Wednesday, May 29, 2013

More with less...


More with less—poems
from May 2013



There was once a man who wrote
each day, pen to page to swirl and to scratch,
to press into meaning the meandering lines,

to trace the tracks along the shore
or traceless futures of untellable trails
that lift into the sky.

And some mornings of summer’s longer days
when dappled sun light reached to touch the hand
as it touched the pen that touched the page,

he’d pause, as always pleased to bow his head,
then again begin to move the pen.



**



It’s that we love, that
we love, that moves us most.



**



Dimpled to opaque,
the colored sheet of cultured glass
hung from the bamboo trellis,
sways with the weight
of captured sun beams.



**



To Jonathan and Victoria

Phrase was the term she used,
the recurring theme in the piece he played,

not passage, nor line, more the rhythmic murmur,
the sounded pulse insistent of ought but itself,

self-contained, readily moved where best received,
but best understood in the gathered hush

of pass and return,
over and again.



**



To wake in darkness before stirring birds
to find winds finally quiet,
fog but broken mist in chilled air
as the first of the sun
lights into the clearing skies

and yet to walk almost blind
with churning argument—it is this then,
it is this, is it not, that condition called human.



**



Like those tall pink blossoms in the garden
jostle and sway, thoughts too speak
of what’s being said.



**



Call it meditation
if you will, if you must
call it something,

but know the quiet mind
is itself already
the work.



**



The ancient masters do not quibble—joy
is real, as is travail; life is rife with both.

Skillful negotiation is key,
compassion its natural associate.



**



Brief auto-biography

Having come to know, this alone leads.
Not hope nor fear, not past nor future,
but this now, this sounded song,
this trail and curve of the breaking wave,
the spread and swell, the articulate turn
of each and every word.



**



Sandino David

In the park at the top of Fruitvale
with the grandson asleep,
each at his age in grass in sun
and all that has occurred
and is done—breezes rush,
leaves tremble, grasses crease at our feet,
and the sky that whispers its mark
on this time in this place as right.



**



The ripple speaks
of current
that moves it

to speak of
its movement—
thus, the stream.



**



to Irma

colored glass—filtered light—glinting
silver—shifting shapes—passing
eyes delight…

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