Spring, looking toward Summer 2009
Light slips past,
from dull invitation,
to full-on embrace
and I find myself
surprised in morning
already forming shadows.
**
At times now, because I’ve been told,
a softer way opens to waves that row with sorrow,
with the terrible touch and wrench
of currents’ darkened tellings of vacant longings
of those absent to light—open to this, yet resonant still
to distant, but distinct, trailings of song.
Songs of April and May
So many whirling leaves,
limbs churn, walls creak.
It’s like that here, in Spring.
**
Limp and unsettled,
insistent in its call--
the white altar rose.
**
Folded and wrapped in plastic,
today’s news sits on the driveway,
waiting to be asked in.
**
Who needs names?
Sun comes.
Flowers turn.
**
Wrapped deep in search of a word,
the pen’s scratch awakens me
to gifts already at hand.
**
First morning rays
gleam and glisten
on someone’s rear bumper.
**
Through the open window,
the tree, the trellis, and overhead
somewhere, a plane.
**
Pulled in,
pulled softly in,
gentle formality melting
all resistance.
**
I’ve occupied this table
at Starbuck’s on Shattuck before,
on cold mornings,
with hot coffee, in music too loud,
to watch the young acacia at the curb, that bends,
advancing always its many feather-fingered leaves.
**
Under the thick mantel of new green leaves,
the browned and fallen pad to silence
the shaded banks,
threaded sunlight pulling selected splotches
again to luminous gold.
**
This young woman’s healing
breaks wide open
my mind—her clarity!
**
Ocean’s clouds and bluster
take no notice of the sun’s work,
moving into place, as if belonging.
**
Bodhisattvas Everywhere
Out there somewhere on early air,
woodpeckers clatter, distant concerns
sound of comfort,
of work being done.
**
Quiet Eyes
Blue sky, blue ink, the empty page full
with faulty lines of scratched thoughts, reaffirmed
in light. “Let the clay speak more,”
the old potter said. Stand quiet, the eyes.
--Shoji Hamada
**
Common, ordinary words for common, ordinary thoughts
simply running their course, as they do, and what is one to do
but admit, admit the stream
for what it is: as much me as is any else.
To deny, a lie, lamentable, but only softly so,
lamentably bemused, perhaps, at the tenacity of personal pettiness,
the utter lack of movement toward the mature
Yet, of late
A settling, a softened settling, sweet and warm
A settled tone, a leveled gaze, the offering of patience in absence of reverie,
lifetimes on rivers of myriad springs, carried by constant tides of gladness…
And yet
There is no sweetness to the sadness of others
purposefully deprived of the possibility
of hearing a compassionate call.
