Spring toward Summer Poems

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.