April-May 2017
Rising early enough
to see the big dipper,
after looking up,
that is.
**
Differing hemispheres means
vantage point, which can mean
a whole different world
view—even the slightest tilt
of the head can change
everything, inside
and out—y’ see?
**
The young jay swoops
silvered flashes
of blue and white, there
where the old oak glistens
rustling shades of green, there
in the bottom of the ravine.
4/13
**
Returning to the State campus,
sitting on a bench, remembering
breaking a slip of plum blossoms
from a tree aside the quad
where the new library now stands,
a young man with a smile approaching
and asking what it would be like if everyone
did that—and I’ve not done it since.
That was the year the riot police stormed
the campus from 19th Avenue, shields
and helmets, long batons, some
on horseback—that was the year
we ended the war—that one, anyway.
**
And along comes the poet who suggests
we follow the cast of words ahead
through the careful view
to something not yet understood,
to be opened to the chance to be changed,
to the chance to learn the kind of life
this might mean.
4/15
**
April 22
I mean, isn’t every day
earth’s day?
**
May 2nd
Even before I’d asked,
she said
she couldn’t give me anything
the day hadn’t already.
The rest was up to me,
she said.
**
Devoid of pretense does not mean
deficient—the teacher leaning forward,
so I did too, to hear him say
he didn’t know,
and smile.
**
The compassion possible
from the deepest sense
that we have no
lasting answer
manifests
in the extension
of that favor
to others.
**
The way the winds come up
in spring late afternoons
and keep us awake
in sky star-studded and cold
and how newly planted veggies
held in light long enough
to forget winter’s way
thrive.
**
East-facing windows
in the slopes to the west
signal the sky
with its own light,
the glistening kind, the kind
that speaks of cool-born clarity
or of morning fogs that falter
when sky’s patience
begins to test itself.
**
The pivot, they say,
for examining reality fully
is self at points of encounter
with world,
working points that re-meld
with original continuities
to spell resiliency.
**
—a poet from here in the west
once said
the organizing principle of the universe
is deterioration,
which for humans
is the primary reason:
**
May 19, 2017
Fifty years tastes like morning
free of clouds, sky blue
suggestions of summer comings
and marrow-deep gladness
unafraid of loss.
We share a flower from the garden.
Go for a ride.
**
5/20 Ben Lomand
The space an open door creates
allows the entry of leaves,
shadowed and sun-struck whisperers
enter and presence
as friends—fingers loosen,
coffee cools
and a place not home
becomes so.
**
Cleaning up around the house
helps my mind get that way.
**
Two riffs of evidence:
Leaves are not fragments
of trees’ systemic extensions of sustenance,
but active parts of working processes trees are,
wholesome movements within greater wholeness,
as can be said of our lives, never fragmentary
ever, not even one single breath-pushed thought,
or glance or act, or feeling, nor any single word
ever dangles or falls itself alone.
*
Nothing to be done
means you don’t even
have to show up
to be here
now means as you are before
revisions conceal
your self-foolishness
from you
means your own vulnerabilities
given leave to rest
right where they are.
**
The place we make for ourselves
may not be the place we’d imagined
in the making, may not
be the better, even if
anyway we decide
to stay.
**
When we say life, we mean us—what else
could we mean, we call world.
Just because loneliness is not an abstraction,
does not mean we are not mistaken.
**
May 30th—overcast and cold, the window
in the room open just a click, so the breeze
can find relief too.
I’d wanted for a long time to be Buddhist,
but found words beginning with capitals
burdensome. Being too a poet, suggests
too broad an interest in work
not of interest.
So now, I light incense
in the room where I write
and sometimes read,
just because.
Though I continue to try to be responsive,
I’ve learned to prefer that company where
expectations near weightlessness.
