A dancer’s dress,
a butterfly wing,
a railing with see-through slats—
homes, hills, cloudless skies
and the barest trace of a walker’s trail
that makes me
want….
**
life’s work…
to say with clarity what we see
in the world and catch a glimmer
of the how offered of that
is not longing
so much as it is our present lack
of words to articulate the distance
and so,
that new language insisting its way,
I believe is the why behind that feeling
that won’t let us be as now we are
for long
**
A single bird, a fluttering flight
of wings against the clearest sky
edged against the coming night
falling first to hills in shadow.
Street lights then, then soft glow signals
from home windows.
Each of us in place
at the only possible time.
**
That this thin sliver of white gauze
high in the sky hides its shadow
this morning and shows its fullness
in time its own and not ours to choose,
we know and we wait and we see—this face
of the world that wraps us as grains
at edges of tides that won’t do our will
that poet Robinson Jeffers urged us
to open to—the answer, he said, right here,
no matter choice, under our feet,
above our heads, the tips of our fingers
there waiting to touch: turn with this
and see, he said. And I, for one, do.
**
It’s easy enough, I suppose, to dismiss
the blossoms along the fence, bobbing pink
collectives of muted aromas riding the tosses
of random breezes, yet all the while
steadily seeking those honey-source rays,
even as now, through a heavy veil
of filtering clouds.
Easy enough, they might say in turn,
to one whose two feet glide easily firmed streets,
willingly carrying a cloud-filled head, oblivious,
inarticulate too, to honey-calling fruition—
easy, privilege, indeed; but which one knows best
its living, and how does one make that call?
**
Not finally squelched, not yet fully slumbered,
desire seeps the waking surface
and lengthens the night.
**
It’s not the word itself,
no single word, nor the many,
so much as it is the doing of words
within the boundless ocean
of interlacing carriers of consciousnesses
of which they are critical parts, each a reflection
of each and every word ever done. And we, each
of us in each doing, reflecting this wholly living
worded experience, its continuing resonance,
the poetry so often spoken of.
**
The throb and pulse and seemingly
endless satisfactions of consciousness
folding over and over upon itself,
until not—and the amazing freedom
born of that.
**
Usually framed in opposition to life,
death’s real role is that of partner—
co-protagonists in free-form dance
unerringly followed by heart’s intuition,
an ungainly range of turns of love and loss,
of joy and tragedy, of doubt, of fear, of struggles
and the satisfactions so often found there—
life’s intensifications in the face of death’s promise,
that we all follow by heart’s intuition, even if
never realized we do.
**
On turning seventy-six next month, you’re asking,
how I’d like to spend my remaining years….
you mean after morning coffee, right ?
**
The heavy bottom-sheet flipped over itself
on the line in the wind last night, as sheets tend
to do, a bundle of resistant layers now, the rest
of the laundry hanging quietly open in the damp,
as fogs drift the ridge, linger canyons, then lift
and slink across neighboring roof tops, away.
You know.
But earlier this morning on a familiar route,
I was startled by what I found: the light, different,
clearly so, opened a distance about me
to reveal previously unnoticed details, so vivid.
While my steps registered familiar ground,
everything was unmistakably new.
Through a break in the trees above the homes,
the hills’ summer tan burst rugged gold with sun,
the homes themselves snapped along the street
with color and line so crisp they nearly spoke,
and a promise, long held deep and close,
proved itself true.
Sensing that now, not one thing ever will unnerve,
distance demurred further question, direction
took hold of its own, and not knowing
became home.
