“Today doesn’t know what day it is…”
—David Ferry
The sun has the hills now,
shade holding dark to the gullies
and beloved pines, as tightly as I do
the coffee cup, both of us nearing ready
to give in to what the day may bring.
I’ve tended toward resolve over resolution,
the latter more public in spirit, more inclined
in my experience to fail to weather the inevitable,
like the dew on the arms of the chair
where I presently sit.
Resolve’s of interior, observed depths, tidal challenges
and successes observed, digested and learned from,
shared, or left behind, traces of celebration and loss
rising to the movement of lines about the smile,
around the eyes.
Like the ebb and flow of the ocean’s reach
on the open face of the shore tells us
of what cannot be readily seen.
**
—Firth Canyon, San Bruno Mountain
Though I’ve been here before, time to time,
never have I come with the need so specific
to articulate the communally held silence
here in this place of trees.
Oh, the hills, of course, ancient bluffs
of even more ancient seas, long-since gone
and unimaginable—so many times
with lungs afloat with the air up there.
But this, this was different.
And so with food and drink I come to rest
near to an old bay tree among others,
deterioration countered by new branches reaching
out of its reclining side and up
into the spread of sky above the canyon,
a shade giving reach, to a sun-dappled village
of foliage, swaying the inscrutable currents
rippling and alive there.
The bay’s silent trunk spans the banks of the stream
now a’flow with the browns and golds of crinkled leaves,
the tossed tumble of summer, soft-splotched kisses
of shade against the gully’s downward run
and a single slender gold-red leaflet that falls
and settles aside the hand with the pen
on the clean open page.
**
Cutting away, pruning, you might say,
the foliage of a plant with a long-forgotten name;
removing its summer growth reveals beneath
the gratifying rock-work, one more
long-forgotten labor of love.
“We did good,” I tell her.
**
The tensions of a restless, pretty much sleepless night
release through legs and feet into the street
and the earth beneath, bedrock of the mystery
of simply walking its varied surface
to feel the healing found there;
everything ever, given without question, you’d think
we’d notice it will last well after we’ve been, you’d think
we’d turn its way for direction.
**
The stucco wall back the house where the deck runs
faces the sun’s most westerly arc and stores its warmth
well past its final descent,
similar to, but for aroma and juice, the strawberries
in the patches below—heat taken whole, so complete,
it speaks what pulse knows, even before fingers’ first touch.
**
To the ordinary, this is to the ordinary,
so well-known it’s let to run unnoticed:
like sparkles on the face of a passing stream
we’re busily passing, even when not so busy at all:
like the lips on the lip of a favored cup,
its weight, the weight the hand wants
for the coffee to round to spread
the tongue to coax the swallow
the next breath follows
to allow one more,
once more, and again.
All unbidden and unthanked, and the swell
of inner warmth so readily given, simply taken,
as is, unnoticed—what is it in human being
that thinks a need to transcend
all this?
How fortunate then, that poetry, so readily,
so often, and so certainly,
returns us here.
**
—The poet with a house
on an outcrop of rock
True mentors are few, and found late
may offer, if not needed visions of youth,
the virtues then of reflective recognition
of the long-forgotten well done, may offer
the warmed hearth of unspoken kinship
that reignites original awaiting coals
at the depths of your own living, mirrored
in the words and the life of a fellow,
timely met in the breath-relieving beauty
of the inevitable.
**
—Monterey
It’s a motel room, no more, but
one with the added comfort
of second-morning familiarity.
The shower running behind the wall
behind my head, the convenient side table,
the easy remote
and then, there in the glowing gold curtain
drawn closed before the window,
the bold cross-hatch of frame
shadowed with the curvatured calligraphy
of bunched leaves,
an unremembered, unremarkable parking lot tree
standing just outside the carefully locked door:
unobtrusive hints from the just rising sun
that there’s more here than what has so far
met the eyes.
**
Just imagining what might be underway here,
moving into the late seventies, with perceptible,
if not inarticulate-able, passes of sheer light-glow,
almost as if the closer I get, the thinner the veil;
and so I keep meeting myself in the otherness
that surrounds breath after breath, each time closer,
each engagement an all so obvious unfolding
of the obvious, so gently satisfying—oh,
to be sure the old stuff kicks around as before,
but wonder, and awe, quietly the joy, showing
their rooted narratives, make the strongest hum
of harmonies, underlying, and I’m feeling
like a flower fulfilling its bloom.
**
Even at noon the sky is grey, the hills
their summered brown, and on the slopes below,
the brush advancing green. Tell me,
open-faced window, what more waits
with the smallest steps through the closest door,
what more might well be there,
waiting to hear its name?
**
I can’t say, wouldn’t say, of this day’s first light,
that it creeps the earth; the quivering quality
of iridescent presence behind the trees,
though quiet, is quite clearly unrestrainable,
a glittering intensity, that, whatever the distance
the moment opens, leaps that instant full to its mouth
in unquestioning kiss, in kind:
see there, the slopes’ gold grasses, the leaves,
the windowed homes a’glow and gleaming,
the city’s distant visage of now blazing towers.
There is no “creeping” here.
**
The high cover of easy grey reaches well beyond
the bay’s edge, to meet the horizon
in the stretch of morning’s most easterly spread
of salmon-glow, there and then swallowed whole.
**
Outside’s pale dull light seems an almost settled
residual, something’s past left to random breezes,
disinterested leaves. Yet, the window’s open crack
admits somehow a hum of rhythm discernible
enough to be caught at the scratch
of pen to page, a reunion of that
never rendered separate,
a homecoming of wonder and praise
inconceivably complete
from the start.
**
Rain clouds bend and bulge
over the bay, bringing grey light
memories of you, bringing texture,
they say, coloring the moments
called now. But what intimate reach
is there in these wet streets
that touches your place
in my heart?
**
Light again brings pink.
Clouds are there, puffed
backs to the sky.
They whisper.
But I,
standing here
well beyond hearing,
wonder out loud.
**
At this stage in life, to say
it’s all always been one flavor
or other of wonder, at this stage
of a life makes, makes it feel right.
**
—The redwood
The great tree among others reveals
two-feet of flesh thick, life-seeking vessels
thereunder sustaining, and beneath,
there the solid core, the all of this, seen
through the burnt and hollowed door
of scar of a fired past
and singular will.
**
—Celebration
Orion, faint and high above the cold
along the streets, recalls the deep canyon chill
of redwood forests two days past,
the span of time there not a weight to bear,
but a boundless mantel of community.
Willing presence, the only requisite,
my seventy-sixth year turned there:
a drifting bit of illumined dust
freely floating.
**
October’s first affirms
the calendar’s call for fall,
crisp and clear suggestions
of change waiting nearby.
**
Life as it is here with this does not so much unfold
as pour and spread whispering strokes
of opening lightedness in contrasting shadows
that cast to vivid shapeliness that which speaks
not of definitions, but appreciations, and awe,
that readily subsume intimations of anger and fear
or dread—softnesses that neither deny the abrupt,
nor need it in order to thrive.
**
Thinking of the masters, or some, in their way
kept their poems clean of doctrine and dogma,
used ordinary language, everyday speech
to convey Buddha’s message to ordinary, everyday
folks; an admirable art on its face, but
more recent thoughts, alone, wonder of what seems
unnecessary, of whiffs of doubt and mistrust of the given
and spontaneous root-source in the kosmic-ocean
of human experience extending words—and I urge
of myself a use-less speech, where language leads
the free-form dance of body-mind-voice,
where ocean’s waves and currents cover the tongue
with words that splash its vital surface, reflect
each resonant circumstance of each
and every happening—
where we listen and we watch, where we swim
the metaphors that carry, stroke on stroke,
and go on:
a flower doesn’t try
to entice the bee, it flowers.
The bee knows nectar, knows to touch, each and another,
over and again. The bridges that link are step-less,
the links dissolved in the doing. And words, words
are spent on tongues, nourish the ears
to allow us to see, help us to reach,
into ourselves and out to the world to affirm
that ever in-determinant matrix
that obtains and sustains.
**
The sun’s light tonight
touches but half the moon’s surface,
the rest, dim shadowed silhouette
barely visible against darkened skies,
yet definite enough a telling arc
of perpetual story
to arrest, even a moment,
the frenzied staccato
of our time-warped eyes.
