Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Home ground


               poems—May 2018



Home ground.
To live where no place
isn’t that.


**


The trails in the hills are dry now, 
creek beds wet and moving. 
Nettles stand out, at least two
of the family, along outside edges,
patches and stands of poison oak.

Overgrowths 
of deep-throated Yerba Sant 
kiss our steps  

with delicate white petals—there’s more,
of course, so much more unfathomable fullness 
that senses stretch to a singular gasp.


**


Robinson Jeffers accused himself
of a “harder mysticism,” a world needing nothing
of man’s to sustain the wholeness of its beauty,
including man’s.


**


Fresh corn bread
as it cools, just before
the shell sets…you know.


**


Buckeye buds from pink to white, 
from bottom to top, from there 
to the air.


**


from the fruit trees,
pulling curled, misshapen leaves,
especially bunched bleeders, 
so sunlight can do the work
I can’t begin to do


**


Clouds these past days
push from the west against the ridge,
hold there with chill.
Shadowed hills less inviting,
gardening more easily postponed,
errant patches of sunlight murmur 
remembrance of the inevitable.


**


Dry trails, wet boots, a wet beard, 
all tell pre-summer stories here. Sunless
blankets of fog—the bay a dream—ocean 
gone—but light, ah yes, light always allows.


**


the passing of books from a friend 
passed

gentle as dawn searching itself 
complete

fingers and eyes catch this, turn that,
let go, covet—

quiet waking to the walk underway, 
warm in prayers

another’s words, music 
for a heart not alone


**


what we look for, each of us, he said,
is affirmation—the mistake
is to turn to argument—
it’s in the beauty


**


Thinking about it, about making statements
of how it is for me, seems, after thinking
about it in light of the mysterious, ie., 
unknowable nature of the unstoppable
motion-flow of this living-dying experience
holding us, thinking about this way makes me
think, to speak the petals that flutter
may say more than trying to trace the tree.
Falling petals, after all, do remind our eyes 
to turn upward.


**


conflict, fear, opposition
and the natural desire to overcome,
to relieve ourselves of these, to realize
freedom—is the state of things for us


**


the browned leaf tremors, bamboo
taken in wind only today’s

so unremarkably common
as never to be repeated


**


Don’t ask me
about direction,
I just follow my feet—

wherever we go
they seem to know,
even without a map.


**


I dreamed once about a white path.
Flames lick at one side, waves threaten
the other. Behind, all the decisions ever made
to get you to right here.

A familiar voice urges. Another 
calls—the path, the only promise 
you can count on.

I woke up then, swung waiting feet
over the side, where they walked.


**


Is stardust then kind of like the universe
passing gas—and if so, what does it mean to say 
the universe manifests us ?


**


the tongue releases reality’s tissue
into air carrying the common’s dreams,
there, shared or not


**


The gracious gesture does not go unnoticed, 
especially when under-appreciation is 
most noticeable.

Living in fields of opposites, as we do, does not
mean we are stuck with a life of this over that.

In delicious tastes, intervening tensions sustain
an unspeakable space of broader connectives.

The graciousness of unattributable presence
breathing all and every.


**


In the dream I lay stretched out, sharp-cut grass 
under my chin, pen in hand, readied. I move 

spot to spot, listening, writing, hearing roots hum 
earth’s names: no thing ever is turned away here.


**

It occurred to me

while reading of the life of a Spanish immigrant
to France, schooled there, who in 1906 comes
here a youth to learn of democracy and to be
a cowboy, and who does, and who becomes 
as well an expert ethnomusicologist, a linguist
and poet and keeper of songs 

of the multiples of peoples native to this place 

it occurred to me what better place to plant 
the tongue of Buddha’s names, what better place 
than this that’s absorbed so much of so many—

why not these songs too…


**

One day either way
would have made

another way
this life was made.


**


Through the one window
to the south, moon light

dapples soft carpeted floor

surrendering bared feet.

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