Remembering

warming everything

not touched, long awaited rains 

fall heavy and cold

**

The lone light on top

of the ridge signals someone

looking up, like me.

**

A bird flashes by—

in the top right hand corner

of the window frame.

**

Catching a haiku 

flu, of sorts, fingers can’t count

much past seventeen…

**

life’s circles don’t close,

but reach out from themselves, openings

ending nothing

**

our truest teachers never leave—

a nearby warmth, they crinkle with the weight

of our breathing

—our truest teachers never leave

**

The moon leaves, doesn’t stay

for daybreak, leaves in the dark,

before I can ask.

**

It’s not as if death

steps back in, returns

from having been, or knocks

from outside—it sighs,

bumps your thigh, and 

once again pulls 

the blankets off.

**

It’s been for me pretty much

the little hopes, those folded under 

smile-warmed-waves with friended faces 

I don’t have names for, or the lingered glances

shared with total strangers, where articulation fails

because it’s before words, because it’s human,

the clarity of the intention of simple recognition 

of a fellow human, going along their way 

and recognized as such. 

If pushed, it just “feels right,” and for me 

seems significant enough for a collective us 

to somehow further along together.

**

—Zarah

caring cockiness,

frowns, giggles and eyeglasses

under flowing hair

**

Like so many motes of dust, 

troubles fall away

with the swirl of the pen’s play

with the swirl of the leaves.

**

—haiku with the grand daughters…

thumbing fives, bumping 

sevens, this old man’s spirit

returns to its teens

**

Sun-lit colors burst

in rounded bits on the ceiling

reeling with pinks and blues,

the shallow glass bowl dancing

the dance of sun-filled air.

**

the courtyard buddha

sits through winter, growing moss

for the coming spring

**

Real questions

deliver bowls

of silence

they refuse 

to fill.

**

Woodpecker’s message,

on a wooden pole, at the top:

send, save or delete  …

**

I remember watching distance runners on black and white TV 

with my Dad. He always spoke of their second wind, 

that deep body breathing that kicks in on its own

when our first efforts give out—the second 

never does.

He wasn’t a runner, my Dad, never reached high school, 

though he ran as a kid everywhere, he said, bare feet,

every Carolina season.

The teachers I’ve had, that he didn’t, would tell him 

he’d found first wind, wild in itself, not second—but he, 

he would have just laughed

—one, two, buckle your shoes, if you hav’um.

He knew what he had, my Dad,

and that second wind, that 

was something else.

**

**

one 

well-

choose

en

step 

at

a

time

        —Robert Lax