Getting Away

I'll be out in the woods someday,
that's what's at the end of the road,
sprinkled like chips if you don't mind,
in a frosty October morning. 
What would it take to get away?
Would I trade it all for a begging bowl?
Or tell the oil company to piss off,
and let them help me disappear?
It doesn't have to end that way,
but lets face it, they built me.
The computer, the pen, the paper,
the house, the car, the wheels,
the soap, the shower, the shirt,
the shoes, the toilet, the meat,
the air conditioning, the lights,
oh, and they fixed a broken bone,
they did all that,
but they did not suspend the sun,
place the brown earth down,
start a fire from lightning,
or let me touch the nest of your body.

I'll shed the skin they left me,
emerge in new words,
let the mosquitoes speckle me,
stay naked, learn to walk on rocks,
gain the strength of grasses,
stop turning their glossy pages.

Going to Sleep

A little ashen moth under the curtains,
I touched him last night as he lay on his side
and he moved.
This morning he is upright, as if
preparing to fly.

How much have I missed in my lifetime,
as my friends lose their knees and their minds?
Yesterday, an ant was in the shower,
and the magazines had no inserts
to pull out and use as a liferaft, and he died,
and I did not move very fast, he was only an ant.

Only a little moth has died.
My thoughts come to rest
on my treasured windowsills,
those platforms of who I am,
where I keep out the disease,
inside somewhere safe.

As I lay down for the night,
I say a prayer for grace
to grant temperence to my keeper,
to let me stand in the last hour.

Daughter of the Thunderbird

She only rests, but never in quiet.
She receives burning and breaking bodies,
she outstrips death by moving close.
Look, shadows are moving across the landscape,
we were just a moment ago in the sun,
Chief of insubstantiality.

She gives him her red blanket,
to make a little sunset.
Creation is like that,
proud of the bloom he is loaned.

Places to Be

I shall retreat to a black forest in Bengal,
paint my eyelids black, and sit for a year,
knowing the blackness of superstition, leopards,
death, the stars, the earth, and what is under water.
My face will frighten the locals, and thereby be revered.

Here in Pennsylvania, I sit each night, and smile.
I text my friends, watch TV with you on the couch,
and leave darkness alone until at last I dream.
There, I wander in the mystery of things,
with nothing but the choice to be afraid or not.

Henge

We collect rocks,
little grey ones with white lines from Nova Scotia,
and you move them around the house.
You make little circles out of them.
They are meeting each other and getting along.

I have collected many things that do not cooperate
and they lay untended deep inside me,
hard, lonely, and tired of competition. 

You know secrets.
I should notice your movements.
You know there is nothing to defeat.
Men do not know what good shepherds their wives are,
nor do they understand the cooperation of stones.

Muse

I look for you in the air in the living room,
in the overstuffed files of my brain,
along languid rivulets of doubt and sorrow,
that lead from the lake that is my true home
somewhere across fields of poppies and chamomile.

Suddenly you arrive in beads of sweat,
in my argument with a broken fingernail.
I am exhausted, I capitulate
and ramble like spilled grapes
across the kitchen floor.

You write in lines across my palm,
Touch that which is touching, 
bear this lightly, 
know the binding-dust.

Hot Sunday

Down on the lawn
there are old concrete posts
that circle an old concrete fountain.
The pool is green, wavy and clean,
like a glass of ginger ale over ice
on a hot day.

Nearby, a new property sprawls
between the towpath and the river,
cedar with stone walkways,
a rock-ringed blue pool,
and a raised playhouse under the sycamores.

Somebody pays, every decade,
from working too much, or just
from their position under the stars,
for pools in the summer,
with madness, suicide, cirrhosis,
cancer, or falling asleep swimming.

What is loved, of this body,
of the bodies of our family,
all float away, at last untended,
while pillars rest there a little longer,
pitted by time.

Nowhere, Never

Cars, forgotten landscaping, cotton clouds,
a thick blue sky, five sparrows in a broken bush, and me
walking around the hospital at lunch.
This is what appears to be here.

Ideas, the weight of lunch,
something forgotten that lies like a spider,
and the energy that sifts from me into the air.
These are what appear to be here.

The balance of light and shadow,
the radioactivity of impulses
and the indiscretion of being,
are closer to what is really here.

The placement of me away from the center,
the majesty of equality
and the taste of freedom
have long been here.

I cease my casting about for a moment,
and my eyes rest like newborns,
somewhere up in the air behind me.

Late June

A June bug buzzes into the lamp
and falls down for a moment.
It's the longest day of the year,
and there was a little blue light over the trees
at half past nine on my way home
as the earth and sun spun away from each other.

At work, one of the patients said I would look good in lavender.
I thought for a moment that I like blue,
but since other people might like lavender on me,
I might get to like it too.
Really, what's self-esteem but getting used
to what you think other people like?
Sounds bad, but if the mirror was the only place
you defined yourself, that would be weird. 

They say all colors actually cease to exist in the dark.
As I fade out, I say to the June bug,
You're fat, but you look good in copper. 

Memories

When I was a little boy,
we drove up a steep and winding road
into the deep green Smoky Mountains.
We stopped for a huge turtle as we rose above the heat,
and the largest bird I ever say swept across the sky.
Dad said it was a golden eagle.

They are dead now,
the eagle and the rabbits it missed,
the turtle and its mate, its children,
and my father.

We are closer to making life
in the laboratory than we were then.
We may set down aging's trigger.

Then, we will dispense with memories
and their meter and verse.
We will feel the dust that blows around
behind the back of god.
We will learn his unspeakable name,
and we will hoard his clay. 

The Mountain

It's a hard climb, steep and rocky, 
to find what we love at the top,
harder still to look down
as the village in the valley
knits together night and day
with sweet white smoke
billowing from chimneys,
where children draw and dream,
their parents cooking,
watching the last red rays of the sun
warm the fragile windows
as it dips somewhere
deep into another valley.

Unlucky

Oh summer,
Oh the corner of your field
where time is warm wheat,
little butterflies, wafting grasses,
the gravel road,
the black and green nave of the oak
where the heat comes to pray,
the wise and delicate birds,
the coming blue bowl of stars,
tomorrow's dew the only tears
for the bugs the birds have eaten,
the fox and owl, laughing somewhere,
at the poverty of my senses,
and the wind that carries
a little bit of all of you
without wanting more.

Oh summer,
I am a penny
under a stone,
under a broken bottle
in a city without you,
head down. 

The Squid

Knowing the black sea
where we would sink and burst
in its great depth,
or be taken in the hoary beak for worse
of something worse than wet,
we stay on dry land.

Knowing love,
we keep to ourselves.

Birds

I must be getting older
because I like birds, although
I'm still working like a starving woodpecker
and not home staring out the windows all day.

I like little flycatchers, crows (I always liked those),
diving swallows, the bush full of restless sparrows,
light brown lady cardinals with their orange beaks,
mockingbirds, the one that sounds like a cat,
the rising songs at dusk and at dawn.

When I stop and consider it,
the feather is one hell of a design,
a hollow tube threaded with branching barbs,
to inhabit wherever there is air.

Sometimes when birds fly, my follicles tingle.
One day last week, I cocked my head like a robin,
like I was keeping busy in paradise.

Lens

Fish are swimming in a fast circle somewhere,
so fast they make an eye in the center of the circle,
and they are magic fish, and the eye lives,
and takes in the majesty of the sea,
and on a clear day, the great air and sky, where the sun is,
and the eye brings knowledge of these dimensions,
and the eye becomes a mouth
and whispers of glory and greatness to its creators.

Here on land we do not run together anymore,
and we do not know of the wisdom we could make,
and do not know the poverty of our lives,
except in dream, or in the rare communion of words.

Yours

There are so many men to be,
soldier, father, lover, son,
hunter, elder, lead guitarist.
I've thought for so long
I wanted to be a shaman,
whizzing a stone on a gut line overhead,
preparing to ride the sound
to where the spirit itself is fathered.

But I choose to be your husband,
on this winding pebble road with you,
to the dusty edge of the land by the sparkling sea,
with the sun in between our lips,
the tender sting of infinity on our toes,
and the falling petals of the flowers I bring you.

I want to be your husband in black night,
when the spirit is wounded,
and medicine is weak, but adequate.
I want to open the door you draw in your dream,
to find you grinding yourself into coffee.

I want to be your husband with our children
and the things in the dark woods that smell them,
set a smudge out there to keep them safe
while they rest for their winding roads, and pray they
find us, find others, pick up the sick on the way,
and plant grandchildren as the spirit sees fit.

The Heart

The heart is a sail with no boat,
it is the sweet spring wind in the trees,
but only when found accidentally.

Here is the heart, free as a wren.
If you want to catch fish, get a net,
if you want to find paradise,
nail your complaints on the door.

But if you want to know the heart,
you must lift off the surface of the lake,
sense without wanting,
let hunger rise and rain,
and live in supplication of your seasons.

The Profound Absence of the Spirit

The breeze has settled around the grey trees,
school has let out for the summer,
and a steel and glass bar run by the cell phone company
has replaced the smoky indoor arena, where once,
the band turned sound into gasping galaxies.

Now there are just little charcoal fires
in the corners of my mind
where I sell burnt pretzels to my memory,
on its way to make Aliyah.

Twilight

Being older, I lose consciousness halfway.
It's like going to the carnival in a bag.
Tonight, I saw that we are stickers,
peeled off a roll and stuck here and there by fate.
The freaky thing was the paper,
just sitting there with zero divinity.

I think the whole process avoids discovery,
which is probably necessary,
to prevent, at least most of the time, 
the profound flattening of apathy.

Untitled

I embraced my son
at the airport after a year abroad.
I was paper, he was fire, in a good way.

I hadn't thought until now
how much he might be like I was,
ready to learn almost anything
in spite of love's unspoken quotient, 
trusting more in curiosity than God,
and not knowing that when he is older,
he will see it was God winking all along.

But I was wiser then, befriending the spark,
letting myself be consumed a little by the heat,
before I wrote of the binding-post.

Mowing

I forgot for a moment
that you are everything I want.
You turn your head just so,
like the red-winged blackbirds
that flew in the field with me,
with your eyes welling, then
bidding me run with them
like the winding creek,
where I would find
the unassuming friendship
of wise and pretty little things.

I remember now,
the lingering azure days
were like your warm hands,
reaching just for me
before I learned to judge.

Four purple swallows
spun around me on the mower today,
and as I cut a sharp circle,
one was suspended in flight
while the world went by.

Dream IV

I dreamed I was committed
to the big stone hospital
for my reaction
to the stillness of the eye.

I'd paused a movie,
just like any other time
I wanted to get up or go upstairs,
and saw His face,
stygian, accidentally unmasked.

When a day had passed in my dream,
I awoke there among the rows of cold houses
poisoning the ground around them
that nothing else live there,
and I saw Him everywhere,
in the blink of every starving eye,
more hungry for the overfeeding of their bodies,
in the night that outlasts the day in the forest,
under the azaleas, and behind the mirror.

But it was not for speaking of this
that I was in that odd and foggy place confined,
but for the treatise I wrote of the eye
that opens but for a million breaths,
that takes this ground for its own,
that turns this sweet day into dream.

Morning Song

A cardinal alights and a berry stem billows,
he sails down and pushes up to a tree
with his little black mask on.

He whistles a few times,
Here I am, sweet day!

It is the morning,
I am sailing down to perilous infinity
or delicious insanity,
or a branch of perfidy.

My feathers are ruffled
by want and not wind.
I let go, I rise,
on delicate wings,
in the air of the mind
where I cannot stay long,
bound by what cannot remain
in the presence of day
supplicated in song.

Amish

When I met you, you were like the sunrise,
a hundred billowing brown butterflies in the mist,
and the love that hides in the green hills
at the edge of summer's field.

We were like Amish deprogrammers
snatching our conformities from their cloister,
letting them cook with more than sugar and fat,
strip off their thick and rough clothing,
and worship as they see fit.

You still dispel the darkness so that I can see,
you are the lightest and most free thing I have ever known,
I love the journey to find you
that no one else can follow.

I bend with you toward the trees,
I let go in the blanket of your skin,
I taste the many spices life offers,
I am found always in your company.

Hoot

Deer eat at moonrise by the roadside,
frogs croak in the thick black grass.
The last bird has closed his eyes,
put his beak in his feathers,
and become as still as a stone.

A few crickets trickle until midnight,
while we sleep and dream.
Later, the night will deepen,
the quiet will become a heavy element
for fox, owl and fisher.

The form of darkest night
is named only by these creatures,
and very rarely heard.
Be careful of waking,
there is prey inside you
they are laughing about.

Appointed Hours

Oh the glory of the little bones
I will leave when my flesh is consumed,
the sweetness of the dust my bones will be
when they are broken by the Pendulum.

I shall be ground into nothing but gratitude.
For now, I've nothing of substance to do
but mount philosophies upon my history,
and watch them ride steeplechase.

Ah but you've come to visit,
and a good host does not chatter on
about the qualities of his teas.

Untitled II

To what and to where
is the mind tethered
but to its own moorings,
smashed again in a storm
before leaving port?

You would think
that at last it would tire
of finding no wheat
in imaginary fields.

Dear one, it takes time
for heaven to open,
the kind of time
it takes to moves stones
the size of mountains.

Know the mainpost of your sundial
and its vain attempt to measure time, 
feel the poor net you cast on every leaf,
every wish, every drop of honey,
in the vain attempt to draw them in.

Withdraw the deed to every field
that the birds will deign
to sing you an elegy someday.

I May Have Lyme's Again

I'm sluggish alright,
and a little sore,
but then again, I'm fifty-two
and life is pot of gold
at the end of a faint rainbow.

If I were a tick,
I'd wave my legs
in the flowery June air,
jump on an aging mammal
and eat til I was a zeppelin.

Of course, I might get picked off,
but ticks don't sit around worrying.
Me, I just need some energy
so I can jump out of this chair
and latch on to something good. 

Untitled

I want the rain to come down now,
the wind to kick up, thunder to rumble,
crack the sky all around,
till it rains in thick drops
from thick black clouds for an hour
while I watch at the window for silver rivers
to fill the driveway, splash off roof corners,
and turn grass into bright seaweed.

I am not myself lately,
I'm like a pointless June afternoon,
with the sun out, the humidity high,
and the heat taking the color
out of the last of the spring buds,
among rude birds and fire engines,
the charter school children
cursing and fighting on their way home.

I want the rain to come down
so that I am dry somewhere,
I want cool and hot to clash
and pour out their struggle,
to make contrast of the grey  I am becoming.

Rolling

You are the firebox
in the engine that moves us,
hot as the day we met,
making steam out of quiet,
the night, round eyes, skin,
the empty sky
and leftover tears.

And now we begin, my love,
on the long road over,
weightless for a moment
where birches bend along the track
almost unto snapping
over the clattering cargo.

Let us roll
over trembling trestles
that cross the gorge,
through black tunnels
where the little dot of light
waits forever to come back,
pops us out into sunlit hillsides.

Let us burn
all that is between us in the forge
and hold each other, sooty and wet,
for to love however steep
the passage of this lifetime.

We carry on, pick up friends,
mull dandelions for wine, 
carry family, roll along.
Love, let us call for sorrow's fireman
at each station on the line.