Winter poems

  “I don’t want to know how I write poetry.”

                                                 

                                                           —Margaret Atwood

And if, as the teacher says,

it’s language that speaks,

then all we have to say

is hear-say.

**

In the winter here, along with the rains

and brother chill, coyote bush pushes buds

to blossom, tiny bursts of fine-white plumage

that join the redness of bear berries in the rise 

and swell of the hills, singing promises 

of nourishment—all of this and more 

taking me in, like a cousin with a key, 

roaming in and out unannounced, 

as if having never left.

**

Only a few days since, and the rains, for us,

now seem but a dream. 

And those streaks, pink, gauze-like blushes, agree, 

claim their cloud-ness to the entirety of the sky.

But the weeds, the weeds remind us

that our feet were not first to meet the earth 

and do nothing for anyone’s thirst, 

remind us that the roots, though unseen, 

aren’t anyone’s dream.

**

Oh, the ball dropped, I guess,

a flickering to the side of the room,

the small group of friends, good food, 

empty glasses.

But it’s that fulsome knowing

that speaks to the love that holds, 

that has held for so long—it’s that 

that brings us over, once more.

**

The moon is full. Ghost-light

cast through west facing windows,

speaking a solitary tongue

darkness appears to favor, offers

softly lain shadows—a shared willingness

so clearly undisturbed by impulse

to explain, my breathing 

holds itself still.

**

To see through other eyes

the merged and merging becoming

meanings beyond meaning,

means, I don’t know

but what wonder tells me.

**

In the watershed of realization,

the streams are the manifestations

that will tell us not only who we are

and where, but how to go.

**

      “Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration

           of the earth

       Under man’s hands and their minds…”

                           —Robinson Jeffers, “Day After Tomorrow”

**

Eternity stripped of the burden of time

opens to bottomless depths of finer and finer

subtleties of workings of dynamics of energies 

of realities beneath realities—in this mirror, 

everything, indeed, everything…

**

Were this a different time, I’d stoke the fires

when rising, greet the coming sun with its own.

Although the sun keeps the old ways, so far,

the thermometer’s switch is where it’s at these days.

So I do my best to do my part each morning,

reach to the far back of the breath 

for those songs so ancient

the source is one and the same.

**

Poetry thrives as that body of language

engaged with the world engaging it,

mutually responsive charges 

at play with the music 

that lingers the sweetness 

that simply cannot be caught.

**

—After Jaime de Angulo

We keep speaking of circles, 

when in fact speaking knows no closures,

multiples of overlapping parabolas

of interacting realities

speak our reality.

Solitude, think again, 

let’s say, of the stars, of the leaves,

just there outside the window,

the neighbor’s radio.

And thinking as such, or is it singing,

cry a cry of joy.