Monday, January 1, 2018

poems from before 2018



For Sandino, and Shel Silverstein

twelve and twelve and 
twenty-four and rhymes
and rhythms may mean more
than any meaning ever can

at five and again at seventy-five
together we follow together the flow
of reciprocal streams 

that only love can know


**


that time of morning
color’s whispers can be heard
if you turn, just there


**


those rhythms 
before heartbeats 
beget butterfly breaths


**


winter’s street lamp shadows 
stretched thin with memories 
of summer


**


I’m not so certain, beyond writing,
what makes one a writer after all, or
what difference designation as such
makes, or in the end doesn’t make
in the wake of continuing writing
saying what it does in itself, or 
of itself or of those of us 
simply continuing that way 
just the same…


**


The furnace whispers winter,
cookies speak of Christmas, 
and coffee, coffee just swallows.


**


The painting of the Chinese Master
at work in candle light,
looks down at the first of many photos 
of our eldest granddaughter,

she wrapped tightly against all things
too new, he likely pushing hard
to capture all the more, 
the new…


**


Tell me, tell me do
what it all means for you

and I’ll surely try to do
the very same for you.


**


The year closes in on itself
a blanket of fog so thick
everything is cloud-closed,
spreading only where made to,
people and things held, yet not 
held, depending on where 
and when one happens.

Every direction the same, 
movement alone determines.


**


Leaves still hold to the oak 
standing aside the Real  
fronting the pizza shop 

just after sun down’s
new found need 
for star light

to hold its place
till coming night turns
back again.

Soft-breezed rattles,
the last of leaf language, 
can only suggest.



**

Morning is cold again, 
the hands-in-pockets kind
that pavement repeats 
for the feet.

The 7 o’clock sky streaks pink
just the same, waiting
in sun’s wintered approach

that allows cold its due
in the broader sweep 
that is the all of this.


**


Half way through the walk,
my legs wake me to the dream
I’m in—there lost in inner mists
then illumined in itself
in the light that holds 
its place in the day,
not lost at all.


**


beyond the need to know
and be known, the mark of true

experience is anonymity