“All that which makes the pear ripen
or the poet’s line
come true!
Invention is at the heart of it.”
—from W.C.Williams’ “Deep Religious Faith”
A fresh journal page.
Crisp lines. Pen forms word-formed breaths.
Buddha’s many names.
**
—Late Covid Sightings
A bird skitters
like a sidewalk squirrel,
low under low-slung fencing,
as a kid runs the same sidewalk,
backpack bouncing to catch the bus
at sidewalk’s end,
at the town park,
where other kids have gathered to ride
together—finally, a together day
—even the smoke-hazed sun
seems to smile on this.
**
Gifted, the rising
confluence brims a subtle
surfacing presence
as sun’s reach throughout darkness
changes shadows bright,
passing soundlessness, sensed, felt,
intimate—the message: light.
**
Bamboo’s tangled lace
of stem and leaf, turning green
in turning light, holds
in silent vigil open
to the slightest breath,
to the smallest of ripples
of the softest strokes
of singular leaves set free
in answer there, in answer.
**
Heard today glacial
ice north in our world
is getting younger,
the old stuff passing
to rising waters,
newer layers now
riddled with fissures
elders once outlived.
I can’t see the world
my grandchildren will—
they won’t know the way
I’ve come to know mine.
But the poems come
for me, might for them
come too, take us all to where
the goings cannot be told.
**
No announcement required
when returning home.
Everyone there already knows
you belong.
**
The pen pushes words
to rise like broom moves its dust
and we, we story—
natural and vital moments
ripen, as fruit does,
as flowers bloom, poems fall
like petals do, to the page.
**
—After Cecilia V.
Words observed yield—breathing
on syllables changes what’s seen,
how it’s heard, and by who—tones
told with care tell differently different
stories—words observed yield, world
observed opens answers to questions
not yet found, given before asked-for.
**
From behind curtains
drawn to shelter from the sun,
scattered lights mark dark
taking the hillsides—a day
lifted with a pull
of a string—dimmed horizons
dotted with dreams, sky
now free to stroke open sills
for more than just memory.
**
Browned oak leaves free-fall
hinted tints of gold, cover
the road full, both sides
the center line, to gutters,
toss taunts at the “orderly.”
**
She asked if you had
electric candles—I said
I kind of thought so.
Fifty years plus, you would think
I’d know something more
than your presence in the house,
the clues your voice holds,
the dumb things that make you laugh.
But of these, no one has asked.
**
The work I didn’t want to do
has been replaced
with the changes I need to make
to make it better.
**
It slips in, this sense
of grace, given even when
there’s no place for it.
A gentle check on ego,
the view opens at the edge.
**
Different tongues,
different voices,
same breath,
is why we hear
the ancients
so clearly.
Why not
contemporaries?
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