Greg Brown,
the song-singer, sings
to the singularity
of usefulness…
to voice itself as certain
a signal of the needs
of this age
as one will ever hear.
**
Taking each day on its own terms,
living deliberately everything
deliberately given,
grounding appreciation
where words
don’t go.
**
Because each thing in its place: time.
*
the moon behind the clouds beyond the ridge
there to the west
a click or two past full—from here
diminished
but for hushed light
tracing its turning away
**
For the young,
the open road speaks
to a freedom that lies
beyond itself.
The old, of course,
learn to nurture each
season’s gardens.
And either way,
the horizon calls for all eyes
to rise.
**
Even the untutored eye can read
the sky’s blue quicken
the heart
to open.
**
of a single drop,
a river in the making,
each among all,
the oceans—moving
water moves water,
because…
**
Without equivocation,
ocean lifts fog
to bank the inland ridge,
to creep the canyoned streams,
to mist the valley air in dew—what makes
our thinking think its difference
from this as us, as we,
as a part of
this greater truth
and grace.
**
Because Sandino…
because it’s my grandson’s hand. This,
most likely the last of its kind for me—I reach down,
he reaches up, because he knows we, knows
we together will negotiate this terrain, that
crossing, the higher reach of the trail
ahead. He knows.
Like the crush of eucalyptus leaves
heals like the scent of millenniums of early springs
like this the one we together walk, he knows.
**
And so for words, lasting meaning
is not merely what they hold,
but how and where they might
move us.
**
As poet I wonder of the songs in purposeful writing,
of the poems there and how they’ll be found
when the shell of self rounds to hard
what the heart might hear of open wholeness.
And I’m in wonder too at the songs of suffering
and struggle, at the trusting voice of deliberate witness
and the patience that weighs at the tip of the pen
that moves at the edge of that music.
**
Is there then a final turn,
or is it more shifting qualities,
movements, more shadows moving
through lilting light ?
