September's End

We sit with our backs to the east.

A small house in a small town, overlooking

a small valley,

homes on the opposite slopes

looking back.

Mornings—if early enough—you can trace

the sun’s progress by looking west—hill tops first,

the softest touch. Then the slow pushing down

of shadows out of the way reveals

flashed signals of the sun’s rising presence

igniting east-facing windows like bursts of light

shining out from the earth itself.

There was a window out there

morning last

with strength enough to light the whole of our interior

with warm-glow—made me to turn and to smile

in silent amazement

into the source. The sun, you know,

has its own sense of time, its own sense of space,

its own sense of our individual contours. And although

we are a part of its broader concerns,

the best we can likely do is as best we can to attend

to its finding us. And to rest

in that attention

to where we are and to when.

**

Ah, good friend, you’ve set me free

in sun-soaked by-ways, along wind-stroked hills,

and narrow corridors of shadow graced with light.

Namaste

**

There is intensity of focus that comes of us

as natural and as certain and as easy as winds

that drench the face and the edge, the back

and the very end point

of every needle of every pine

within their reach—and then to all the rest,

they breathe the wish that blows behind

their rivered and rippling kiss.

**

Vows we find we’ve made:

looking back, I’d have to say,

a long-standing inclination toward silence

and the solitary, from birth even, yet always as these

are drawn through the intimacies of the few, the nuclear

and as carried on within the broad strokes and patch-work

of the greater quiet—the urge to acts of mutuality,

of respect and consideration and the wish to understand

these enduring visions of love at play

in the daily comings and goings that define the ordinary,

the universal, the connecting groundswell of commonness

that is our collective humanness—and this,

it seems for me, is the center-less center to which

I have leveled my most heart-felt claims

of citizenship.

           

**

Near-ecstatic revelation

The lift of our living within

              the firm embrace of holy name

is found

not on the in-breath,

                    but of the out-going.

Namuamidabutsu

**

After far too long a time

trying to prepare for seventy,

I’ve somehow come to let it go

to itself—this turning grace

called aging—and, 

as it does what it does and what it is,

to use the best of all I have as such,

and as I am, to see it through

all the way through its grace filled,

self-fulfilling way.

**

Whose voice is it

you think

you hear,

yours?

And so

of the words,

yours too?

**

Often after the fact, I pull back in wonder

at the somewhat frantic nature of the search

for that which I already know to be there, yet

nonetheless continue to need to reconfirm,

like seeking out the earliest cast of the sun’s rays,

as if to assure myself the warmth remains

there in the light where last left—and for us,

the spoken name is like this too,

the emergence and re-emergence

of the warmth of embodied memory

made manifest; no less a flicker

than passing thoughts, but tangibly so.

**

And…

implies connecting and also connection,

it implies greater numbers of, and so,

addition, so then, progression

and causation, relation and variety—

it implies abundance…

and so in such a world

might well then serve

the preferred expression

of gratitude, of praise

and of prayer…and…

**

And

the deep

silence

bottomless

well

embodied

here

in this one

sustains

forever

resonant

tremors

of our

collective

living-dying.

**

John Muir Wilderness

                   Fleming Lake--Elevation 9,700 feet

The mountains here drop their shadows

just as the rays of the coming sun begin to arrive,

water offers ripples to the first gentle gusts,

and pines ruffle and wave. To follow the urge

to sit at the edge in a place like this is an act of faith,

a free-fall ride on the wakes

of star-streams—birds swoop and twitter, answers

brittle and fall, frames and reference shift

to the boundless possibilities of the humbled few

who discover the truly praiseworthy.

Here, it’s not asked, how old one is,

but exclaimed: How far we have come!

Here, the wise are those who hold their tongue.

Listen to the rest.