—Austin, morning #2
Dreams, I’m beginning to think are like
waves reaching hands waiting ready
to take them in—waking late
and rested and hungry
for a slice of that cherry pie waiting
by that empty cup waiting
for coffee calling me—edges,
self to other, are presumed, but passwords
do proliferate—so, so subtle
we often don’t even know
we know them.
**
In the museum store today
a hand-held pencil sharpener
for long slender points
reminds me
that my original excitement
at sketching the world
had gone missing
somewhere I couldn’t find
till right then.
**
sprinkles turn to downpour,
the quickly grabbed umbrella
keeping me dry knees up
but squishy feet and
drowning shoes still say
every walk taken is a walk
received
**
was it the old oak’s bending limbs
or the splash of water colors
that swiped the time away—
making lines with pencil and paper,
coloring them in, an old man still in love
with child’s play
**
—Terry Black’s Bar-B-Q
Oh, the meat’s good, don’t get me wrong,
but it’s the energies
that would pull me back in
if ever again—
people pouring in,
genuinely hungry
to be hungry…
**
Stockton’s sun signals morning promise
in hotel windows across the way,
parking lots chill in the shade
and a single-cup brewer clicks to rest
after working its best—is it possible,
do you think, to sense so closely
your own grip loosens
its hold ?
**
October’s end-moon, that star
below…
that hour we’ll loose next week:
how to use it now…
**
Looking long
into low
eastern sky
blueing in
pink-grey blush:
sometimes this
is morning.
**
He means to say
simplicity:
those solitary
moments
happening:
things now, here: where
edges round
to open…
**
not so sure anymore
of reason
to explain—at eighty
life explains,
I smile or I cry
—either way, OK
**
The little sounds she makes
room to room—just us two
a long time now, but now
even more
little sounded moves,
little talk—just we two
being we two
even more.
**
Harvested the last of the apples today,
hard green tart ones, good for apple pie
thanks next week—evening turns, rain-drops,
protest chants still ring in my ears—wondering
what this does for the world’s peace, wondering
if just this once, all at once we all stopped
and thought and said so.
**
We should write
our own sutras,
speak the unspeakable
run of word-song
in open sky,
laugh and cry,
laugh and cry,
live and die
like word and song
in open sky.
**
Waking in dark
rainless quiet, I rise
and stretch,
follow freshened air
to empty streets
that welcome steps,
receive thoughts
from any and all
who care to come.
**
Rains leave
clouds to clear
clean crystal blue
to cold—winter’s fingers
probe.
**
Two leaves, brown and beige,
coupled on the oak limb,
ready for the fall.
**
In that first light after dark,
before sun breaks, coyote,
the color of wintered grass,
disperses into the open hold
of mountain slopes
then taking me in, dispersed
in call-response echos
of coyote’s kin.
**
Oh, to have lived
long enough to understand
it a gift.
**
Sitting in bed, we look out
at the south-east run of ridge
some three miles long, a thousand feet up
in sky that reaches the Pacific.
Scrub and grasses and oak and bay, then
thousands of miles of sea so far west
you find yourself east again.
Fall brown and falling colors now
and if rain comes, winter green—I fell
for this the minute my feet hit the turf,
learned right from the very first:
there’s living, and there’s being alive.
**
And if I could, I’d speak here
of love; but all I really know of that
is what I feel of it.
**
Two black birds
looking up
into light,
glow below
blueing sky,
as do I.
