From the year last past...

From the year last passed, poems,

from late July, on

Meeting at Bird’s and Beckett

Like cousins, almost,

the pulse and blood of words

binds us, drives so similar

as to link us as kin,

beyond tongue or skin,

real apparitions,

mind breath’s music

carried to sound.

**

Bathed in the passage of light,

a growing body, actually

a growing body of work.

**

Behold the deepening treasure store of quickened richness,

receding limitations’ collective collapsing horizons of self, into self-sustaining clouds

of endless generosities and genuine gestures of welcome,

so readily, so graciously, received

that songs of praise

carry the only possibility of appropriate response.

**

In Jack Kerouac Alley, at the International Festival of Poets, 2009,

I heard

that Jack Spicer said

at the gates of Babylon, God divides

Man and Words--

Words, He calls Angels

and I saw

from within the shifting shadows

freshly hung laundry flapping sunlight into the sky above

the sounds of the many tongued yet singular song

of love

and I knew

beyond uncertainty

the unbounded community

of undeniable renewal

of the human voice

**

Reflections on this life…

I remember, well yes, maybe as a dream, but I do remember the turmoil

and confusion seeming endless, but was not,

for the depths carry a calm of their own, as does time, that too has a way

its own, and so I have lived to learn to sing, to praise

the ever shifting depths, and that which comes of that.

And so these days, I think myself a poet, yet

for years and upon reflection, for most of the most ordinary of days,

the face of their most common rhythms remain still unspoken,

this silence suggesting, for the poet presumed,

a most purposeful puzzle.

**

I certainly didn’t care how old you were then

and careful consideration tells me it’s not a concern now.

As it always was and continues to be, it is about our time,

your skin, your touch.

**

There is the softest whisper of rain on this morning’s air.

Street lights dim, to better hear; pine needles cease their breathing;

leaves swell and shudder to silence; and shadows wait;

each confident in its hard earned wisdom, each thing in its own way,

in its own time.

**

A haiku life…

Seventeen distinct

drops of sound, blown past the lips

and into the world.

Of fathers and sons…

I’d have said you were gone,

but for those brief glimpses of you, there

in the smile, around the eyes—you there

in the grand son you never knew.

Fully grown now, with your own to care for,

we stand in the shade of ancient trees, speaking of poets

and students and what length makes a line and we agree

to never agree that real work is work at all,

or that, really, we would ever want it to be done.

**

Making music with our voices,

beauty with our words,

makes peace of places

without walls.

**

Fog pressed air, so thick with silence,

morning bird calls must feel their way,

ear by ear…

**

The poet presupposes words,

says the priest, breathing, lifting the pen.

But language presupposed

does not imply words planned.

Wondering, he breathes, lifts the pen.