“LET US GIVE UP THE IDEA
THAT WHATEVER IS HAPPENING TO US
BELONGS TO US”
—Albert Saijo
The young maple at the corner of the drive
where the old Chinese lady lives
offers vivid orange and gold. Midway up
the terraced garden, long stretches
of deeply colored greens, and upper most,
a row of fruit trees, holding full
to their leaves their color,
under the wide and empty chill
of a morning in fall.
**
—11/19/19
Numbers and letters fall to turning pages
like so many leaves,
flutter a silent filling to scattered corners
to cushion the earth
with multicolored stories
of life in the sky, let go.
**
The fog today blankets the valley
full with only itself. Cold accompanies,
transparent, affirmed by skin and bones,
by lungs braced by the unforgiving gift
of perspective regained: center-less
is the way it is—inclusive, whole,
to be sure; no thing rejected, all things
a part of. And center-less.
**
With death closing in, the man on the screen
asks aloud of himself, what he’s done
with his life, and all the others, all aging,
on and beyond the screen, pause.
**
And so the hills felt different, indeed
presented differently for me, and maybe too
for the way I’d come, just wanting to be there.
And arrived as I did in the beginning of day,
before the brightness, in the earlier layers of light,
in the quiet of grasses, dull and fallen leaves,
reddened berries, the smells, aromas—all so clean
a simplicity, whole and complete, open to accept
every step, no question where I’d been, any direction
I’d care to go—a clear and palpable blessing
of coming to know earth as ever my home.
**
First light
allows
east facing houses
on the hills
entry
from outside
darkness,
the quick brushed kiss
of sun’s rose-gold rays
dulling
in the veil of mists
that hinders too
the fullest of moons
from sharing
the brightest of its time
in this new-come light
of the soft coming
of this new day
it slowly leaves behind.
**
The moon drops its light
from overhead,
spreads patio stones lit
like the face of a mountain lake.
Orion takes the horizon in the west,
I the double yellow lines down the street
some hundreds of feet
before any sign
of life.
Morning so quiet, it seems un-breathed,
that whatever the next utterance,
it will tap the whole
of the waiting resonance.
**
—Late November
The light
in mornings
between the houses
lays silent, sullen almost,
as like the tan colored grasses
of fall’s advance, lying flat
down against the face of the earth,
mixed here and there with darker tones
of fallen needles, lifeless scatterings
‘round bared, swollen mounds,
packed hard and risen, as it were,
to better survey sporadic stretches
of still living grasses, many of which
will last, perhaps into, even through
the strange winter season here
and the promise of rains, which can
and may green surrounding hillsides
well into a spring not even thought of yet,
except of course by those rains.
The ways of a place, once understood,
ought to be followed more closely than predicted.
But who we are, what we do,
for good or not, is usually both.
**
—The canyons
The spring to the eastern side of the large oak
where the hermits have lived, still stains the earth there,
a pleasing find, more easily seen through the leafless trees
and withered scrub. The stream beds too, hold the puddles
and trickles of successive waves of fog.
Bear berries own the hillsides, white tufts
pepper the wide spread coyote brush throughout
and buds hint at the limb tips of the bays
upper most in the canyon, where it begins to close in
with a last reach for the ridge.
One of the ancients has fallen here.
The stories the mountain holds are there for the asking,
page after page of unfolding continuance, step after step
a revelation of the universe at work, even if
none are inclined to inquire.
**
—Harold Stewart
There’ve been so many things these days
I’ve forgotten—those I can’t name among them—
but over and again I’m amazed at how often
so accurate a glimmer appears for me,
of a phrase, one piece of a phrase,
it’s place on the page as opened,
to the left or the right, and how that in itself
helps pull the right book from the shelf
and the intensity that is there re-touched
and in turn can lead to another turn,
to a forgotten fellow poet, as now, waiting
so close by, to again touch me.
**
The sleepless first hours in bed last night
slipped into long, low-range dream-sleep
that lifted with first light,
unusually cold and unexpectedly vital,
that took me into deserted streets in time to see
low-angled rays of sunlight
reach to meet the gold-turned leaves
at the tops of the trees with its own.
The dream held a voice that held a place with me
as I walked in that most perfect time.
It was strong, gruff, blunt with its words,
not mean-spirited, but no-nonsense.
The words, I could never clearly make out.
But the voice, the voice said
the time was now.
**
Even the coldest night holds true certain lines
that loosened contours of breath ride
like so many lighted passages.
Fear of death is the self’s resistance
to misperceived limits and misbegotten ideas
of peace as place certain.
The doubt that rebuffs the natural,
unhindered flow of trust
is of similar root
and the spark and glow from the rub
of those tensions
is the stuff of human liberation.
***
***
“We love everything…—we dig it all.”
—Jack Kerouac
No comments:
Post a Comment