Saturday, June 8th, 2013
We drop ourselves on the grass, face up,
and look past blocks of windows–
stacks of squared lenses to look from rooms
for the sight of sky-moods.
Our view is like that of fish
in the city pond,
eying flashes and shifting shades
made on the surface by sun behind maples.
Fish, like cave-dwellers
watching shadows made by fire.
The sky, the pond, the fish’s eye–
one collapsing telescope
we get behind
from the ground,
interrupted by dogs jumping
for a wet ball.
An ocular Earth.
Saturday, June 8th, 2013
for Michael Adams (in chemo)
Ninety-six hours of voluntary poisoning,
not to kill time
but to have it.
On the ninety-fourth hour
he played the banjo and sang
to stay awake.
On the ninety-fifth he walked a mile
on a loop of carpet squares
to stay awake.
Ninety-fifth-thirty, listened to poetry,
hmmm’d when so-moved,
and stayed awake.
Unplugged from his meter,
he stayed awake,
drove home
to sleep when his lover slept,
where she slept,
in the hours of breath.
Says he that other nights
he could not sleep?
Was the fever-bird singing
over a river of steel.
Blood rushing to cool
his face,
he baked cakes–
had, given, eaten,
food for unstoppable songs
of being awake.
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
One day the maple dropped sap,
another day, bud cases.
Seeds waved goodbye
all the way to the ground,
to leaves young and ripening,
leaves that made promises
as if summer never ended.
Of course, the maple filled with snow,
dropped clumps,
dripped liquid threads that froze near nighttime–
just days before the bees arrived,
nodded into the maple flowers,
into the cells of fallen honeycomb,
fragrant, caramelizing in the sun.
Sunday, May 5th, 2013
Glass shatters and is beautiful,
losing nothing but form.
People fall apart and seem ill.
Better fall instantly
to first frost,
expire early in drought,
collapse on mild earthquakes,
dissolve in sun showers.
Hardiness strives so long for its own fibrous form.
We might cheer to break
like glass,
like lightning:
from one crack
to countless
clear
light
sharp
irretrievable
sparks.
Monday, April 15th, 2013
This predecessor mood next to its successor
is
…they are transient as two bodies
one light/one shadow
that pass each other in the deep blue sky.
The corona rounds its infinite shadow
and is brighter.
The moon is a perfect orb of ink.
Light is a whiter reflection of darkness.
They pass each other in the deep blue sky
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
Land of Lincoln corn,
rows of cool and knee high in July,
rise between their leaves,
their green palms
in uniform prayer.
Feed corn fattens eunuch beef.
Seed corn grows sterile.
Come August ripe
the corn rows grow obscene,
drinking and exhaling in a crowded haze.
Soon, farmlands settle,
lightened by harvest…
the export of corn
by truck and train
to farmers
in Mexico
where Guadalupe tastes memories
of elote, of her own maize.
After Zapata
before NAFTA,
the kernels of cream
became grains of sun
for winter meals.
Her field now is a field
of whisk brooms
sweeping dust.
She buys her meal,
uniformed corn that
shoulders through the markets–
profuse, competitive,
from the Land of Lincoln.
Guadalupe daydreams
while sweeping
imagining the daydreams
of a Zapatista.
Support small farms and food security in Mexico! http://sunnu.org/en/
Sunday, February 24th, 2013
Homage to the great Laughing Goat of The Laughing Goat Coffeehouse
Maybe goats are not what they eat (trash),
so this goat laughs.
He is the coffeehouse mascot,
the small god of the almost-outsiders,
the gargoyle that guards our beans.
He is a goat at the coffee bar
and he is annoyed
at the heaving motors of the cooler.
So he laughs.
Annoyance is ridiculous refuse, and we all know:
we enjoy our annoyances.
Eat them.
Sunday, February 24th, 2013
Marigold candles
light November- gray headstones
Calendula blossoms
glow all through
the snow
then disappear in secret
before green cracks the cold
on the spring solstice
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
–for Nan-in, when the teacher simply pours too much
a blossom-painted cup on a linen field
was over-poured and overflowed
on an oolong afternoon
when a cup cannot be persuaded by the spout
to hold more
its rims trail tea veils
while the dog looks away
eyes birds but sits
until it too has had enough
and whines for water
brings on the rain–
peace, and the end of an oo-long picnic.
Nan-in was a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912); he famously taught: “You are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
Monday, February 4th, 2013
Nudity won’t do
for nakedness.
If we forget, sweating gives a sense of it,
of nakedness,
from the inside out.
Remember our naked childhoods:
the rasped knees,
sand in our teeth,
water in our ears…
the things they made us eat
(with our bare tongues!),
time and again, what we hadn’t meant to say,
but stumbled, and did.
So, we played with fairy tales.
Now we hide in our dishabille,
bit in half by desire:
one for illusion,
one, stronger, for one another’s eyes.
Such mammals as we are,
we are chimps in the nude,
still startled out of nakedness
by the sight of nothing
but our own hides.
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
The house is a cluster of walls
whose thresholds and floorboards each adopts
its own angle of repose, as animals sleeping.
Its bricks are set-and-set together but
–bulge, bend, shift–
hold onto form like an organism.
It is a house
placed on foothills,
that pulls itself up, slowly,
to the mountains.
At first its lumber shrieked
and groaned itself from a hundred-year sleep.
Nails and pipes and cables resisted
but only worked up
an appetite
for uselessness.
Dis-integration is some motion.
Still, gravity never brings a house down,
it’s the house reaching upslope,
it’s shambling towards wilderness.
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
Well loved in a world of
well-loved children,
and of fathers who do not die
holding guns,
A child is unaware
that no stone breaks her glass
no blood floods her milk
no light fades from her lamp–
that her sons will live,
without armies.
No one ever doubts
she belongs everywhere,
to be daring and safe
everywhere.
What will she do with so much peace?
She will create without creating possessions,
paint her dreams on unlocked doors.
When we have forgotten
the ancient religion:
of fear and war.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
In memory of Micah True, aka. Caballo Blanco,
who lived some months of each year in Mexico’s Copper Canyon
Give him the reins
to the ghost horse
and the guide will remove the straps
from its face and neck.
Then, they will cross the border together.
They will begin forgetting,
when walking through the city
of commuters with inventive ways
to carry worry.
They will forget the dollar
and the peso,
and thirst, for anything.
When roads disappear,
they will forget news, words,
and especially the task of asking
who they were.
The ghost horse,
his ribs and flanks will forget,
his white hide will forget
every boot heel,
wrong or right.
Together, they will breathe nightfall
with the Chihuahuan desert,
where sage soothes the sunset
as it strives behind mesquite branches,
and where wood fires in the canyon
gather Rarámuri faces
around.
They will forget
to celebrate or mourn.
All the love they’ve known is in the pollen
of purple jacarandas,
and in the maize pots, filled
for those who have become their kin.
With thanks for thoughts on border-crossings derived from the play, De Camino al Ahorita, by Raúl Dorantes.
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
My face is just a lake
of burning water
whose dystopic lakebed
yearns to be a field of grain
or of flowers.
But tonight, rain pours,
sweet as almond oil
on burnt cheeks.
Then whistling birds
and tingling stars
sing to the air
with which morning will stroke…my face,
still cool
from green dreams,
in a lakebed.
Saturday, August 18th, 2012
To walk is to touch inside
the skin of distance,
so I learn with my feet
to know the places I go.
Wearing shoes, still, I can tell
grass from mud
rock from sand
dry asphalt from wet.
At home, I will paint this joy with effort:
images of roads caressing hills,
stairs bending in succession,
of red dirt stroking between my toes.
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012
It is fear that makes us push against curtains of silk
like they are walls of lead.
Breaths across the prairie floors of a house
give rise to morning waves at the sills.
Our respiration, like wind, is only visible in what moves,
like branches and glances, steam from our cups,
the silk that sheathes our hearts.
A fire takes them all within moments of ignition,
a snapping flame that eats what is best loved.
This is why we still pursue lead shelters,
in homes of silk.
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
In an eight-sided house,
eight elbows in walls
slow thought’s rotations–
a leaf in an eddy,
turning to know itself.
The center post holds
a single purpose
so thought need not.
At top, a window lens
blinking rain:
one skyward eye.
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
Acquisitive eyes are blind,
anywhere,
more than half the time.
It is so in the desert,
a place more private,
intimate only with eyes
content both knowing and not knowing.
On the altiplano, paja brava
tuft and riffle like the water
that emerges here and there from sand.
Improbable, indomitable, the grasses and the water,
who host the private lives
of beetles, chinchilla, artemia.
Deserts are never naked,
but in spring, wear their flagrance.
As pimientos give scent,
optunia and flowers blaze.
They expect to be seen,
even in flagrante.
You must more than notice them:
face forward toward the mystery.
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
I lay on a silver bitumen rooftop near midnight,
face to the stars, and closed my eyes–
a leaf floating on the tensile skin of a lake.
I weighed nothing, was nothing less
than one of the planets,
whose orbits roll, marbles on time’s silk sheet,
toward the center.
Until a train roared by on rails,
from there to here and on, and on.
Its wheels sputtered false lightning.
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
Bones and stones and shells,
accretions of each in each
because of water.
Let me stand, to my tender belly
in water,
where filaments of bone wave
inside glimmering fish
between strands of sea grass.
Gulls break shells
for flesh that melts like mine,
whole sea yolks…
whole lives, in water embodied,
fed, carried, dissolved…even stones…
in water,
steady below the tides
of my eyes.
.
Water is licensed by Deborah Kelly (Hirsch) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.