We’ve a large yard out back;
we’ve dug, built, planted, pruned
and shoveled decades under the gentle gaze
of the hills here.
Other side the ridge, where bay waters
once made marsh, the canyon’s lower slopes
let you find a shell mound
multiples of feet deep—
when we tell the kids that we’ll only go
“feet first,” fact is,
peoples who’ve come this way
don’t readily leave
and we count ourselves
among them.
**
—Yosemite
I’d like to fill the page
with words sure as slow poured honey,
but a mind empty of all but fatigue
has only this:
go outside on the deck;
if the trees don’t tell you,
the singing river will.
**
—Incense Pine
Tall with shredded reddish bark
and fan-like leaves that clean the sky
of any suggestion but blue.
**
Between the cabins,
lupine and lavender iris
laughing at the dust.
**
Summer solstice longest day
at the feet of earth’s tallest trees.
Dust-borne resolutions, air-borne prayers
carry us home to low-country.
**
Doves—disguised
as street-surface, flutter
at my arrival.
**
Thinking this morning, wondering
questions of what zen calls
the “great question,”
what some poets say we do
everyday anyway, so
what’s the point
of death
and dying is
the living it means.
**
Spring pruning
two of three apple trees,
folding ladder folded and leaned
carefully against each trunk.
Nearing eighty, gotta be ready
to be scolded.
**
So many of the many books
on the shelves here
hold so much of me, I can’t begin
to speak of it—the pale, almost open
roses on the altar
saying nothing either,
we two just sit.
**
An old friend once said something remembered
this morning seeming relevant, yet
only a few hours hence is unmemorable;
so I just follow the sun’s lead
and move ahead my business
as if that’s just the way it is.
**
sunlight
takes the floor
this morning,
leaves the chair
for me
**
the weave of it all,
the ancients say,
a fabric never rent—
every thread ever
in place
**
live oaks
give acorns—
poison oak,
a rash
**
true gratitude, my teachers tried to tell me,
is rooted in awareness
of its absence
**
—Calistoga
The woodpecker glides
over the pool water’s quiet
to a tree not mirrored there,
glances side to side,
then, soundless as the leaves aglow
at the tops of the trees,
flutters back across, leaving me
and these scratchy songs
to slow coming morning.
**
Anita Virgil, poet-artist, writes of
“the fruiting body responsible for reproduction—
like an apple is to its tree,”
like we humans, like you, maybe me,
walking, scribbling evidence,
fruiting, ever fruiting…
**
The white flower
aside the road, front petals drooping,
yellow center skyward.
*
Beyond the fence,
other side the street,
workmen, shovels
and birdcall.
*
The house sheds shade,
breezes trace its flank, bring sound
to wakened ears.
*
Amen, amen, amen.
Good way to start the day—
legs, breath, morning mists.
Amen, amen.
