Spring poems

 

I’m not sure it’s spring

but it does ask for laundry

to be hung outside—

**

buddhist thoughts arise, 

overridden by poet 

thoughts overridden 

by old man morning moon thoughts

—almost full in almost light

there are days in different weeks

of different months when moon-brightness 

peeks through the blinds

and the moon drifts that kind of waiting 

drift out back the house toward

the waiting ridge horizon-line

and each time for me its time

with me is sheer delight for me

**

It’s not that we learn to be

in accord with the working

cosmos, it’s that we are 

in accord—the challenge lies 

in not interfering with this.

**

—3/25/22

At the shell mound in the canyon,

buckeye and hummingbird sage

round the clearing 

in a blanket of fog—a jay calls out 

for morning.

**

We watch each other.

Then, lifting from the limb,

coming half the distance

closer, the red-thatched

hummingbird hovers, bobs,

returns to its perch.

Hello.

**

When fogs walk these hills,

nothing is missed, each thing

taking the given as needed,

leaving the rest

to work with

the rest.

**

Tripping on the trail,

meeting face-to-face

with the ground-in dirt

of old-age, telling me

being more attentive

is no longer just

another option.

**

**

“That’s when you taught me tears. Ah

      God in the morning

             Ah thee”

               —from Jack Kerouac’s “Hymn”

**

Blessed are those who know

when lessons are being offered

for learning, and aren’t too busy.

**

And some days seem to just sit

laid out as if nothing’s doing

and yet a whole day’s entirety

is being done as if in-between

the invisible seams of its shown face

tiny streams of cosmic energies

are exchanging songs of survival

so sweet sky resonates blue

and blood red and grass gleams

quivering green toward the sun’s 

unaimed, unswerving warmth.

**

Wires are carried

by wooden poles where I live.

Woodpeckers know this.

**

Not pushed around by time,

I remember the given name

of only one of the three flowers

growing along the fence,

yet all give all of their opening

just the same.

**

Startled by my shadow,

the sun’s play reminds me

loneliness is ill-conceived.

**

Once in Mexico I walked at dawn

along rock-bound shores

and found the town beach,

where fishermen drew their catch

for sale, the morning market spread

on tarps among palm trees, table-

talk and laughter.

And off to the side, closer to the street, 

a single table, an electric kettle, a large jar 

of Nescafe, styrofoam cups,

plastic spoons

and a small bowl, 

where I dropped some change,

and with that steaming black,

turned back to join the community.

So I thought of this this morning,

this somehow modern, somehow

perennial practice 

that makes morning for me

most everywhere I’ve ever been,

and thought, when the time comes,

the Folgers is in the upper cupboard 

to the left of the stove. I think you know 

where the cups are.

**

awake

in morning light

of open-window spring

**

Fuchsia pour

from the fence

in green waves

foaming red.

**

Old doesn’t feel that way

this morning—energies flowing

in changing light.

**

spring pruning

the citrus

on the ladder in the leaves,

new buds, lady bugs

**

morning mists 

and rains so dense

scattered lights

tell stories

in dream-hidden

hillsides

it’s not so much a matter

for me what a poem is

but where one finds one

and I’ll gladly follow the words

for the making that comes

of just that following

**

the smallest ledge,

rising no more 

than a quarter inch

between the patio stones,

a crack and collected dust

and the vibrant reach of weeds 

therefrom, single strands 

and forming clumps reaching 

down, reaching in—not to hold, 

but to fly

**

The earth is the place

we plant each foot

for its walking.

**

—On a cold spring morning…

a sideways glance

catches light through the trellis

above the window’s out-side

that slices a thought whole

and delivers it, 

there caught,

that all that practice

talked about, worried about,

prayed ?

about, is about

bringing us back to where

we already are—just like that,

light said so

…

and it’s strange, I guess, almost

   giddy, this silly sense

      of helplessness, it

         feels just like

            freedom

               …

and what’s left to do ? is the best 

you can do, with all you have of who 

you are…

and those buddhists, or some of them,

those who say, might just say, namuamidabutsu-

namuamidabutsu-namuamidabutsu

Light let in

 

—After Diane DiPrima

Listening to words is what we do,

so poems are done in the normal course

of what’s already being done

before any extra doing need begin.

We step out, each of us,

and into our very own cosmos

with the so many words

that have come, doing their work

like they’ve always been there,

tracing the outlines

of our being’s presence,

its perceived needs,

and scratching at the reach of edges

of questions they haven’t met yet

—endless human imagination, home-

country to the poem, parent-place 

of every possibility…

**

Orion lays out 

along the ridge in the west

in night’s naked cold,

steady reminder of firsts:

constellations known,

measureless distances touched,

timeless intimacies held.

**

—Thresholds…

The time too, when young,

in the pass—12,000 feet—

the whole world unveiled.

Is it not the same, old age,

in “the cusp between”

life and its death, 

looking out, knowns 

and unknowns, 

so vivid.

**

The door opened—she

walked in, children unfolded,

from there, grandchildren.

**

A word—the bud-push

flowering of linguistic

attention-making,

deep-source call-response- 

touching

or, cognitive manifestations

of cosmic conditions,

oral or not, lighted intellect

lightening the situation

by virtue of what is

lighting it.

**

This life, living us,

even at rest never rests—

earth turning says so.

**

It could, it might, be called

conscious subversion, the intention

to not father the same as the force

with which one was fathered;

but the real work there begins

with that same force that’s found

in one’s own heart—the real work

is that attention, that subversion.

**

—Report back, early 2022, age 78

I’ve been preaching to myself lately

of change, the cosmic, eternally 

regenerative energies at the heart

of it all, feeling when I do, my eyes

light up with glowing thoughts, while

all the while secretly waiting near 

the darkened backdoor of the heart 

I hold to be singularly mine, left ajar

for some sure-to-come calming

to arrive, some certainty that doesn’t

slip back out again—the voice, mine

in this case, is the danger preaching

carries, for it can, it may, drown out

for you, your own words—

the sought-for calm comes, if at all,

in seeing there is none to obtain—this

disquieting unevenness known as old-age, 

accentuates for us, if we hear, if we listen, 

how the cosmos is holding us right now, 

how it’s holding us, now, which 

can never be wrong 

and it even, the cosmos, 

leaves the door to our hearts ajar,

so we know it’s always right there

with us.

**

Harvesting the greens,

winter garden offerings,

left by slugs and snails.

**

Bulbed flowers heave

out of the earth, meet with the sun.

Glad of it, like me.

**

Don’t get me wrong,

I learn from the resonance

of the deep-thinking ones, the breadth

of their reach has touched me

even in the days before I could tell

what it was, touching me, even when

the range of thought, the allusions, 

escaped the edges of horizons allowed me. 

And I do cherish that touch, what it brings,

what it brought—but in the end it’s not 

me, and the older me’s less inclined 

to linger such visits—oh, I’ve ego,

to be sure, and even though it’s tried

to trick me into thinking it’s not there,

the really “great ones” in my eyes,

who speak to ears like mine, are those

who’ve learned to trick that sense

of self-importance to take its cosmic place 

and, with all else, to simply 

come along for the ride.

**

—Marco Pallis:  “…it is in intelligent humility

                            that a truly human greatness

                           is to be found.”

**

The patter, softest

drops in morning’s dark, signals

rains passing hour,

wet muttered kisses

a’kin to high canyon mists,

quietly lingered,

the obvious limbo

of a hovering lover

breathing just once more

before light breaks full

and day makes all seeds its own

—passing through is all,

there is no more and

no less than impressions left

in that passing through,

each drop, every brush

of breath and skin, words uttered

on the winds, all press

—presence passing through

counts, every presence each time

counts forever more,

each noticed in whole

in the whole as taken in,

eternity’s work,

cosmic notice taken,

cosmic value given each,

just because it is,

is reason enough

to notice and wonder,

to ponder and praise

and to care to be

the difference made

—present, as we are,

makes the difference 

only our presence can make

and does every time.

To loose track of this

is to be lost—to remember,

is to take our place.

**

—March 2022—Kerouac Centennial

It’s important I think: to recognize

teachers become teachers by bringing

us all that was needed then to bring us 

closer to who we’ve now become.

Our fullness now doesn’t erase

the reality of the emptiness then, maybe 

accentuates it—we may move past 

the teachers who’ve moved us,

worthy students do, but what’s been learned,

really, if we remain foolish enough to think 

we’ve left them behind, blind enough 

to think we can, or want to?

Thank you, Jack.

**

The rush, the excited-purposeful,

ebbs with the curb of the car’s engine,

window open to leaves and limbs

on waved shadows, dappled sunlight 

and birdsong, peripheral playground musics, 

all holding an embodied silence,

an un-produceable, un-predictable embrace,

a calm come center of its own, a grace, 

of stroked shoulders rendered still.

**

—word dharma

I don’t know how I know

or even what is thought known

is so

but of words and their working,

watched…that, this, 

is something attuned and un-claimable.

I don’t know but to watch the words, 

wonder at their working’s telling

what can’t be said of knowing—

words, at work—the very nature

of the working discounts divisions

of sense and sound and source

so emphatically implied in intellect,

it’s so limited usage—

words, their working evidencing

human reality seamlessly true, 

so readily connected as to be as

easily missed, as readily underrated as

our next breath—

their work, our life—each a part of the flow

of which it is a part.

**

—March 18th

At the bench David made

in the upper reaches of Buckeye Canyon

in and among the live oaks,

looking west and south, shade

dominates the restless sleep

of abundant plant life—over the valley,

in sun-bloom, crows circle, a hawk

shrieks and songs sing—iris, lichen,

bee plant; humming bird sage, poison oak;

blue blossom, bay and buckeye.