Mid July

Mid July, 2012--poems

Where we stand

They stood and talked, working

their way to present circumstance,

two friends, catching up

in the whispered shift of light

that clicked in him, a place

just so, and he saw—

there it was, he thought, here it is,

given, as lived.

And with no further fanfare,

the ancients and their way

seemed no longer so distant.

**

A hundred more

and they’ll look back

on us…

**

Summer

The light at eight in the evening

in the garden seems the same

as at the earlier eight.

The sky. The quiet.

**

Where we stand--# 2

An old friend and teacher once said,

we must remember our original intention,

and I took this, as delivered, in a religious sense,

as such well enough, but the religious then

was for me so narrow  

as to preclude my truest motivation.

Spoken or recognized or not, 

the urge to first-person choice, the breakaway move

toward fulfillment, that self-conscious clarity and vision

from which all else follows—for me, was you

and all we’ve together built

and continue to build, as life speaks—

     The voice of peace of mind is response

     to the inner call that never fails,

     never interferes

     except to never relent.

     Eventual convergence, the healing rule,

     tide-like guidance of all into place

     in the greater turn

     and shifting embrace.

**

Haiku workshop

To witness, to set

the circumstance, so those who

don’t, who think they can’t,

see by doing that they can

do, with style, grace and insight.

**

Pacific Seminar 2012

The tree is still there,

the one in front of Starbucks

on Shattuck, south and west of the campus.

Berkeley, under high grey skies,

the morning chill fresh against the chest,

a few block’s walk from the center,

still there, all these how many years

since having wandered and found

an early morning cup

and sat and wondered the fate

of that scraggly street specimen

now arching some twelve feet or so

over the side walk,

still there,

so one might stand under

and look up and in

to this living canopy of green.

**

Vocation

Like marrow,

unseen, except for you,

unheard but for your name.

**

We worked into the night,

each to our tasks,

to close the day together

in that fullness

of having nothing left,

of having given all,

to having given in—

that waiting ease,

unspeakable.

**

The question

She spoke it for him, when he asked of her parents,

the unspoken riding the edge of carefully chosen words.

Knowingly, she’d nudged it, her answer turning to fruition

that normally taken as loss.

She didn’t say passed, did not use gone,

but said with a smile instead, completed, this life,

for them, completed.

And this morning, weeks later, it tipped

again, for him—that gnawing sense

of incompleteness—illumined.

Of course.

**

For Kiyo

Forgotten promise,

rising out of the tangle

of words—a friend’s name.

**

Sometimes only a whisper

but this morning, the sky waits,

hesitant patches of pale blue, high

out of the way of the blustery busyness

of ocean-sent winds,

the chimes, the great eucalyptus,

distant pines, grasses and fogs,  all aswirl

on the surging tides

of earth’s great breaths,

indigenous carriers of wonder.

**

I traveled once to Japan to see

the places my teachers had lived,

where their words might have been heard

by passers-by who had seen their eyes,

who’d measured too their human worth

over scattered snatches of breaths

shared along the trails and roadways,

beside the rush of rivers and

under shaded canopies of

cicada-filled trees—one pale face

adrift, a few pebbled handfuls

of the native tongue, specific

destinations, unobtrusive

as possible, yet taken in, turned right

at every pause and stop.

My teachers wrote often of gratitude.

Its sustaining power, its taste,

how it lingers, how it holds true

even in the tangled scratches, the marks of a life 

carefully lifted and placed on the page.

The freely given gratefully returned

to a world so much in need of it.