Voices heard---early 2015

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 ?