sorrow and decay
are out upon the land.

Perhaps they will open,
lead you past the fire of love
and the ice of separation
that sustain each other,
to the bloody heart of time.
Perhaps they will remain silent,
because you do not have the key,
because it would break the spell.

It would be as easy to transport
the devil himself back across
the black water.

Sparrows flit in low branches
this winter day.
I only want to hold them
for a little while.
They have some spark in their eyes.

Farm

Today I am an empty barn
in the dead of winter, wood cracked,
cold as the field around it,
not a shred of hay,
my thoughts gone with the last
of the animals taken to market
seasons ago, after the farmer
was taken to heaven.

Even the cats have vanished.
They would warm each other here,
but each one needed mice, which
stole a little feed.

How things change.
The land yields for a while,
lets us grow and build,
imagine and narrate.

Then come dry seasons,
some misappropriation
of what needs water,
and a harvest of dust.

The Language of Death

It is not that foreign.
Crows gather on the eaves
without a single word.
The sun sets, coals grow cold,
and the wind whispers dry
little puddles of rain.

Me

When I am hot,
roll down the windows.
When I am cold,
turn up the heat.
Bar-headed geese
wait out a storm
at twenty-thousand feet,
and because they share
the extremes of thin air
they are wiser and kinder than me.

I would find that migration
of two thousand miles was
about two thousand miles too far,
but no medals please,
to the geese because,
they wouldn't do well in the car.

Change

September's leaves are under snow
and becoming something else.
I am restless for them,
and cold, and coming apart.

Everything must end, that is the law,
but it is only written in the fall.
It circles my heart in gold,
I stand in the forest, call back to you.

Beware a safer admonition,
draw deep the lonely air.
Listen, I am drumming for you,
and by daybreak will be there.

Everything must begin.
I will speak my piece in salt hail,
that tears me to the bone,
and bend my knee for what i find
in you, with you, alone.

Before Snow

Little crystals are everywhere,
quilting a firm bank of backlit white,
pine branches hang still, thick and black,
cold, rich, and heavy in the night.

Elves have pricked the atmosphere,
that the frost-king breathe the air,
and exhale after turning blue,
what sandmen would not dare

Night

Owl's eye is open
while mouse's eye closes.
The great Eye is always open.

We run away from the dark,
to dreams, to the kneeling-bench,
but dawn will not hasten her arrival,
this is the law.

Mouse's eye will no longer open.
A tear falls from black heaven.
Owl flies away.

Pinky

I was going to run a marathon
and get a tattoo today,
but the feeling didn't last.

It doesn't make sense
this vanishing energy,
but then even a pinky
never really has it,
it falls from gravity,
flies up from the simple need
to unsquish itself.

I suppose there is therefore
anti-energy, you know,
bouncing balls wouldn't need to re-round
unless the rest of the world already
had the presumption of them doing so.

I fell in love with you
when I was full of life.
I am still so gloriously flattened.
I fear coming up again, but I must.

Praises be, love is not a ball,
or where it lands,
love is more than the fall,
or the empty hands,
it is the heart, the one
held ever, held only, by trust.

Maze

Sleep has this way
of folding back in on itself,
like the rain forest on a dead tree,
or the tide, or the way
sunset takes all the light back.

I suppose you could argue with it,
but the judge is decomposing,
logic is rolling away,
and definition grows dark.

Just on the very edge,
my ears whine like jets,
my sinuses fall into graves,
my ribcage opens,
and my heart
leads a tattered band
into the square of shadows.

In the Hospital

I smile to visitors
as I go to lunch.
They touch my smile
like light from a lighthouse,
and I know that someone is in danger,
another is departing,
another waits on shore.

I thought I was sailing
on a sunny day,
but it can be stormy, this life.
This hull we are buoyed by
so very thin, they flash.

In the Yard

I saw a leaf impaled on a twig,
it may split later this winter,
fly to two different little cemeteries.
In neon moss, flat jade weed flowers
were quite alive and at home.
Overhead, a vulture wandered.
I want to open up my head,
and let out what is inside,
to fall or rise, and grow or die,
at the home of the wind, the lips of winter.
For now, I write to the little things I love.

Buckingham Mountain

We walk together through the valley,
quiet winter colors around us,
lime and rust cedars dot pale marsh grass
under slate and linen clouds.
On the slate road, ash bark with a pale green lichen corsage
has fallen for you.
To the east, sumac vines tint a dry blue sky.
I pick up an ice candy dish and drop it,
you protest as it falls.
Uphill, there are needle crystals in the roadside.
Dirty and pretty, they clack like wood.
Two burros come out of the steep shadow as we go by,
you say maybe they are getting to know us.
In a headwind, we walk quickly home to warm up.
We wonder about colonists,
who were too hungry and cold to go for a walk,
or to imagine us.

Keats

Blogging is so cool, because
I have a way of organizing my poems,
with a place for comments,
connected everywhere at once.
Starbucks gives me venti energy,
to write poems about anything.
I often have the TV on in the background
if I am at home creating.
It keeps me company.

Keats had what, like an inkwell,
super thick paper, black tea,
a few birds out an open window
in some murky cottage,
writing 'Entreaties to Solitude?'
Come on, man.

Coda

Fifteen million were killed in World War I,
and more were taken apart alive,
so many broken from what
they loved and from what loved them.

Somewhere on the Amazon in 1914,
a naked boy, never knowing hatred,
pretend fished with vine and stick,
and held his family in sweet moist night.

My mind is like these.
Though rockets and whiskey killed him first,
I want to make my grandfather die again
for tearing out my mother's heart.
When I am outside, I rise to treetop cathedrals
in ecstasy, though they tremble of late.

When Germany was winning, they were out of metal.
In towns, church bells were given funerals, and then melted.
I wonder what the children thought.

Dreams

In dreams, all is electric.
Even fear is worth the trip,
every jagged edge of bloody window glass
has its nervous living story, shimmering
crimson oil on each trembling tip.
Love in that place is first dances,
yielding of earth to water,
the descent of bright doves,
and then fire, carnivale,
a strawberry tongue to the ear.

In dreams, charge your soul
with the current of touching,
of watching, feeling, and running.
There's no time for sleep,
and no body to tire.

Run to the city square under the moon,
listen to the whisper of the ochre salamander.
"Energy is overrated," he says, as he casts
himself again into the fire.

Exit

Again, black birds swirl
above the steep walls of the prison.
Hundreds lift, circle and stream
away toward the countryside.
I cannot find a leader, yet they are led.
To know, they meet again and again,
they pass in turns and speak in shapes.

I am driving to night work
along the gray road of the kingdom.
Hundreds of us roll and dream
that outside is better than inside.
I turn the dials in my head,
to find direction; They but lend
formless routes I cannot take.

Reflection

You dreamed of a woman in another world
on the other side of a mirror.
You needed a spell from your friends
to get through and help her.
A full moon rolls through heaven tonight
and there is no wind.
Hurry, call to them, she needs you,
she knows you from her dreams,
she sees you when you comb your hair,
out of the corner of your eye.

Owls

Tonight the moon is whole.
Day birds rest in thickets.
I wish my mind were like them,
peaceful under her glow,
but it is a hungry owl,
and my thoughts are mice.
"Whatever you do at this time,"
a monk said to me once,
"is increased for the rest of the month."
If I stop hunting for things,
I fear starvation.

My home is warm and quiet,
but on the television,
the battle of Stalingrad rages,
frozen, heartless, and deafening.

Outside, there may be many owls,
but few of us venture out to know.
I continue to write, past moonset.
For that, I will be irritable tomorrow.

Sin

Where is trouble but for its name?
I feed a restless mind with bees;
The poverty of Whitman and Joyce!
But that is just jealousy, an angry habit,
born of fear, from carrying red roses
and blue violets in a hailstorm.

Becoming stripped of petals,
I seed the stations of sense.
For my eyes, gold desert sand and azure sky,
for my ears, three owls calling
in the ice of moonless winter.
Your skin is deep vanilla, moist musk,
a little lemon peel and pure paper.
I taste the salt of nightmare at daybreak,
and pause before sweets and coffee.

My body was a castle, fathom long and lonely.
I wrote letters to a peasant girl in town,
unseen by the king.
"I will run to you," I said.

Crows

In the morning, restless crows
watch the dirty city from wires.
Two fall to pick
from a moving trash truck,
and lift back up to perch.
On my way home, hundreds
roll through blue dusk.
They know each other,
pairs, children, clan;
They are borne by spirit,
to home on the horizon
where they will share tales,
while we stumble alone,
in crumpled newsprint,
stuck to the ground.

Filling

Under the Happy Birthday
and under the icing
in between the cake
is the filling
that was whipped
from an egg, sugar, and all that.
There was a chicken before the egg,
and whatever makes sugar nowadays.
After the party,
a little filling goes a long way,
to the dumping ground.

A birthday is a good time to remember
that you are good simply for being.
You help the world because you fit
into it like filling,
and although you will make dirt for
chicken feed, or sugar beets (maybe that's it),
right now,
love is all.

Cats

Cats move everywhere
through the city at night.
They own blackness, the stars,
and the cold of January.
I own the headlights on my car
and a coat with bird feathers in it.
I rush to sleep, full for tomorrow
while they run.
I dream in clean and sacred scenes
where cats sail with me,
show me what eyes and ears can really do,
while somewhere below,
blood runs through my veins,
food wanders about tunnels
and synapses blink like empty stoplights.

Succito has gone on another alms round
in damp England, with nothing but a bowl,
to know what cannot be owned.
He could get pneumonia out there,
or rabies.

Holding Patterns

Dust settles in rooms around the house
a few mice move around while we sleep
I fold my fears into warm towels before bed
and give them to the closet to keep
overnight while your cat with cancer dies
a little bit more each day
and I wonder if I can be anything
more than a place behind my eyes,
move out to touch your tears
that settle on her bones,
bear these hands to trade with others
that will wash and dry the dead.

Tree

The heartwood has been eaten by worms
into a kind of honeycomb,
which we harvest and bring home,
for some aesthetic.
Later, on a long run,
I notice many trees
in varying states of decay,
victims of neat woodpecker holes,
mushrooms fanning from moist clefts,
an excess of moisture at their roots,
(probably, as my neighbor complains,
from unchecked development and new runoff),
bark bursting from black molds,
some down from the early snow this year,
a few even felled by their fellows.
But they don't complain,
they just creak and crack,
squeak in the wind at night
when they rub together.
They watch me as I run by,
more slowly these days.

Bowl

If I could cook the food of the spirit
rather than what I think I should be,
what I should have,
and what I don't want to lose,
with wishes from salesmen,
comparisons loaned from the mind,
insured by doubt,
then I would.
Oh but never mind, I'm doing it again.
I'll make it up on this first day of the year,
touch the squirrel on the road,
sweat a little,
write,
kiss you.
You can help me,
hold my legs,
mix it all up in the sky.