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.