What my life has to reveal
of value to others
need be told by them, not me;
but whatever it is
may it be unmistakably human
and tell truths of us both.
**
Possibilities flutter the periphery,
murmurs
that draw beyond boundaries
of intention
to roam the currents the universe allows
unplanned—
questions bereft of wonder
vanish the poems.
**
The enduring strength—I’ve see it—lies under
the effort that calls for it—leaving it where it wills,
reveals it—pushing to have it, repels it.
It works—it waits—watch.
**
—Tristan Gooley, the naturalist
Absolutely to the contrary of what we may tend to think,
“nothing in nature is random.” To know something
or someone, we need know that space and time
inhabited
reveals specifics of accomplished survival—otherwise,
no thing, no one, there to know.
**
The world as we would have it
lives along the surface of the tongue
releasing the breath
to the names
that call it.
**
So gentle the breeze
outside flowers bend and reach
just to be so blown.
**
Words coming together, as they do,
in such a way as to catch the attention
just so, make the poem, William Stafford
said—and it’s this I’ve tried to follow.
Nothing more special than what the words
have to tell us, and nothing less.
Leaning over the open page, pen
in hand each morning, “Sometimes
I breathe,” he said.
And each time, release.
**
Venus spot-lights
the thin crescent moon in the west
in twilight. Looking from the back deck,
I call out too.
**
Translucent, haloed leaves
on the embankment aside the road
glow in revelation of the sun’s coming,
well before it shows its face.
**
Entering the second month of shelter,
the schoolyard playground at the end of the block
is empty quiet.
Up the hill from there, in the canyon crevices
where the stream runs all the winter, the Buckeye
are full-leafed, with beginning blossoms.
This too.
**
With April’s end, it’s light at six now,
even on cloudy days,
May’s page on the calendar
just lying-in-wait.
**
Sunlight glistens the face of the bay,
footsteps syllable the quiet, and still chilled air
gives breath mists to touch the sky with.
Worlds sing words, if you let them.
**
And to turn in the dark
and feel soft witness, feel the trust
of that ever-present “Yes.”
**
How different the measure of the weed
to that of the flower, to that of the human
living, and which one, if any, more worthy ?
**
Those who go before, who have gone before
are released into the very atmosphere
that sustains those who follow.
That this is and has been the way of it,
renders any abstraction, purpose or name
irrelevant on its face—
awe and thanks are all that’s left.
**
In a world—a cosmos, let’s say—alive
with itself, light first arrives everywhere at once,
and not waiting the sun’s singularity, speaks
and grows enlightened richness in all its touch,
surface first, then the rest throughout, penetration
of every direction in and out.
Such a world as met me this morning.
And to know it’s never the same as yesterday’s
seems pretty much all anyone needs to know.
**
Language in its purest sense
is the natural and spontaneous participation
in the living world’s living, not dialogue
but song’s dance of space and time
within the movement of the whole
expressing.
And in the end, even the seeking.
**
If it’s not mine or yours, then how
am I to think of things’ relation to me
but to change my perception of I
to we, perhaps, to ours
and that widening spread
of belonging.
**
Earlier outside, scattered bits of wonder
tumbled flowered limbs along the fence,
cloud-dimmed light chilled any skin dared
bare, and between turns of gentle kneading,
the sour dough on the counter
quietly considered the future—
and now, in the waiting, as sun light plays
shadow with the pen
against the page,
my children’s mother rises
and greets me, on this
their day.
**
That all my horizons have forever been changed
and are indelibly linked to pen and page
is indisputable.
But how and when I fell in with the poets
remains a mystery.
