Finger tips know their own way
and don’t keep it to themselves.
Don’t let the mind tell you it carries
most of the weight.
**
The plane turns south from Denver,
late afternoon throwing light through cabin windows.
Open prairie farmland, lightly dusted white,
turns to rolling hills and deep creviced canyons.
Sporadic stretches of forest, crosshatched roadways
and the sudden encroachment of housing tracts,
the far-reaching outskirts of Colorado Springs,
then the flaps-down drag of descent
and arrival—old knots of kinship
ready to be retied.
**
Out the backside of the house, we look south
over neighboring rooftops, to the Front Range,
lightly dusted slopes and ridge lines
fronting the higher, whiter, further out.
The home is quiet, a comfort. Sleep comes
as long and deep as winter’s nights. The brisk air
of morning suburban streets pleases.
Catching up is so relaxed, the range so wide,
it’s hard to tell if anything need be caught at all.
The top right corner of the micro-wave
needs an extra push. We leave night-lights glowing,
just in case—things being said
that can only be said here.
**
—Making history, with Ted
The two of us,
who were so many years ago moved so
by this man’s words, the two of us sit and watch
the turn table spin, silently listening
to the needle-lifted tones of Kerouac
reading his own.
We, alone and only in the world this day,
at this hour, with Jack…
Pretty much presumptuous, we observe;
but likely true.
Same hearts as back then, set to beating a’new.
**
Our last night together, plans in place,
dinner waiting on the stove, Latin music
and a fire.
Direction affirmed without the aid of a pointing finger,
we find our way by listening—where the music
takes us, has taken us, trusting opening
a different knowing.
**
The ancients bid farewell at river crossings,
roughened bridges; but for us
the early morning drive on darkened highways
holds the stories our love like a glove.
Whatever’s not said, can’t be.
A hug, a kiss, a wave.
The right seat at the airport yields clear views.
Snow streaked Pike’s Peak, clouds clinging about,
roused from the dark by high country light.
What can real prayer be, if not
the gladdened edges of a heavy heart,
and willing devotion to whatever unfolds of that.
**
the last few years have been uneasy
for me, and I don’t know, but now looking back
an urging, a call, signals without ready answers
no surface changes, yet swells, traces, as if
of currents not fully followed, for fear, or something
something resistant to definition, to calculation
or design—no not those, something
once absent hesitation, something
allowing
an edge, to be sure, a point perhaps, but of space,
of time
that shows itself and there reveals
the all unseeable beyond
an unsayable momentum and pull,
immediate but gentle beckoning
as the breeze that turns the leaf
there touched by sun, caught by the eye
just passing by
on the path that called the foot that
then took the step
**
—An ode to one-offs
I don’t know,
I see now
not one thing
of one-offs
so desired,
except for
the music
in their count,
muttered crisp
to ears cupped
round their sound,
there picked up
with a smile.
**
Almost like over night, so many of the trees
along the streets have shorn their leaves entirely,
as if winter, finally come for sure, leaves too little room
for free-fluttering to ride in a sky constricted so with cold
it brittles all it touches. Lucky for us, the many and varied
and deeper resiliencies that run in the blood of seasons.
**
I spread round the fruit trees today
with composted manure. Winter rains take it from here,
to soil and roots into spring buds carrying seeds into blossom-
yielding fruit, come summer.
Been here twenty years, the trees a bit less—my part each year,
less and even less—learned and learning how best
to just stay out the way.
What a joy.
**
I saw on the desk calendar, predictions
of a fulsome moon sometime soon—but the rains
refuse to listen to such stories.
**
**
“Keeping company with moon and blossoms,
I spend my remaining life.
So clear—rains, clouds, and spirit.
I am awake, as are all things in the world.”
—Ryokan
