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.

Boxes

I carry the dust of fifty years,
borne on wooden pencil boxes,
dad's old cigar boxes, toy boxes,
a submarine made of moving boxes,
grandma's Christmas box
that came to the house, with perfectly wrapped
around neatly signed treasures from Santa,

a tackle box from Uncle Bernie
with fifty hand tied flies, Pink Ladies,
Black Flies, Bombers, Hoppers,
Mayflies, Midges, and a White Moth,
my box of Boy Scout badges,
with a bright embroidered serpent
symbolizing my herpetology skills
sat next to the Cutter snake-bite kit.
No one was ever bit, but I was prepared
to tie an arm off with the red cord,
cut two X's with the little razor,
and suction out the poison with the two ends of the kit,
boxes of college books, Siddhartha,
the Classic Maya, Geology and the Upanishads,
boxes of clothes for running, warming up,
and clothes that would never fit anyone,
the box of Dennis Kennedy's art his mother
accused me of stealing, which I didn't do,
and then he was found hanged.
I carried his coffin at age seventeen,
but I never told my parents,
because they hated him.

Composition

I wrapped your wedding ring in words
for three months before I gave it to you,
and I recited them every night to myself,
they went
You are the bright eyed one for me
You are soft like a good nurse
You are the dawn in my day.

Now you wear my ring,
on your soft and pretty finger.
Now you are the song
of which I am the singer. 

Dewdrops

My head is an oak cask
brining my brain,
my stomach a firebox
steaming my train.
My legs are grey fence posts
with rusty-hinged knees,
my body is stung
by occasional bees.
I have broken butterfly wings
for two eardrums,
a dripping tin downspout
instead of a septum.
My feet seem quite new,
I may have stolen them somewhere,
My mind an apocrypha,
still bound although threadbare.

The desert is silent as night falls again,
How did I get here, I wonder aloud
while kind little owls emerge from their den.
and I trip on the ribs of a very dry cow.
It only gets worse, they say
from here on out,
but I still have these dewdrops
to drink in the drought.

That Old Black Magic

I snipped the wires away from the house,
rolled them back to the pole they came from
after a tree had downed them.
They were old telephone wires
useless, replaced by cables.
I remember when my phone used to ring
because someone was on the other line.
My grandmother punched in real jacks
for the phone company.

Ma Bell is sitting in a swamp somewhere
rotary dialing hexes on people like me.
They won't arrive, of course,
but I'll miss them anyway,
what with the thick air of texts and tweets.

Linguistics

I called Noam Chomsky yesterday and said
Nothing is better than reality.
He replied that it would be interesting
to impute some constitution to nothing.
I asked if he meant that with a capital 'C',
and he said that was pretty much the USA,
which angered me, given that
my father had grown from and given so much to his country,
and his generation had planted good seeds.

I wanted to be free of my anger,
to stand up in my stream of thinking,
to speak the equality of my creation,
even in the face of someone
who spoke better than me
and then it occurred to me
that I don't have to speak better
I just have to be.

Nature

A man cannot talk with his ex
about the pain of divorce,
and he cannot talk to his new wife.
Friends and family all have their interests
more closely at hand than his.
And so a man is left to talk with the earth,
and she is a bitch.
She will pretend to listen, bend like a willow,
and then use him for her own needs,
as a ripe fruit for mold and parasites,
as a bee for the black pollen of senescence,
a clay tablet for her to knife
cuneiform characters of her dominion.

Sitting

I sit on retreat in an old house in Cambridge.
The sounds of the street always go by here.
I hear children, couples and friends, cars
and bicycles all waking up
the light rumble of voices, feet and tires
that moves up and away with a swish. 

I watch the habit of contrasting mind.
I wonder if they hear something quiet
as they go by.

Seasons

I am equally terrified
of summer and winter.
My blood might boil in the sun
and burst out of its fragile drains.
The forests will catch fire
and the seas dry up
and the devil himself
will come out and play. 
In winter, I could get stuck outside,
or run out of oil and shiver
until the teeth snap out of my head,
and the sun becomes blue and square.
I think to myself God wears a sweater
inside all day like my dad
and won't let you turn up the heat, ever.
But then temperate seasons arrive
between these severe decrees
and I trust them for a while.

The River

A good poet lets rhythm roll on
like a song about the Columbia river
or a heartbeat, without building a dam
or overanalyzing;
You know, the heart is a funny thing,
it beats our whole lives, skips rarely,
the metaphorical one too rolls on,
not that it leaves what it loves in a hurry,
it rolls like water, loving its upstream and downstream
and never has to take itself out of the game
to know where to go and what to do,
friend of gravity, gently persistent
with whatever is in its way
and never ceasing its rich and gentle duty
until the clouds no longer gather.

I'm not such a good poet.
I criticize, worry too much, contrast needlessly.
Yet, my heart has no questions
it doesn't tire,
it only sings

Cats

I don't know about you,
but the reason I have a cat
is so that I can say hello
about a hundred times a day.
Kitty puffs out a little Meht,
coming around a corner,
up the stairs, back inside,
after the shower or the dawn,
and its not always for food
that hello, no sir, its
Hey whats up Meht?, 
good to see you, hey now, 
nice day, you are looking fly.
Sometimes that is followed
by a good petting or chin scratch.

The Russian psychiatrist I work with
sat me down and said
Why do you say hello more than once?
I guess in Russia they don't do that,
but after two years he tolerates it.
He also said Why do you counsel them
to feel painful things?
My mother died and I don't think about her. 
I doubt he has any pets, but I wonder what he will say
when he runs into the ghost of his mother.

Reflections

There are children inside you
playing and rising like
the dawn, the spring wind,
hot-air balloons and muffins
and they cannot be taught
the word ordinary. 

Do you feel them?
They are sliding down
the back of your eyes
and into your chest.
Will you tell them to shut up
and go to bed, to be quiet,
to be seen and not heard,
that life is not fair,
that you are in charge,
or will you say
that they must never grow up,
must wear a coat in May,
never break crayons,
or say that they can have
whatever they want
so they never become angry?

In any case, one day
they will find a dead bird
under the window
and ask why.
Your job is to bear
the cold hand of doubt,
and ask them to pick up the truth.
How else will they find
in the forest of aging,
the fruit of insight
laying quietly by?

What to Do When Lightning Strikes

Blow out an eardrum,
black out
and weld your wedding band to the bone. 
If you are not struck, you must
humble yourself to power,
cultivate the state of waking,
and remember your commitments.

If you live long enough
you might see ball lightning.
Grandma did.
It came in the window,
whisked around the room
and went back out.
In such a case, there is nothing to do
except be Grandma,
and leave a little spark
in your eye for the grandchildren.

File Under Bad Ideas

Build something so big,
it won't matter if it hits something.

Venezuela

Wake when the wind rises
and the silver stars still blaze,
drift down to the market
and open the wooden doors
to your vegetable stand
as a thin ribbon of blue
appears in the east.

This is where you belong,
amid the carefully picked and washed,
where there is no harm,
just before eyes and arms reach out, 
steward of a good station.

Kindergarten

Now children, the world is round, 
and full of many hands to hold. 
There is darkness on the edge of town, 
the sun is honey-sweet and gold.

Mrs. Price was an enormous angel,
and made a bowl of stars out of our innocence.
It just occurred to me to wonder
how angels bear light in complete darkness.

They have a strong heart, that much we know,
and one could say that it beats a long while.
Yet even polar bears starve in the snow,
and even light will starve in a trillion miles.

Mrs. Price herself is probably dust,
and the world has all but starved my innocence.
Foolishly I look for a science of the heart.
Mrs. Price knew we were too young for that.

Always and ever, you must try to be good, 
even when others are mean. 
Say a prayer for the beast at the ending of the wood, 
for he suffers from being so lean.

Pearls

Just once, my sister forgot
to take back my mother's pearls
when she returned to the nursing home
and they were gone the next day
off her cherry wood dresser
standing faithfully,
although the glue had let go
of the photos in the albums inside.

Now they are somewhere else,
long after my mother has died,
and for a string of hard, round months
I was hoping
they would cause ill to the thief
for their neglect of my mother
and her elegant collarbones
that held her thin and speckled skin.

I'd yelled at the director
who didn't seem to care,
and then at my own neglect,
because my mother was a stranger to me
and I didn't want to know it.
And so I want her pearls to be pretty,
to let someone's beauty be known,
or to just be with whomever they are,
taking in and softening the light.

Liberty

I dreamed that Liberty
was riding her bicycle by
at a pretty high speed
but I was in just the right spot,
probably had a few good deeds
(or was graciously given the will to try)
that landed me there and then,
and she was bent, I mean really, 
bending through space on a wing and a prayer,
drunk on morning glory, microbrew,
tobacco and acid,
cycling from Trenton to suburbs and past them,
engaged in that more French than American pastime,
and I said to her Liberty, what is our destiny,
and she winked and she wobbled into
the breeze she was waking, and said
Child, we travel the road we are making. 

Night

If I have a kind nurse at death,
and a crimson ribbon of sunset
that turns the blue bowl black
outside a clean and fragile window,
I will pour out my gratitude
with sunken eyes that glitter still,
and trembling fingers that lift nothing
but praises,
and I will no longer imagine
that I am outpacing time, building
anything more than space allows,
or am a speck more than equal
to deer, to dandelion, or to anything.

She will take my hand in hers,
and press tears into my palm
that will receive the dust.

Get You Flowers

Some mechanical ones nobody's thought of yet,
they'll have little metal jaws and rubber lips,
a whim of some good and odd MIT graduate student,
and they'll jump out and kiss you,

some living ones like sea monkeys were,
only these are little bluebirds by the dozen,
they come with a little house
and stay with you and not die inside some container,

rare ones from around the globe, on a new I-Pad,
2-D, yes, but oh the technology,
maybe with a set of one more D glasses,
you'll thrill to thick gloss vibrance

OMG I forgot to add eufloria,
they have that in development,
the smell of every rose recorded,
and sprayed back in just the right mix,

because you are the best thing out there.
There are regular girls, nice girls,
great girls, and desert flowers,
and you are the rarest of all that grows.

But I'll get you flowers
from the roadside, blue chicory, black-eyed susan,
queen-anne's lace, tradescantia, mallow,
because you are part of more than my imagination.

Party

The guests arrived like pinballs,
bumper cars, birdies and rackets,
oil, vinegar, gremlins, caribou,
foxes, weeds, poison ivy, ticks,
santas, prime ministers, doomed cattle,
coats of paint, grey hairs, rockets,
careening vehicles, shook up sodas,
cancer, elephants, shrews, quarks,
bees, remoras, lungfish (a no-show),
crows, berries, deer poop, stars,
old age, bad news, babies, pets,
eclipses, fog, goats, and seashells.

All in all, it was a great party,
we were surprised at the accord.

They left like rainwater, mice,
dead leaves, sunsets, groundhogs,
hobos, cheshire cats, pioneers,
hubcaps, pens, socks, pine needles,
recyclables, color, dunes, boats,
clouds, sunsets, Rhett Butlers,
sages, hunchbacks, soldiers, ants,
spring, breath, children, and joy.