the red blossom,
the sea of tangled green—
even bamboo holds its breath
**
who’d have thought—three lines,
barely phrases, holding worlds
wriggling with life
**
with only us two,
the house is pretty quiet—
but then she leaves
**
In the end, each word
is a bow to winds borrowed,
returned in saying.
**
Our feet, the earth feels,
but won’t take in without rain.
Either way, no sprouts;
even after years, no fruit.
Yet, somehow, we get to stay.
**
Barely 4 PM,
the sun meets the horizon,
falls below, while chill
slinks away with the shadows—
all this snubbed by evening’s sky.
**
Nailing the metal
Mariachis to the porch rail—
memories secure.
**
“The voice does not belong to the speaker.”
—an Igbo Elder
Word in world connects
reaching in with reaching out—
breathed intimacy.
**
A woodpecker pecks
at morning’s silence, trying
its best to fill it.
**
illumined
through the opaque plastic
chisel handle
the plywood
table top glows
with thin window-let light
**
the old translator
said his gods lived in the folds
between the petals
“lean closer,” he said, lean in
for the listening returned
**
everything has edges
beyond which
where poems lurk
is always a reach
**
silent
the bird flashing past
outside
calls me there
to hear what’s being said
**
sun pulls
leaves lift
breeze slips
by
**
Those many-petaled flowers
the wife tends, so soft pinks and blues,
drop all browned and dried
along side almost ripe
tangerines—and it’s dark at five.
**
so certain their commitment
to planet as they find it:
unquenchable: weeds green it…
**
Street covered in gold,
yet that one leaf waits to fall
until my eyes lift.
**
There’s a certain quiet rain brings,
breaking silence already there,
making morning
from what was
to what is.
Last night you asked me to sing
and nothing today is the same.
**
Have you ever heard a love song
in a tongue you don’t speak?
Words turn in voice turned by words.
What more is there to look for?
**
The moon cuts its arc
in the south aside a star,
singular and bright,
that holds each evening’s sky
as its own, but this.
Hanging a bit west, my guess
is it will out-wait the moon.
**
I can see then
the desire
to keep open
the means we use
to make our work.
No matter how
simple the count,
syllables count
just the same, but
do not count up
to a poem
which moves count beyond fingers,
to where whatever the count,
it drops away in poem
which to my way of thinking
leaves such objectives open to question,
and to my mind shifts the flow of words to
tongue, to lips and the ears, which
when caught there, tell.
Count as you will:
count requires time’s attention,
includes breath-lettering sound
relationships, revelations,
callings followed in rhythms, rhymes,
extended tones and tellings
not otherwise known or heard
but for sounding
of the otherwise unimaginable
eddying round the words embodied there.
Count as you will.
**
As an old white guy,
I’ve heard a bunch
of hateful stuff
and young and old have walked
otherwise with others
a long way.
Ill winds come and go, all grit and dust.
Holding hands reminds us.
**
—Sixty years hence…
with Kerouac came
the dharma world and legends
of walking these states
clear across—diner coffee
and pie ala-mode
mapping movements west—desert
nights, headlights, roaming
dogs and police cars—I traced
what I could, filtered
the rest for the best for me,
for then, and for now.
And I remember who helped
break open bindings,
crack doorways not seen before,
dream the never-dreamed:
real teachers: revealing their
faults and imperfections too.
No comments:
Post a Comment