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.