Home ground

               poems—May 2018

Home ground.

To live where no place

isn’t that.

**

The trails in the hills are dry now, 

creek beds wet and moving. 

Nettles stand out, at least two

of the family, along outside edges,

patches and stands of poison oak.

Overgrowths 

of deep-throated Yerba Sant 

kiss our steps  

with delicate white petals—there’s more,

of course, so much more unfathomable fullness 

that senses stretch to a singular gasp.

**

Robinson Jeffers accused himself

of a “harder mysticism,” a world needing nothing

of man’s to sustain the wholeness of its beauty,

including man’s.

**

Fresh corn bread

as it cools, just before

the shell sets…you know.

**

Buckeye buds from pink to white, 

from bottom to top, from there 

to the air.

**

from the fruit trees,

pulling curled, misshapen leaves,

especially bunched bleeders, 

so sunlight can do the work

I can’t begin to do

**

Clouds these past days

push from the west against the ridge,

hold there with chill.

Shadowed hills less inviting,

gardening more easily postponed,

errant patches of sunlight murmur 

remembrance of the inevitable.

**

Dry trails, wet boots, a wet beard, 

all tell pre-summer stories here. Sunless

blankets of fog—the bay a dream—ocean 

gone—but light, ah yes, light always allows.

**

the passing of books from a friend 

passed

gentle as dawn searching itself 

complete

fingers and eyes catch this, turn that,

let go, covet—

quiet waking to the walk underway, 

warm in prayers

another’s words, music 

for a heart not alone

**

what we look for, each of us, he said,

is affirmation—the mistake

is to turn to argument—

it’s in the beauty

**

Thinking about it, about making statements

of how it is for me, seems, after thinking

about it in light of the mysterious, ie., 

unknowable nature of the unstoppable

motion-flow of this living-dying experience

holding us, thinking about this way makes me

think, to speak the petals that flutter

may say more than trying to trace the tree.

Falling petals, after all, do remind our eyes 

to turn upward.

**

conflict, fear, opposition

and the natural desire to overcome,

to relieve ourselves of these, to realize

freedom—is the state of things for us

**

the browned leaf tremors, bamboo

taken in wind only today’s

so unremarkably common

as never to be repeated

**

Don’t ask me

about direction,

I just follow my feet—

wherever we go

they seem to know,

even without a map.

**

I dreamed once about a white path.

Flames lick at one side, waves threaten

the other. Behind, all the decisions ever made

to get you to right here.

A familiar voice urges. Another 

calls—the path, the only promise 

you can count on.

I woke up then, swung waiting feet

over the side, where they walked.

**

Is stardust then kind of like the universe

passing gas—and if so, what does it mean to say 

the universe manifests us ?

**

the tongue releases reality’s tissue

into air carrying the common’s dreams,

there, shared or not

**

The gracious gesture does not go unnoticed, 

especially when under-appreciation is 

most noticeable.

Living in fields of opposites, as we do, does not

mean we are stuck with a life of this over that.

In delicious tastes, intervening tensions sustain

an unspeakable space of broader connectives.

The graciousness of unattributable presence

breathing all and every.

**

In the dream I lay stretched out, sharp-cut grass 

under my chin, pen in hand, readied. I move 

spot to spot, listening, writing, hearing roots hum 

earth’s names: no thing ever is turned away here.

**

It occurred to me

while reading of the life of a Spanish immigrant

to France, schooled there, who in 1906 comes

here a youth to learn of democracy and to be

a cowboy, and who does, and who becomes 

as well an expert ethnomusicologist, a linguist

and poet and keeper of songs 

of the multiples of peoples native to this place 

it occurred to me what better place to plant 

the tongue of Buddha’s names, what better place 

than this that’s absorbed so much of so many—

why not these songs too…

**

One day either way

would have made

another way

this life was made.

**

Through the one window

to the south, moon light

dapples soft carpeted floor

surrendering bared feet.