Like weeds, the poems

11/21

Try to stand in the ocean

and you sink.

**

Owl Canyon

Fog clings low to slopes warmed red

with berried toyon. Coyote brush 

buds white on green. 

And willows layer leaves 

to ground there yellowed.

Some voices are best heard

with the feet.

**

11/25

In the end, words lead to silence. The reverse is true too, 

but too close a call to discern. Just string them out 

to their natural end—there it is.

**

Darkness holds outside the window 

and up from there 

a star

or two, 

muted clouds and whispers 

of moon-glow.

**

11/31

This morning’s words waft

like air-borne leaves in winter light. 

Certain uncertainties recovered.

**

12/1

Creek

Swift running shallow waters keep clear 

the undisturbed bed.

**

On the day before this,

in the still before the sun,

a hummingbird darts

shaded vines 

and wilted blooms,

each of us 

giving all we are.

**

12/2

San Bruno Mountain

And beyond this, beyond these bluffs 

of sand and grass and ancient 

butterflies, 

a city sits in hills that dance 

in winds that sing 

in skies that still watch 

the change

still now 

underway.

**

That we begin again to listen and to hear 

the things of the world, does not mean 

they have been gone.

**

12/4

Everyone, everything ever, tells us

over and again, who we are with them.

**

12/6

“It was like our lives,” he said

of how it was back then for them,

which is how I remember it for us.

Our lives.

**

Too much is lost in taking things 

just for utility—numbers taken for fun

can be dropped without anything

breaking. I try to keep it that way,

with words too. Let them do whatever

they seem to want to do. See where that 

leads. You know, like William Stafford 

once said, “what the day says, 

that’s what I say.”