thinking of June...

A handful of American sentences 

(per Alan Ginsberg, a 17 syllable line):

Deeply felt contentment spreads undirected and without being asked.

**

From the airport to the south, planes lift soundless airborne headlights, glaring.

**

Just south of east, darkness dreams of dawn—was that shadow-glow, or a sigh?

**

Horizon returns salmon-toned under an already bluing sky.

**

Freeway traffic, distant, latent companion, emerges with the light.

**

And though we rise and act as if we do, our prayers admit we do not.

**

April’s End

First quarter almost done,

wholeness prevails. 

A single heave of the heart

makes its own space and time, 

always of and always within

the larger arc.

**

May Day

comes as April’s darkness 

departs in light so clear and settled

even birds still themselves—

the bare, unsung sky 

wanting nothing.

**

Telephone poles where I live

still attract woodpeckers,

mostly in mornings 

before the rush of small town life—

engines turned, closing doors,

the roll of passing tires,

the build of children’s voices,

the playground down the street.

If you tend to rise before the tide here,

you do so with woodpeckers.

**

Introductions to life’s fullness 

abound about the eyes and ears

like gnats around fruit 

set out in the sun.

And there it sits, so still 

you’d think it waiting—

but you’d be thinking wrong.

**

If it is as they say, that it’s the ear 

that allows us to speak

as we do, 

then what of wind and water, 

of birds and trees, earth 

and ocean, 

and the stars—do their songs 

play a part in all of this—what then

do we hear, 

what then does it mean

to listen?

**

Post card poems

A thing of the past

makes present

with the stroke of a pen,

the placing of a stamp.

**

Tell me something I’ll want to know

just for the knowing, and 

for the feel of it.