Nameless

When did I forget the full moon really had no face?
She was beautiful anyways
her black shadow hair glimmering with shards of stolen white diamonds
she danced in a buckskin dress made from the ghost of a deer
it had no bead-work.

She used to whisper lies
frostbitten kisses burned my cheeks
oh her lips against mine
what I thought was lapis lazuli was turquoise instead
I valued it still.

Some nights I go back
sit alone on those hilltops
among long grasses bent with the burden of seed
watch waters below mirror endlessness
until her weeping ripples the sky.

abyss

i query the Database
it keeps returning nulls

invalid parameter
subscript out of range
script timeout
404
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page not found

you will not find a tiger in this poem.
the night has not yet come.
it is not cold.
you are laughing
but have you seen the sun?
have you tasted it?
or something like it
orange in the desert
some salt in your blood?
the light that comes with sunrise
it's not in the sun
but in the clouds
not in the clouds
but in the not-clouds
not in the scars of claw marks
you do not have
but in the scars you do.

early winter shore

winds blow through a worn and barkless beech buried in receding dunes
what weight is there in hollowness wrapped within a tree?
gray sky clouds drag their shadows where tourists used to stand
where does a shadow go? which color are the pebbles that remain?
what is their number? how are they arranged?
what determines where the grass will grow?
the vertebrae of fish have gone
seagull skulls lay staring
eyeless though feasting on eyes
none of them see
overhead glide high in the wind
echoes of screeching
the slap of waves
draws mountians
on the shore 
one after
another
erases
heels
toes
all
of
it

why

can't i hang on
to just one thread
one sun-bleached thread
that flower dress
you have thrown away

just a single breath
faintest echo of that song
we tried to share

no you're right- it isn't there

then why summer still clinging so
to my winter coat?

your words

a crumpled page
my rigid fist
as if to wring out truth
and ink could run
like blood that's dried

the place I thought you were

cupped in hands

big lake's cold
washes nothing away

roar of surf
echoing over hills

dunes beneath growth and rot
never again to see
cruel burning sun unless
land- a torn wound

none of this
enough to save

I speak as if I know you
certainly I don't

only these trails of words
we leave each other

and if I believe it's possible
can't you

where is that wooden boat
blue paint peeling
dingy yellow patches

so what
if the oars are frayed
if waves are fierce

I need the wind
to sting my ears and dull my grip
I won't let go
those useless oars
I'll reach the other side

that's where you're wrong
you see
I will

not if it doesn't kill me
it will never kill me
only the part
that won't be whole

Pi

they sundered all things

moon into shadow
jupiter steeped in light
some said they should
others that they shouldn't
circumference of a circle
no beginning
no end

what then?

shall I be satisfied with this?
yes it is wonderful
but doesn't tomorrow always offer something new?
haven't I ruined everything I've ever tried to preserve?

leaves fall from that dying ash
pileated woodpeckers feast
I am not yet dust
so let me kick it up.

back

in snow dusted hills
among rattling branches

bare against winds off the lake
the west- a roar of waves

we blow cupped hands
warm our fingers

- - -

beneath hemlocks I tell the boys 
this is shelter in a blizzard

I point out hoof prints of a startled deer
we follow them backwards

lay our fingers in white pressed coolness
smooth twin teardrops

maybe she's watching us
she too knows the utility of hemlock's shade

- - -

cresting a ridge
we spot the furrow below

that's our trail
it takes us to a place I know well

boyhood's rusted nails
buried in a swell of bark

how impossible this clutter

a photo of a river through a forest

a painting of a child lifting his hand to his mother
she balances a jar of water on her head

three white stones on what's left of a gray worn limb
from a land that has ceased to exist
the vista from that tree

a camel carrying a tourist to the pyramids

silent victrola
cigarette burns on its lid
left by teenagers old when I was young
for many years abandoned
reclaimed from a shed covered in pine needles

shelves of books
bindings bleached by seldom light
how many do I still refuse to surrender?
those pages I once turned
telling myself stories of adventure
trying to unfurl the language of love
walking the tangled trails beyond love
to solemn places in unknowable deserts
standing naked and shivering before a scent of holiness

I still can't rid myself of these

beer in a bar

birds (which birds?) in branches
the strongest hug one another and smile
(do)n't love this beer this red bloody beer
it makes no handwriting I understand
answers no answer to the calling of words
burned in black windows
dead brown leaves
eating through massive nothingness of universe
of unity so confusing I can't read
nor was I meant to see
to believe or disbelieve
to dive off cliffs
if or if not
water below

Advent

"Can you could teach me the mysteries?" he asks.
She does not understand,
he can't tell what her eyes are saying.

A breeze arises,
carries no birdsong,
just the din of traffic.

An hour later he realizes he loves her,
she sees it in his eyes,
but her bus has come.

She waves goodbye.
He does not notice,
has already concluded

she's from some distant shore of heaven-
a messenger,
but she's from Cleveland.

forty nine leather straps

face pressed against face
bound from neck to knee
constricting breath
you both struggle against suffocation

if you inhale together
her ribs will crack
if you are methodical
careful
synchronized
you can undo the straps
working from top to bottom


you feel incapable
doomed
she so helpless
it's her life you try to save
yours is nothing
she pays for your every mistake

the first straps are easy
but near the end you stop attempting to unbuckle them
try to tear them off
all the while your breaths shallower
quickening

at the waist
your fingers still struggling with straps
she lays her hands on yours
whispers in your ear
you've undone enough

Digging

I saw you last night
looking right at me
I sat at a folding table
you stood at the mic
musicians played jazz
your voice as i remembered it
a beat poet
when you finished
I clapped louder than the rest
I wanted to go next
but got lost in cigarette smoke

haze

the sun is out this afternoon if only briefly low in hazy sky not gray nor blue but white a worn-out tissue something in my eye i hesitate not sure if it's remorse or longing or whether these are both the same i stand in what used to be my garden forgetting it's already november remembering how in '95 so many crossed wide valleys in cold rain living in swamps and how that cargo plane rattled tin roofs plowing up all that sod i only know the flies were bad that year

Not only this

What is it exactly that has passed through my fingers without me even knowing? I still feel its brush against my aging check. I dreamt of it last night. It startled me awake and when I fell back to sleep I lost it. All that remains is the shape of hollowness. It lingers even now at the end of this day that has taken more than I had in me to give it. I do not blame others for how much they want from me of what I can't give them and what they seem incapable of giving me, nor do I blame myself for this. I only want these few moments I have stolen from the day and horded in this folded napkin stuffed in my pocket.  I unfold it now, examine it in the stillness of this quiet room. It's not that I am glad that they have fallen asleep so I may stay awake these few more minutes. It's just that there's no other way for me. I don't know why this act of lamentation brings such peace. I only know it is singular to me in this moment and if not now poured out then not only this but everything is lost.

Is this what wonder is?

I am fishing for small pickles
sour in the greenness of a jar

until I read

indigo buntings migrate by night
follow patterns of stars
to south america

an image of them
burns through darkness

oddly when I close my eyes
I see small shadows

goldfish without color
burnt-out holes swimming deep

cerulean seas
where in soundless fathoms

mysteries like bright stars
shine

Astronauts, Lunatics

"HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND" - a plaque on the Moon

While Jim Lovell's wife and children prayed for his safe return to Earth
Idi Amin beat prisoners to death with sledgehammers.

When John F Kennedy announced we were going to the Moon
Belgians dissolved Patrice Lumumba's body in sulfuric acid
they kept teeth for souvenirs.

After returning from orbit
Lisa Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando in adult diapers
they found a steel mallet in her trunk.

northward

through wandering ways
into long quiet evening

the particular route unimportant
only heading far away

around an unintentional shoreline
where waves wear away pebbles

meandering through stony elevations

along a ridge
across ravines

the exact route unfolds itself
speaks to me

miles yet
before arriving

whisperings
in shadows of a forest

not my destination
as of yet unknown

how could I not know

many years ago
you swam for me

in that swimming pool
beyond poverty

everywhere outside
the open hands of dusty children

men with leprosy
wide toothless smiles of old women

they'd thank me
for a few useless coins

you swimming
in chlorinated azure waters

your bikini
brought from the States

just that once
for me

the journey home

we send them out
in lifeboats with broken oars
leaking hulls we patched with pitch

into the open sea
beyond the old courageous
they so young how would they know?

that great shadow in the depths
they pass over
there is no other way

not for us
as we have said
it is their only hope

we but ask for them the sun
a steady breeze
to see them through

and yet

this is still this and that is still that
the waves come rolling in and rolling in
or they don't
the water's a mirror
until a bass leaps
what were you looking at anyway?
and what can you see?

winds

all through the night
trees moan
the bay roars
the house creaks

so many voices
so much condemnation

this morning
whitecaps on the bay
the old locust tree bending
little yellow leaves
cast across the highway
turbid waters
milky turquoise mixed with tan

a little sunlight
in the beginning
but now it's gone away

A Riddle for Hitchhikers

There's a truck driver, a policeman, a New Zealand VSO, and a Peace Corps Volunteer driving across the African savannah in the cab of a truck when a tsetse fly comes in the through the side window. Which one does it bite?

-None of them. They're all so busy trying to kill it that nobody drives the truck...

late

driving
near midnight
sand blows in from shore
hotel after hotel
vacancy in neon
shoreline serenity
all along the bay
lights glimmer dim like stars
not a soul
its been dark for hours
twenty seven degrees
earlier a halo around the moon
leaves have fallen in the driveway
clouds press down in deafening darkness
winds cut through my hat and jacket
the house a mass of shadow
porch light's out 
inside everyone is sleeping
I haunt the empty rooms
my toes ache
sliding in thin socks
across the cold hard floor

and yet there is a solace
in the silence of this hour

turning 49

setting sun upon the heights of a great oak
a golden light upon the clinging leaves
one by one they circle far across the sky
branches rattle in chill gusts coming off the bay

cornucopia

the oaks
once again a black scribbling
scrawled across gray sky

nearly all the words exhausted
unspoken promises
but grackles flying off

great vessels of dark clouds crowded out stars
dead brown leaves poured out from their bellies
locusts eating what was left of the very little that had been real

a sisal sack split unraveled
weight of hope spilled out
dry kernels of stale corn that even mice abandoned

recompence

"All that came out of them, came quietly
 like the four seasons." -Chuang Tzu

all the stones and pebbles
you've spent your life collecting

fling them back into the waters
the dead sea

cast them off the rim of chaco canyon
return them to the mountain of the rising sun

let them fall from your hands
unbearable

a trail of them
leads home

that crumbling foundation
overgrown with poplars

the pink granite boulder your father plowed up
it had a vein of quartz

from that same field
a stone axe head broken

the sharpness of its edge
made by those who came before

return these to their places

traversing a swamp

jumble of branches
brown damp grasses

poplar leaves
rattle yellow

pastel blue
dying day's sky

flutter of wings
pileated woodpecker

closer to earth
starkness of white against gray

milkweed pod
loosening seed

just pluck it
and blow

the arrow of time

all there is a constant trickle of words that mean nothing   maples bud may leaves such tender green by august darkened october yellowed november papery brown leaf after leaf fallen returned to the earth as if they never were and this is true they never were   these letters these pixels forming the characters you read they are the same meaningless thing going on and on as if they were taking you somewhere besides your useless grave who cares?  words flow like water carrying with them all things   all things erode   you are born live and die the swifter the current the faster things move but after all the time is inconsequential

leaden

yellow leaves
turning brown

cover
dark hills

black fingers of branchs
claw the gray sky

old forest
silent

posion of overipe berries
rotting away

through the crisscross
of tree limbs

still waters
color of steel

i cannot bear this cold
and much less me

Cartography

He told me how in the 1600's a Japanese cartographer devised a means of measuring great distances so accurately that he committed suicide because he couldn't account for errors which were due to the Earth being round. I suggested it was because their women were flat chested that he could not conceive of a spherical Earth. The fire was blazing on the shore, and stars burned brilliantly.  We were drinking whiskey. Going on, I claimed that God was a large-breasted woman playing a tuba, and the universe a song.

undaunted

dust of the road
of years
that remain
much fallen away

traveled so many roads
all roads are one road
leading to wilderness
deteriorating
two track
trail
foot path
parting of grasses

i turn
look back
footprints in sand
don't give a damn where
go on and on
there is no way

many trails end
beyond them nothing
always turning to nowhere

i've grown accustomed
learned to appreciate
sought them out

where no one else goes
where i am not asked
where nothing is broken
because everything's broken

edges etched with erosion
water wind blowing
sand eats away

gray trunks
twisted trees
grooved liveless wood
smooth worn rock
some solace

crevices through mountains
canyons across long desolate plains
i follow the winds
shit wherever
move on

from my shelf

i read it one last time i told myself i don't want to part with it i would have said to her keep it if it's useful but if it isn't let me have it back i would have said keep it until it you're done with it then give it away but she wasn't there and i still have it and i don't want to read it anymore

putting back the sun

if you stop your hand for but a moment
slipping out of present into past

pink wisps of clouds linger
over waters

if in the middle of the river
on this island where you live

you let a hundred years settle
like evening dew on your shoulders

if over and over
dull twilight coalesces into pin pricks of stars

remember the dream
from childhood

how the sun fell one afternoon
and landed in mud

you held it in your hands
a dingy cardboard disk

even after all these years 
you cannot put it back

still covered by those useless feathers
buried in the bottom of that broken steamer trunk

I was

a landscape
through which a river flowed

my arms trees
fingers boughs
from which branches grew
and from them leaves

my head a hill
eyes rocks
mouth a cave
where strange things lived

even I lived there

emerged into sunlight shining
through branches
rusted leaves
strewn like a shroud

nudged a few
into the waters

watched the current
carry me away

This is the crap i come up with

The thing is- I don't care, all there is is the writing and if the writing stops- well let's just agree that the writing will never stop, that it will go on and on maybe even if it shouldn't, it can't be plugged, it can't be turned off no matter how bad it gets. It does get bad, terribly bad, horribly bad, its just that it's all there is see- and if it ends well the trees will loose their leaves, the stars will fizzle away in dried up ponds where there won't even be a carcass, not even the fossil of anything that never was, nothing will have gone to seed so nothing else can grow, the black soil will have become a colorless dust, Jim would utter pelagic not upon eager ears but to the dry hollow husk of a dead anemone shell and even the shell would be not a shell but a few calciferous shards laying in a dusty wooden bowl and the bowl but a pile of sawdust in a black and white photograph of a woodcarver's shop and the woodcarver just the memory of a buried infant boy and the boy just an amorous glint in someone's eye who never saw a thing.

I'm signing off for tuesday

north winds and echoes of winds
rain running down the window
I'm turning off the lights
locking the doors
going home for
the evening
it's dark
getting
cold
out
so
-

East East

at the end of the world
impenetrable as bwindi's forests
tasteless as dust
as cobwebs of pate
as lost as legends of kilwa
eaten by salty mists
on the indian coast
to bathe in tourquise
to feed on beryl
not mold-eaten limestone
to climb across the riddled boulders until
looking down on socotra's diminishing shores
by hands and knees reaching
the shadow of the dragon's blood 
and there beneath the cruel arab sun
plunge into the dark robe of that sandal-less sultana
have her over and over
upon a foundation of sweet sweet chrysolite
until even the stones are spent

Each

leaf falls down tomato slips past ripening cloud collides wave pommels shore dark drop fills cup of day poured out runs through crack in smooth surface cool degree of temperature a penny slipping through hole in pocket of broken hour until there is no more

Scorched

So the Earth burns in my wake. It has always done that. I cannot hold things without breaking them, I cannot leave things be. I attempt to understand them and often through that process destroy the things I seek to know, but I have come to see that before anything new can be created, what exists must burn away. So I keep moving because if I don't, even I myself will be consumed by the very fire I pursue.

Color

Things are as they are and I cannot change them,but still nothing will ever diminish the splendor of the October woods. The maple so singular, so arresting, consuming all of vision until you begin to believe that you can even feel the color saturating your skin. In those last moments before the Sun passes beyond the western horizon you are looking east and the forests are ablaze, it is only later in the gray dusk that something startles you and you find that you cannot account for the period of time that has passed or for any of the living you have ever done and the only thing you know is that you are now alive and everything is new.

Called

Near midnight the moon called me like it used to do down that old trail through the woods I wandered as a child. I paused at the cage where we used to keep the dogs and stood for a time until one by one all their ghosts came panting at the door. I opened it and watched them leap with freedom one more time. I said goodbye as they fled into the shadows of the pines and then I followed. I crossed over that gate which once held back the woods from the yard now overrun with willows. I entered into darkness beneath the oaks that had always been and in that blackness there was no moon no trail except the trail I had always known. Cold mists lingered over the swamp where a few crickets chirped their lonesome songs. Further down the trail echoed the barking of the dogs fainter and fainter. Patches of moonlight burned here and there in the darkness. Atop the ridge ran the crumbling tombstones of the cemetery that held two hundred years of bones. Some of the ancient oaks had fallen across the trail gargantuan trunks and mighty limbs barred my way, but I wove through them, over and under and around the smooth and bark-less wood. As I passed they tore away the years.  Then the leaves before me rustled and I felt the air explode, an invisible mass beating its heavy wings off into the heights. I did not know at first if I was still all there, if it hadn't carried most of me away, but I moved on, and as I did moonlight dotted more and more of my way. I stood at last in a clearing at the edge of the swamp. The moon so brilliant shone I squinted at its light, my clothes so pale, and then I turned. Beyond the ridge the cemetery glowed and down from the hill around shadows of towering trees wove all the apparitions. Awakened by the barking of the dogs they'd come to stand with me and gaze across the swamps at the brilliance of the moon. One by one they rose and in a great V like geese they flew off towards the light. I alone remained in the moonlit forests of my youth.

Harvest Moon

I'd driven through traffic
was almost home

I'd come to the bay
hadn't noticed how quiet
the eerie light of dusk

The road curved northward
a great pine stood
looming on shore
there in its arms
dark shape of a crow
white circle of moon

Was it night already?
Where had September gone?

Just this morning
the sky such a brilliant shade of blue
clouds like kingdoms rose
the din of children living at the beach

Sails were billowing and when I swam
I swam for hours beneath the burning sun
the breeze was warm and steady
upon my browning chest
sunset forever
stars fell overhead

It's evening now
I put my sweater on
go out in the garden

I've known for months
the pumpkins wouldn't come
I look for signs of frost.
My fingers ache with cold.

Dirt

Days hollowed out like logs
from trees that once lived

Hollow winds blowing too long
striping away time and creation

All things get caught up in wind

Days have gone
so many gone
like dandelion seeds
fallen on sandy places

I should sit for a time
by the bank of that old pond I once found
deep in a now-forgotten forest
watching the water's surface
watching winds
across that still surface
broken in so many shards
shards of mirrors
wavelet upon wave

I should just listen
close my eyes and rest

I should go
far away from here
where the sun still glances
across tender stalks of grass
that bend and bend and bend
that cast their seeds and die and grow
cast their seeds and grow
flourishing in the rain
sleeping beneath snow

sending shoots skyward
in any weather

The sun is drifting southward everyday
night encroaches on the afternoon

I don't know what I'm after here
these words seem so weakly simple
like the grasses they go on and on

I'm not certain they bear seed
yet they flourish
as long as I'm their root

But is it me or something else
something needing voice
speaking itself into being
I only a furrow to be carved?

Yes I
the soil that must be turned
the soil life works
breaking the substance of me
dividing and subdividing
what I am
root coming from root coming from root
until I am just the sand
every nutrient extracted
until I am the dust
which wind and rain remove.

Dusk

oh the Sun

it's shining, it's burning
blistering away the day

the tree branches swaying
in the gales off the bay

flocks of swallows
dotting the yellow sky

as if Summer still had some sway

as if already
the light wasn't bleeding away

hulks of the maples
a growing shadow in the west

a streak of brilliant white
so luminescent

thrust at such a perilous angle
into the shoulders of the trees

a jet barely visible
nearly lost in the heights


its engine heating
compressing the air

using the atmosphere
against itself

to climb westward
so to appear

as if it's falling

into the ghost of the Sun

how wonderful to know
that light seeks after light

the peach edge
of a gray cloud

already eclipsing
that bright contrail

branches still buffeted
sway

the north winds
roaring hollow and bodiless

tearing, tearing
the world away from the day

Overtime

That's the thing. I should be developing GetHTML("CensusKey") but I'm sketching contour lines instead. I'm trying to get the edges right, an oval of a face, remembering a glance, trying to remember the corners of a smile. I'm not being analytical at all. The code keeps crashing, I keep running down rabbit trails, the outline of her hair, that knee length skirt, the band-aid on her toe. Why do I keep cutting and pasting the same variable, as if it's iterative? Its getting dark outside, the rain's incessant, so much code to write, so much.

This can't be true

She was born on the Autumnal Equinox. They remembered this was so even if, perhaps, there was some meager chance she wasn't. She would come and go so often on that day when Day and Night stood arms crossed saying, "We're the same you and I. You go one way and I the other."

Says Day, "This is your time. I know it as much as you, but do not think that I am less than you."

Says Night, "This I know so well, having watched you live these past few months; and you, you're no more than me."

You go your way; I go mine. That is how it is. Can't we go together? There's no particular reason, even if there is a purpose.

Last year a milkweed seed drifted through the open windows of my car. I'd pulled off in some sun-bleached country field; was just awakening from a nap. So quietly it drifted by, so delicately floating on nothing but the air. As it passed I knew it carried me away somewhere, and there you were, your hair so soft and cool against my sunburned cheek.

Ten Thousand Birds of an Unspecified Species

ten thousand birds
darken the sky
fill it with riotous noise
night has darkened day
clouds appear in the west
consume the stars
they still shine
the windows are open
i stand on the porch
watch them fly
fly out the door
rise to the sky
i am pinned to this Earth
mouth agape
watching them
watching them 
skyward fly

Return

Once there was a day when the forests were pure when the sun shone from an ever blue sky. Some days I still find it. Many years ago, a hundred million years ago it seemed, a white moon without blemish shone. Do not be afraid to return, to linger. Pause. Do not be afraid to seek it out.  For many days you will not find it no matter how hard you try, but please for me, for you, for all of us, do try. Don't surrender.  There are many ways we must surrender and when we do we know we must, but don't listen to this, my telling you what to do. The winds are pure, the sky is blue, the sun shall ever shine. That place in the forest waits for you, keeps waiting for you.

hope of summer, spent

acrid smelling shotgun shell
spinning through the air
smoke
and taste of smoke

regret

an empty plastic casing

pleasure so temporary
pulling the trigger

young boy
pointing the barrel
inches away from tiny white chest
a chickadee
the rest of his life
tasting the spatter of bird shit
mingled with gun smoke

young man
taking an eight point
nearly two hundred pounds

vertebrae shattering
turning
to face the sound
echoing off distant hills
still running 
on its side in the swamp

gray

gray clouds

a cold cold rain

Flight

Tonight as I kept repeating the melody stuck in my head, pounding it into the worn keys of a tired old piano, I went back to the time when I traveled for days by bus across the wastelands of central Tanzania. I was fleeing myself, putting kilometers between me and the places that had become too painful for me to stay any longer, where I was living out the lies I was telling myself. I was distancing myself from the whores and the old bartenders I surrounded myself with, who played along for profit, complicit for their own pitiful reasons, who would have rolled me over had I died to pick my pockets for the few useless Shillingi I lived off. I was escaping those of my own devices which I believed had already killed me, and had yet to come to gestation. I occupied my mind those days with fears of various forms of infectious disease that depended on such activities for their procreation. I had already known that I was going to run. I had the bus ticket and my bags in my room ready at the Y. It was on that last night of my envisioned destruction when the bartender had already stiffed me, and I let him just to see how far he would actually go, when J____ had finally given up her manipulations and suggested that I take the sixteen year old who was new. S____ had already thrown the beer bottle outside against the wall, and her friend speaking of love, trying to negotiate a settlement had given up too. She had in her hand a paperback of Gulliver’s Travels, which was fitting, for it seemed by that time they all had already tied various threads of their own contriving across my torso and limbs, and were clinging to them in attempts to pin me to some firm unmoving ground. The deal was made. I was to pay their ways into Jimmy Conners, and they would swing by the Y to drop me off so I could come later. All of us had come to separate independent realizations about how this would provide various opportunities of escape for any of us. Maybe no one understood but me that all of them would be enacted without exception so that early the next morning, head heavy and stomach rotting with too much beer I was sitting in the midst of villagers on a bus, sunlight searing through my eye sockets into the back of my skull, leaving in the dust that desperate city to waken without me.

when the Sun is out shining go turn your face to its light this is what I tell myself the sun will shine when it does and when it doesn’t maybe rain let it come when the moon is out shining wake stand beneath it whatever the hour of night let it tell you things that you’ve forgotten let its light paint familiar landscape strange summer fades there’ll be others or this may be the last no matter take the time wander a field find an unknown wilderness alone when vegetables in your garden ripen pick them the green beans die from rust let them go wake to leaden clouds of fall the day’s sudden coolness let cold brush against your lips winds redden your checks stars still shine progress in their mechanical way i suppose other things are like this too i showed up at the wrong funeral confronted by loss of someone i didn’t know i have to live within myself who else has the patience? each year my litany grows longer so many more reasons i will let things be if i am different so what i haven’t the words get beneath my skin September winds blow strong the quality of this day battled out in the sky above i’ve spent a whole succession of months chasing the light of the Sun there is never a day i seek the shadow of clouds

Words

I am not sure anymore if my writing is only a footpath through the forest where I've traveled, or if it's a way revealing itself into the depths of an as-of-yet-undiscovered wilderness. Maybe it's both or neither, just water flowing where it will, where this present landscape affords it passage. Perhaps it is only pooling in some concavity where the myriad forms of pond life thrive.

solitude

i went to the desert
it was like a sea

(you need a boat
to travel the sea)

walked for miles

had no sextant
lost my way

in the middle of nowhere
sat a Coupe de Ville

'58 or 9
a rusted husk

sky through bullet holes
hollows for headlights

no steering wheel
doors gone

i got in
sat on a stone

turned to
Father Anthony

“you got the keys?”
but he was gone

in the back seat
Athanasius

shouting
“drive you fool, drive.”

Autumn

In the dream a friend was telling me how in 1948 her grandmother was born on the Vernal Equinox, but September was near. "We've turned the corner. Summer's gone," She said. We stood in shadow beside an unfamiliar gas station. An old woman drove up in a rusty blue car. It skidded to a stop. The woman had crazy eyes. She came to me and buried my face in her chest, and when I looked up I saw she was a classmate from many years ago. She didn't look so old. I could see her nipples swelling behind the fabric of her cotton dress, and when I awoke I was a boy again sleeping in my old bed, trying to pull up the old wool blanket I used to use when I got cold.

bordering on cliche'

Inside the room
a painted cloud

music of
a violin

the flowers already
starting to fade

scent of incense
always masking

some odor
of death

Outside the window
clouds are real

so is
the sky

earlier
I walked

among the cut-up branches
of a beech

September
knocking at the door

I myself
am crawling out the window

dancing over
a distant hill

the grass so green
this summer

my body
in many ways denied

always telling me
it's there

telling
and telling

until at last
I have to listen

sunlight through
the window

so wonderful
this time of year

faith

inside a small adobe Church
air thick
smell of incense

a candle for Jesus
flickers in the darkness

outside
above the desert
the brilliance of clouds
whiteness of clouds
moves
across a stoic sky

in the distance
far from the empty Church
there's a skeleton
of a prehistoric fish
pressed into a layer
deep inside a stone

that darkness is no different

the coast

the days are long

cards thrown
one at a time
at a wall of gray cement
they land face down or up
an Ace
a Queen of Clubs not Hearts

is a Jack a Knave?

boats rock
on distant waves
not blue waves
gray green

1 + 1 equals something too far gone to see
the cards don't tell a thing

at the corner of the future
is the past
she knocks me flat
cards fall out of my pockets

I never pick them up

the sea is not too far from here
I can taste the salt

is there a boat out there for me?
a gray boat
on gray waves

the clouds
curtains covering sky
steel curtains
cold rivets
raining down

what rot

i smell
can taste it
lick it
but hell i can't shake it
a sling on my arm
two weeks
one hundred
degree temperature
one hundred
percent humidity
two tee shirts
two god damned
tee shirts
worn too too thin
ocean warm
waves waves waves
i'm drowsy
beached
on a sand bar
raised up
low tide
not far from shore
away from the din
the traffic
humanity's mass
the whole fucking city
i sleep like seaweed
cut-up on shore
smell like dead fish
seaweed that died and fermented
in one hundred degree air
(i don't care)
the whole year
rotted
the long afternoon
of that great lie
pitting
prostitute against whore
(nobody won)
beer bottle shattered
bus through the desert
the sea beating beating
against the hard sand
rising and falling
smelling like a corpse
three days dead
fermenting
one hundred degree air
swollen
the pig that i am
while from up in the sky
falling
a cow
trailing its entrails
singing so sweetly
an old lullaby

water a mirror

i
or
you
lost
words
unfurled
rope let go
boat wind-cast
upon wide ocean
into vastness so full

of emptiness there
is no map of the
open sea waters
go on forever
like sky goes
on forever
all men go
to graves
or part
words
lost
you
or
i

passed over

what I didn't say bled like a river for days long after flies long after the blood had dried and the flies dead long after the odor the stink required a shirt held over your nose and mouth what I didn't say lingered there in the silence the solemn silence deafening the silence I had to break with the things I had to say that coming out of my body tore flesh shattered bones like a high pitch shatters glass saying what I didn't say to drive the crows away crows that tear at flesh and go for the eyes there were no eyes there was no flesh there were no words what I didn't say no longer was what I did say no longer was I no longer was there was only what was itself existing because it always had remembering itself what it was it threw me away because I didn't matter it didn't matter if I didn't say if not through me it would find another.

Sound

You wake up near evening
a single stone in your hand

misshapen
imperfect
just the right thing

not random nor meaningless
cool to the touch

made of a wisdom
that you can not grasp

like an echo of nothing
of nothing
of nothing-

How I managed to survive

The damned balloon was made to order, but the stupid asshole who made it let it go too soon. I had to make my own out of bubble gum wrapper, paper towels, toilet paper, and plastic grocery bags. I tied them together with dental floss, stuck them together with pine pitch (did I ever tell you how much exactly I hate, absolutely hate, I mean HATE pine pitch?) Why'd that bastard let it go? No matter, I made my own. Did I tell you that I happened to use the elastic from my underwear? of course I didn't, that would be stupid... but... I mean... oh never mind. I was actually able to launch it. There was a formula for making lighter than air gas in a popular science book I read from the 20's, One of the ingredients was iron shavings. I started grinding up my car before realizing that there is very little iron in cars these days. I ended up using the kitchen sink instead, proverbial I know, but I was desperate. I had to get the hell out. Time's up? OK, long story short I did get out. The balloon happened to hold. Of course there was a small mishap with fire. What? Yes I understand. Perhaps some other time when we have a little longer to talk.

out of pen, out of mind

good morning night elusive. The sweetness on my lips from wine doesn't run too deep. The stillness, pens louder than traffic, the window sky airplane buzzing by awhile ago, the spokes my bent wheel whining, counting time, days, hours, minutes knowing that they would run never doing what you would hope, and that's the funny thing there is no time that ever isn't slipping this way or that, tomorrow yesterday both robbing now, knifing it in the kidney or the back, leaving it laying in the alley leaking seconds and minutes, the bike wheel spinning on its side, and I wonder when I race my bike if I'm not still, and only speeding up the Earth, and if I can ride east fast enough will I ever find a yesterday I'd even like, don't get me wrong, I'm not into repeating (a pause) I'm not into receding into past or into walls that seem no more to be, I'd rather run or race not against anybody but me because just once I might be able to escape myself or me or whatever the hell I am or not. To see beyond the present why would I want that, I don't, the future nor the past, you just let me be now here away from that which should be or might be or can't be. Let time fall off the planet, let me do away with skin, with flesh, with shoes that wear too fast, yes speed if there were no time speed would die, the wind wouldn't blow, my teeth wouldn't chew, doesn't garlic burn? raw garlic good for the heart, and keeping people away, let me breathe on you and leave your flower putrid, let it cease to be, that you might come out, empty yourself and me the (no not a vapor)

this way and that

among the wine glasses a water glass bubbles un-drunk the evening light bleeds into us over us through us the aching bee stung with visions of death undetermined the word concrete falling from the sky the black sky above the himalayas who was it spoke of the wisdom of her dog its simplicity complicity the revelation of some truth that seems like paisley in an empty sort of way colorful too again the bleeding light a sea of oranges bobbing like the gladiators eyes his lopped off head smiling still speaking saying babbling "fu.." then ending tongue stuck out a crow alights and caws they always like seagulls go for the eyes are the doorway into the emptiness of souls spilled forth a multitude of things draw me in all directions perhaps they do others too they grab them though and shape them into something that has so far eluded me but that's OK a dog chews the dried ear of a pig.

the lifeboat's last voyage

a lifeboat upside down on a sidewalk scraped along the bronze of its gunwales beginning to shine layers of paint peeling off he dragged it behind him approaching the wall finding the door that was locked he hurled the lifeboat against it all of his dreams spilled out the glass jars shattered things lay in puddles that were once in jars things bleached brown instead of green a lamprey eel dead reeking of formaldehyde the fluid clear repulsive yet vapors rose that once were dreams a wind drew them through the doorway over the fragments of the broken door out into a field on the other side so incongruent - a field he followed the vapors through the doorway finding a desert instead a severe light beating down the still coolness of timeless morning sands winds whispering whispering whispering.

Broken

words
a trail
leading into forests deep
and tall and wide
into the hollowness
full of detritus
leaves
sticks
jaw bones
in them interwoven layers
and layers of pages of words
word after word telling of things half remembered
nearly illegible
the rain and the snow
the winds and the sun
the worms and the grubs
composting
transforming
waste into nutrient
seeds
taking root
saplings
growing year after year
reaching deeper
further
thicker
drawing sustenance from the words
and though indecipherable
the trees
at their zenith
in the height of summer
are beautiful and timeless
and whole

The First of November

In the dim sunlight of Fall some red, yellow, brown leaves cling to the nearly barren branches of the Oaks. The sky is gray, but still in the height of afternoon, between the chill gusts of wind, a meager warmth lingers. I close my eyes and face the sunlight and feel its gentle touch upon my cheeks. On opening my eyes I am welcomed with color. All is quiet and in the stillness comes a peace. The simplicity and wholeness of this gift fills me with awe. It is good, and right, and holy.

A prisoner to words
they cage me in
confine my thoughts
they dictate who I am
and what I can do.
What is it that they want?
Why am I enslaved to them?
They are my master
and yet I cannot find them
they do not comfort me.
A thousand bear no weight
and yet they are so heavy some of them.
I cannot pass time without them
and when I cannot find the ones I need
I must sift through them
as if they are tens of thousands
of pails of sand.
When I seek solace or peace
and try to put them away
they barrage me like hailstones.

Waters Arrested

Behind a pane of glass on the cluttered bookshelf sits an old black and white photo yellowed with age of a river lined with trees clothed in all their summer foliage, her waters arrested, the forest still and silent. The waters have long since flowed away, the leaves of the trees fallen long ago, now dirt. The summer breezes gone utterly away. The river still flows, the winds still blow, the trees yet grow. The fading image on yellowing paper will one day be no more, it is dead and decomposing, but the waters will flow forever, birdsong borne on the wind fills the forest perennially and long after I myself am gone, others will come to photograph the river's waters.

Most of All

But it was the sky most of all...
The sky was dark
the sky was dark and burning with stars
The sky was vast, it went on and on
and on.
The sky bled
the sky bled away color
the sky drained into darkness
the sky drained away into darkness and spoke of infinity
The sky of infinity
was silent
The sky, silent
spoke
The sky told of things
that were and are
the sky told of things yet to be

The sky was free
but it cost everything to know
The sky sang me to sleep
the sky called to me in my sleep
it woke me up
The sky said...
what was it that the sky said?
the sky, it said...
what?

The sky it said and said and said.

The sky
the sky
Why?

The sky I lost

The sky incoherent

The sky went far beyond me
above me
the sky ran beneath me
The sky ran like a river
washing it all away

The sky like sand ran though my fingers

The sky blew away in the wind

The sky was the Earth

but it was the sky most of all
that saved me.

November Nights

The howling winds, they all call out to me. The Big Lake roars, the weather turns, it is always turning, turning, turning, bitter cold. The trees bereft of leaves a spiny mass of gray, here and there interwoven with veins of birch virgin white, rattling on the ridges as other colors fade. A lone yellow leaf clings to a branch. I seek the solitude that comes with these November nights that sang me to sleep when I was newly born.

Sometimes

Sometimes
I only want to hear the voice I have forgotten,
I only want to sit in the stillness of a meadow
with the late morning Sun upon my back.

Sometimes
in the evening I linger to watch the stars come out one by one.

Sometimes
I awaken far away from everywhere in the middle of the night mouth open in awe
beneath the myriad stars riddling the Universe.

Sometimes
I fall asleep oblivious to all.

Vision

The clouds drift by, the sun rises and sets, the moon follows in dizzying circles. Seasons wax and then wane and it means naught to me. I have been rent into a million shards scattered here and there across time; the past, present, future. In my soul I have endued all of nature with a voice now silent. It is as if the world has turned to glass, it is frozen and inert, and I a vapor that passes through it invisible and unable to affect it. I am full of words that I can no longer free. Light is now refracted, separated into its component pieces, and incoherent. Winds moan, rattling the glass branches of trees that ring out as they shatter and rain down. I stand beneath hoping that the fragments of glass might pierce me, so that I could remember what it is like to feel, but I am a vapor and the winds carry me away. In the broken light I see the reflections of dreams of what was and what might have been; fractured, mingling, kaleidoscopic. And that is all there seems to be.

The Front

At the last hour of day
I lie awake in my departed father's old bed.

The night is cold, and Summer's end approaches.

I close my eyes and remember
how afternoon's warmth slipped away—

We were clearing dead branches felled by last Spring's storm,
breaking them up and burning them in a small fire.

Why do clouds look like cotton?, asked my son.
I attempted to answer but he was already lost in the sky.

It was one of those Summer afternoons
when you could sit with your face in the Sun
and convince yourself that things would never end.

The kids had lost their fascination with the fire.

They ran off to pester their grandmother for the grape popsicles.

Alone, I turned my attention to the sky
at the severe white of the billowing clouds.
I spotted at a vast height ten barely perceptible silhouettes
they were birds of prey gliding, not in formation,
but in a rough arc of uneven points.
Independently, each had found and claimed its own place.

I stared, not yet understanding, bewildered.
Then I saw a great mass of shadowy clouds behind them.
The birds were gliding on a fast advancing front.
I stood there lost in the spectacle,
caught up in so singular a vision.

In the evening my sister told me how as her and her family were out boating the weather surprised them.
It had appeared out of nowhere.
I told her how I saw the front
presaged by the shadows of birds of prey.

Over dinner mom, now 83, stated,
Just because it's Labor Day doesn't mean that Summer has ended.
Fall doesn't start until September 23rd.
I thought to myself that she must be tacking on a day or two.
She obviously hadn't noticed the change in temperature.
I spoke of the dark clouds rising over towering pines
and recalled how quickly they came in from the north.

The clouds had rolled in at the exact moment I thought to myself
how it might be a good night to sleep beneath the stars
and share with my children
the wonder of waking in the middle of the night
to find the myriad stars hanging overhead.

Before going to bed I went outside
to make sure the fire had died down.
The clouds hung low,
the sky was starless,
the children had gone off to their cousins' to sleep.

Alone, I crouched over the embers of a dying fire
and attempted to warm myself.
The winds howled through trees.
In the distance, over the hills, the Big Lake roared,
its violent waves, coming early, beating on the shores.
And I there in the darkness
left with one echoing word 


Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.

Words I Used to Use

I have forgotten the words I used to use
words scrawled across pages in journals gathering dust
layers of pages bound within journals crammed into bookshelves
layers of writing like the rings that you can count in the trunk of a cut-down tree
layers of sediment compressed into rock which you can crack open to reveal words now unfamiliar
words as indecipherable as the dreams that you may half-remember when you awaken
words like dreams that try to speak of things you can no longer quite recall.

Afternoon, half a world away

Forevermore whenever I ride my bicycle down any road lined on either side with a colonnade of old and stately trees, I will always be riding somewhere else. I will be riding in Zanzibar half a world away, between Stonetown and the east beaches, in the middle of nowhere, sheltered from the fierce light of the equatorial Sun beneath the shade of ancient mango trees, pedaling in the still silence of a torpid afternoon.

Woman finds giant sinkhole under her bed

As the old woman lays sleeping, there comes a sound from beneath her four post bed, a sound coming from beneath the blue and white tiled floor that looks like a checkerboard. Beneath the rusty bed, beneath the tiles that are perfectly square, the sound of the earth falling away as she sleeps, a sinkhole grows; a perfectly round hole in the great sphere of the Earth. The scraping sound of a few of the tiles falling away as they are swallowed by the widening hole awakens her. She listens to the echoes of banging rise from the depths in the darkness as the tiles collide with the walls of earth.

She does not yet know that what was once firm and solid is now gone; a deep chasm in its place. She lights the lantern on her nightstand, puts her pale bare feet upon the smooth cool floor. she kneels and crawls on hands and feet to look under her bed. Bewildered, terrified, she discovers the hole and in the cool damp air the taste of dirt that smells of decay. Timidly she lifts the lantern over the hole and peers into the depths. She sees only darkness.

"Helloooooo?" she calls down.

Her call is swallowed up. Suddenly she is horrified. The lantern slips from her fingers. Paralyzed she watches the lantern's light travel down, down, down.

Fading, fading, fading.

Becoming

a single

point
.

diminishing in luminosity until like a dying ember

it is gone.

Her arms and legs give out.

She topples in, somersaulting slowing through the cool damp air. It whistles in her ears.

Falling.

Accelerating into the darkness, she is too bewildered to mind.

She loses consciousness.

She gains consciousness.

She sees the light of her lantern, and struggles towards it. The air is hot and humid. The walls are fleshy, they contract around her thrusting her toward the light.

Slowly.

Painfully.

She is born.

poured out

I am poured out, all my waters I have poured out. I have poured them out on a parched and barren land with an insatiable thirst. I have poured them out and not one seed did grow. Not one seed. I am an empty vessel, and the land has drunk me up without effect, but my waters flow on, through the sands and are purified. They've leached out the salts, and the toxins, and have left them behind. The fierce sun in the burning heat of afternoon has evaporated the waters, and have made them vapors, and the vapors rise, and unbound by the limits of shape, are free. They dance in the heat and dissipate into the heights, high into the rarefied air, and coalesce into the great white clouds which are pure and untouched. They merge into one with all the other waters, and like tears rain down in other places. And the vessel? either someone will find it and fill it once again with waters or they will not and it will eventually over the eons become one with the barren land and so affect it.

I am borg

Technology has finally overcome me. It has won. I can no longer experience a moment that does not have to be photographed or videoed or tweeted or blogged. I have become subservient to the gadgets. I am always charging or rebooting, or cycling power. I am always updating, always upgrading. I need the flat screen, I need the newest app that provides augmented reality, the information that my tired old brain can no longer hold. Speed dial keeps me going, and now the phone is ringing, and there are messages in my inbox, and there are so many things that i need to buy, and i'm too fat, and need to sue someone. So many beautiful young woman are eager to meet me, and need my bank account number so that they can wire me millions... I need to feed my puffles, and farmville needs my attention. My ear buds cannot bear to to sit silent, I need my podcasts, my mp3's, my flv's. I must fill my time with video games on my LCD. I do not own the technology, it owns me. It has stolen everything that I used to have. I have had to become my own documenter, I must feed my facebook page. I have been reduced to a profile, to a QR code. The fucking TV blares its chatter deep into the very center of my being. There is no peace no stillness, all is in motion, and is being continually monetized. Upgrade, pay online, enter your credit card, join the cloud, make your life easier, you deserve it. Surrender. Resistance is futile.

unraveled

An unraveled thread from the center of a gutted baseball in a tangle blown by a June wind that seemed too damned cold, It was once the heart of something that can never again be re-made, that can never be as it once was intended to be. The Universe unfurls that way, into chaos from some kind of order that never established itself. To find meaning in something that makes no sense, that is unintelligible, is senseless; but we busy ourselves with so many unintelligible things that we ourselves are incomprehensible. The writing of words into the nothing-void of the million blogs is but foolishness, but foolishness is at least something, and something must (anything can) fill the greater void that consumes all the light in my life. It is more an endurance than a life, a grasping at grains of sand that slip thorough fingers and are blown back into the infinite sea of the desert. Grains of sand are something, and though I grasp them I cannot claim them. Claiming anything is senseless. All things encumber, all things however small weigh you down. Thoughts possessing no mass whatsoever are the heaviest of encumbrances. Words are just a pouring out of thoughts, words take with them the thoughts they are composed of. Let me not claim these words but rather throw them out so that the thoughts they bear will be cast out with them. I seek a state of no-words, non-thought, stillness, a desert of thought, where words are the grains of sand, and one or the other of them is just as meaningless as the other. I have lost something and I don't know what it is, I can't remember it, perhaps it is my way. One thing is certain - I am absolutely alone. None can know where I am, none have ever been here, and none ever will. Hoping someone could is the cruelest, most wicked of all self-deceptions. Every moment is another moment that I speed away from the whole of the world faster and faster with a gathering acceleration. I am thrust right into the center of the infinite void. Any direction that I turn is as meaningless as any other. I have arrived at alone-ness. Who will have even attempted to follow me this far? It is a road none should travel, and yet I must for it is my road; if it leads to nowhere so be it. God has given it to me to travel. I must learn to be at peace with it. I must walk on. I will walk on through the gathering darkness, and growing cold; through the echoing silence, and widening emptiness. The Desert has claimed me, the Night has put its hand upon me. I have no tears to shed, no hope to sustain me. I will go on without hope, with only my determination to guide me through a land that I am an alien in; Wearily pushing onward until I collapse, and am again roused, to rise again and travel on and on.

oh oh how I dream

oh how I do dream things long passed
oh how I do dream long
oh how I long
oh how long passed
oh long passed things
oh long passed things scattered
long passed things scattered here and there

A Mother’s Day Orchid

The purple orchid I bought you in May
has long since dried up and died.

The peas you planted in its yellow ceramic pot
fared no better.

Here I sit considering the lost orchid
feeling the coolness of the smooth wooden floor.

Let’s throw out the stale gray soil from the pot
wash it out, dry it off.

We’ll set it upon the mantel
above the fireplace that we no longer use

Then fill the yellow pot full of pennies
that will clatter through our fingers with the sound of prosperity

Pennies we can cast out for our children
across the back porch

Although the cement is cracked
And uneven.

Let them think
that they are the richest children in the world.

Let’s do it
just to hear them laugh and giggle.

I swear you won’t regret it
fifty years from now

When you’ll still find that laughter
ringing in your ears

Ringing like the raining of rain
that waters a purple orchid deep in the forest.

Settling

Distance and darkness
dust covered words.
The continual advancing of time
brings these about.
What once was new
becomes broken and worn
whether teacups or vertebrae
or thoughts that I think.
A wedding ring lost
slipping off of my finger
in the bay where i swim
a simple band of gold
disappearing into the darkening depths
settling into the mud
returning to that from which it was forged.

22 Memories of Fall and Winter passing.

I.
Evening finds sunlight lingering, crisscrossed with the long shadows of naked oak limbs; fingers of ice crystals stretching out across the surfaces of brown opaque puddles; last year’s dead grass flattened against the face of the fresh exposed earth, like a newborn’s hair; birdsong.

II.
The road is long. The road is straight. The road is narrow.
The plains I travel over are broad, flat, and unchanging.
The sky overhead is laden with a sheet of silken cloud.
Miles, miles and miles I drive thoughtless in darkness
behind the headlights’ monotonous beams.
Suddenly
a flash of motion, frantic, a fawn darts in front of me
startled I can’t avoid it.
God spares it.
Long afterward I’m haunted by “what if…”

III.
My mind was as white and inert as fields and fields of cold white snow
until after much passing of time, lost in contemplation, I at last did see the snow.
I began to understand that it is through the random senseless falling of so many snowflakes and the relentlessness of mindless endless winds that such intricate exquisite patterns arise upon the surfaces of drifts.

IV.
The Sun shone so brilliantly that the sky burned blue and the fields blazed white. That it was a frigid three degrees was to hard to grasp until you turned into the winds. With the crisp air came clarity, a keen realization that life possesses an undeniable veracity. In the stillness of the moment all was beautiful.

V.
Snowflakes fall in the stillness of night silently blanketing the land. Each one a masterpiece unique, not just each snowflake falling here and now, but each one fallen anywhere ever since the first one ever fell, snowflakes that lose themselves in the mass of the whole, each one a poem undiscovered until one at last lands before your eyes and tells you everything.

VI.
A yellow house seen through the falling snow
I remember the forts and angels we used to make.
The blue sky seen through the naked branches of winter’s oaks
I remember a snowmobile ride in a forest where I first saw my sister smoke.
A doorway illuminated by a lone bulb in the darkness of night says “Come in from the cold”.

VII.
We can choose to change or not
we can either be intentional about what we will be
or believe that change is unnecessary and unwanted.
Be that as it may, change occurs regardless
imperceptibly or in an instant
towards growth or decay.
You decide.

VIII.
It rose brilliantly illuminating winter’s longest night
ascending to its zenith where a darkness came upon it
extinguishing in shadow black its lofty light.
Ocher as blood it turned as if it were dead
and the world grew dim.
In the quiet I pondered Christmas and the Cross
then the shadow ebbed ever so gradually away
until at dawn it entirely vanished.
The Moon had set, the Sun had come
utterly vanquishing the night.

IX.
Mighty is the Oak
Great is the towering Pine
Both slumber undisturbed
roots nestled beneath a deep blanket of snow
The little brook acquiescing to every stone still meanders on its way.

X.
Morning finds us waiting with Ben for his bus
catching snowflakes on our tongues
looking east into a blue sky, up at a soft white cloud
the Sun not yet cresting the tree tops, painting the edge of the cloud yellow
December's chill upon our cheeks waking us to the wonder of a brand new day.

XI.
The gale casts before it an endless snow, falling steadily, obliquely, from a great mass of clouds occupying the gulf above the bay, a space once inhabited by Summer’s lazy breezes, by the setting Sun’s soft glow, a space now darkened by the blackness of Winter’s long night, by the oppressive weight of clouds pressing down upon a weary shore buried beneath the pristine whiteness of a new fallen snow.

XII.
The tree I used climb
the tallest tree sitting on the highest hill
bent and formed by November’s gales
against whose trunk in summer I used to nap
from its topmost branches I’d survey both great lake and small village
years ago branches lopped off
dead trunk towering against the sky
a monument, a testament to childhood
fell
finding it laying there on the hillside
I sat in its heights one last time
remembering.

XIII.
Traveling across the stillness of forested roads beneath old oaks and their canopies of naked dark branches. Arriving, waiting for arrivals, the opening of doors, welcomed and welcoming. Inside, the soft glow of a fire. Outside, chill winds casting before them snow. Spaces filled with long familiar voices, aromas of nutmeg, cloves, garlic.The stillness of night gently parted by the quiet grace of a piano.
Thankful.

XIV.
There was, wasn't there?
Entwined in twisted roots of an old oak.
Between that star and the little red one.
Buried in the limestone heart of Stonetown, down a labyrinthine side street.
Scrawled in illegible handwriting on a yellowing page written as the red sun died one evening on a train out of Mwanza.
In the gentle coo of a mourning dove in evening's soft sunlight.
Hidden in the voice of the wind.
There.

XV.
At the end of the last street, a light pole rises into the darkness. From the worn crooked pole an incandescent bulb casts out a feeble circle of yellow. Beyond lays a barren field. Winds howl. Autumn acquiesces to winter. There’s nowhere to go from here, yet look, beyond the road, pole, and field, into the night. A crescent moon hangs low, smiling down on me.

XVI.
I look out the window and see the Moon sitting atop a black mass of cloud, like a immense cyclops with a glowing white eye and a gray head of hair. The winds howl, the lakes roar, the trees rattle. I can't wait to fall asleep and dream.

XVII.
Across the field in the early evening when the low-lying-Sun casts its light upon the forest's Fall raiment I see an entrance beneath the trees, a dark passage into the heart of the wood, a way revealed, never before seen, beckoning me, bidding me come, drawing me away from the world of man.

XVIII.
Outside at this late hour a soft white moon, nestled in a faint gray blanket of cloud, is cradled in the dark arms of a great oak, its leaves swaying in October's capricious gusts. Inside in the fireplace only embers remain, waxing and waning in the darkness of the room, all that remains of the blazing fire we sat around.

XIX.
The Sun had set. Long horizontal bands of wispy clouds remained, peach-colored and pastel orange, glowing in the still-yet-azure sky. Thrust up between it and I, jabbed the dark silhouettes of narrow dead pines cutting me off from the light. I lingered and watched it ebb away until the first few stars appeared.

XX.
If all were maples, and it always October, would I notice? Would I stop dead in my tracks, awestruck? I know soon the time will come when yellow leaves lay plastered against the black asphalt by a driving rain, but that in its own moment is also beautiful.

XXI.
As I rode home this evening in the shadows, at the feet of the mighty white pines towering above me, I looked up to see their outstretched limbs reaching into the heights. They were aflame with the remnants of the sun's tangential rays, still glowing golden full of light. Thus began the day's descent into the ever-waiting hand's of night.

XXII.
Ah you Sun, regaling yourself with royal cerulean, claiming this cool Fall afternoon! Colors riddle the hills, violent reds, yellows, oranges bursting forth as if explosions, caught in full flower, arrested in time, juxtaposed against Summer's fading green slowly swept away before the dread Boreas. I ask of thee only a moment in your light to rest and warm my face, a few more ripe tomatoes, and a honey-crisp to savor.

Epitaph of an Astronaut

Please don’t bury me in lifeless dust beneath the Sea of Tranquility
my life was anything but that.

When I rode atop the ball of flame
that thrust me high above everything I knew and loved
I yearned to ride another, and another
until at last those flames engulfed me.

Bury me beneath the crater Tycho where long ago a mighty rock impacted
its shards strewn across the face of the moon, etching it with scars.

Let me rest there in the light and darkness.
For though I loved the brilliance of the burning sunlight
I have also made my peace with the unforgiving cold
of the dark side of the Moon.

Chapter from an old Hyperlinked Story

You turn your back on the egg, and investigate the table. On the table you see a message written in the dust, "DON'T EAT THE EGG." Smugly content that you have found some kind of hint, you realize that there is something odd about the room. It has no doors, or windows. There are just four brown walls, a ceiling, and a floor. The floor is covered with black and white linoleum tiles. A single incandescent light bulb dangles from a frayed cord running from the ceiling. As you are so studiously taking note of everything, you turn your attention back to the stove, hoping to notice something that you had overlooked. You stumble back against the table, shocked at the size of the egg. It had been growing all the while you were investigating the table. It is now the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. As you watch, you can see it growing. Its rate of growth is accelerating. As it falls off the stove into the center of the room, you wonder how you could eat it if you wanted to. Suddenly realizing that there is no way out of the room, you are more concerned with being crushed by the egg...

Nameless

Earlier than 7/25/2001

Walking in the rain on the glossy pavement listening to the raindrops pattering, draining into dark sewer drains. The dead leaves well up around grates, the waters back up. The gray sky overhead is continual, endless, calling out to no one. On and on I walk. Overhead the straight line of a telephone pole rises out of a chaotic random jumble of tree limbs and branches that are leafless in early December. Cars in the distance flash by with a hiss in a streak of light. They are far away and nothing comes near, nor approaches, nor fades away. There is just the night and the glow of the nearby city reflecting in an ugly brown color on the clouds that are hundreds of feet thick. Nothing comes in or out of them. My footsteps fade in silence, the constant trickle of water flowing. Damp moist dark lawns of people who I used to greet on the sunny summer afternoons are empty. Where are they now? Not even a trace of light comes from within their houses, their homes as quiet and empty as the night. Was it really so late? I did not notice. I walked on, wondering how far I could walk without thinking. The puddles along the curbs glittered with the stray light of the streetlights reflecting recursively off of every wet surface, so many mirror-like surfaces. The light eventually dispersed into the opaqueness of the air thick with moisture. Do you know that air which contains moisture, water, is less dense than dry air? What that means is that moisture laden air rises and rises until it cools, then the water condenses and falls back upon the wetness. I had walked long enough to begin to feel the wetness of my hair. My coat grew heavy. I did not care. I turned up the alley. Wires ran in soggy arcs from pole to lifeless pole. The asphalt below me lay black and hard, shadows mingled with themselves there. I walked along a wall, a straight wall that I would never see beyond, never cared to see beyond, I wasn’t even aware of anything but the wall leading me on like a passage in a maze. I did not follow it rather it ran alongside me isolating me in the silence. My shadow grew long in front of me, then, as I approached a street light, my shadow began to diminish. It went that way for blocks, I noticed only my shadow waxing and waning beneath my feet. I did not want to count the number of times, but at least I knew that time was passing that way. I was in the midst of monotony, swimming in the deadness of not-thinking. Stimuli were gentle, undemanding; the rain, the stillness, the soft glow. I could feel my breath condensing upon each exhalation. Beyond me, far away, people were living their lives, but I was walking the streets, the alleys, trying to outpace myself. Could I walk away from myself? No, but I could distance myself from thought, as if it was smoke rolling out of the exhaust stack of a hundred year old steam locomotive pushing through the weight of the blackness of night in the still virgin and majestic forests it was helping to destroy. The alley was devoid of trees. The odors of trash lingered. Then it came, the memory of conversation.

”…It’s a dysfunctional community.“

“I’ve never known a community that wasn’t”

“I know one, The Nez Perce in Washington State had a functional community, at least until the US Calvary came and gunned them down, and beat their children’s heads in with the butts of rifles.”

“what?…”, She did not know that I was still angry about something I’d read.

I walked on. There is a peace in the Bleakness, in the nothingness. Nothing is required of you, you are not good, you are not evil, wise nor foolish, right nor wrong. You are nameless, and unspoken of.

On the Tip of My Tongue

The words have gone, bled away like blood spilling from a fatal wound. A dark pool that only serves to remind me of the futility of anything I’d hoped to do; a dream that was never dreamt; a civilization that was lost and buried by a jungle, and never discovered. I am here with something on the tip of my tongue that seems invisible and impenetrable all at once. If I try to dwell on it, it flits away like a hummingbird, if I try to grasp it, it tumbles into a bottomless sea like a rare diamond. There is no hand upon my shoulder, no quiet voice against my ear. The future is as far away as the past and I am stuck in the here and now. My head is as heavy as my heart, my thoughts as heavy as my feet. I sit and rest in the middle of the desert, and one direction is indistinguishable from another. If there is a path it has been rubbed out, I cannot see it.

The Sound of a Snowflake Falling

Outside in the night's darkness beneath the weight of an endless mass of cloud, the late winter storm has laid down its bitter cold veil, an eerie white cast upon all that was sunny and green. A gathering silence grows, an oppressive peace, a stillness. Inside, beneath thick blankets, I hear my own heart beat, I feel the moist warmth of my breathing. I lay there hoping to dream. I'm almost certain I can hear every snowflake as it lands.

*originally posted on my MySpace Blog Apr 6, 2007

The Other Side of Polebridge

Driving across the fire-eaten earth, brown earth with the black stakes of burnt pine trunks stabbing the orange dusty sky. I felt silent and still as if all motion was arrested by the aftermath. Nothing stirred except the shadows of the dead pines that grew longer in the reddening sky. The hazy ethereal globe of the dying Sun wavered massive and fierce behind the barren stakes, black stakes stabbing the orange dusty sky. They were like iron spikes arranged by some random force, spikes driven here and there in the sandy lifeless earth, marking the graves of souls that no one remembered. Dry earth, dusty earth, sterile and empty, quiet and so utterly lonely. The Shadows, chained to the spikes, reached out towards me. They sought to cut me through and divide me with their dark sharp edges.

*Originally posted on my MySpace Blog Feb 27,2008

Freezing and Thawing

It has come. The gray time, the black and white land, the sunless twilight on either side of day, the wet fecund mud. Before anything grows what was frozen in months of ice must thaw and begin to decompose. The winds blow damp during the day and frigid during the night (in the black of night when all that was beginning to thaw re-freezes). What is there? What hope? The fireplace is old and there are no logs. Many men have died alone on nights like these of hopelessness, dying on the verge of Spring, after a too long Winter that had refused to let go its interminable grip, dying on the verge of Spring, laying dead on the hard frozen earth, outstretched hands with fingers only inches away from a dab of purple, a crocus bud that appeared the following day. It is hard to say if it would have signified hope had it come a day earlier and thus saved a life, or if it signified man’s spirit in the corporeal form of a new flower just beginning a new life. Perhaps it was both, or neither, only indicating the horrible inhuman character of nature in that nature cares not that men live or die or suffer loss. Flowers grow where they will, requiring the decomposition of organic matter, mindless of what was before, and are we men any less dumb? Do we know the sufferings of those who came before us? Or of those that are so far removed from us that this very minute are suffering and dying while we sit complacent and unaware? Pause for a moment, wait, be still and seek awareness. Now, before the wonder and fury of life arises once again to flourish upon yesterday’s frozen earth.

*Originally posted on my MySpace Blog March 17, 2008

Memory of a Cabin

There is a thing that seems too long ago to feel. There is a feeling that is so long ago you don't remember. There is a memory… of something …its there… just under the surface, the surface of everything that is and was. Then there is tomorrow, what is tomorrow? Well, really its everything, because all that was is just a memory of a feeling so long ago that there is nothing left. I speak in circles, in circles of circles. I sit by a pool of still water, and cast pebbles into the pool and ripples radiate in rings, and they intersect until I am lost in them all rising and falling. In a moment the leaves that were greening the maples on the hillside are now yellow and red. They litter the footpaths that used to be roads. My father used to speak of an old log cabin way back in the woods that used to be cabbage fields when he was a boy. As we walked in the woods and he used to remember where he led the cattle into town, we would sometimes look for the remnants of that old cabin, but we never found them. Even as I grew older and wandered the woods alone, I'd follow old overgrown drainage ditches, often through dark mucky swamps. I'd climb tall trees to look down into the swamps, always looking, always hoping to find any evidence of that old cabin. Time and the constancy of decomposition in nature have won out over my determination. I have even begun to feel the time hang on me. Its been many years since I have even thought of the cabin that was probably gone before I was even born, but I can still see it clearly, as it was the first day it was built. I wonder how long ago I stopped seeing things as they are, and started seeing them as I remembered them. There are many places that are full of ghosts that I'm not even sure I even notice. There are places that I'll never return to because they are gone, because, though they are still there, they are so different that they are lost, and returning, I'd see that they are lost, and the only place I can find them any more is in some rare dream where they are more fantastic than they really were, and I choose to remember them as they once were. I can close my eyes and still see them, more and more places, and people the way they used to be, and the danger is that in closing my eyes I may never choose to open them again, or worse, believe that they are open when they are really closed. Sometimes the thread that anchors me to the here-and-now seems so thin, so frail. Sometimes things seem to get so bad that all I want to do is close my eyes and pinch off that thread between my fingernails, but always there is tomorrow and tomorrow is a new day, and with a new day comes new opportunities, new hopes. As long as the Sun shall shine there is hope. And I know without a doubt that I know nothing, especially of what will be.

*originally posted on my myspace blog Nov 1,2008

Stories of Eternity

In the stillness of the night, in the quiet of the shadows, your thoughts draw you off to once familiar places. You hear forgotten voices speaking in wonder or joy or awe. How in the darkness you can see sunlight, and taste the winds of summers past, and gaze into the billowing clouds white on the horizon drifting along like old three masted schooners heading for some unexplored shore is but the faintest taste of grace. No matter the worries of the moment there is the vision of concord, of reaching another shore, of crossing over to a new land in a newness of being. Loneliness seems sometimes a constant companion that will not leave you be. God is the God who grants solitude, and the hope of perfect union. Joy is seeing Joy in another's eyes, or on their face, or hearing it in their voice, or in their laughter. When the oppressed are set free, when like God we are able to extend a bit of grace, something unalterable occurs, and nothing can take it away. In the stillness of the night, in the quiet of the shadows, sometimes you see everything as it really is. God is whispering in your ear telling you stories of eternity.

Sailing - Part 2

Ghosts, ghosts ,ghosts, for me there is no affirmation, only ghosts. I have only the wind and nothing else to cling to. Mine are the dark waters deep and still. The roads all lead to places that were, and are no more. The songs are lost in the winds and hopes are submerged and hidden beneath the waters. I have fallen asleep in the shadows and all the the world recedes, diminishes. Solemn is my song, forlorn and echoing. I am lost, pursued by ghosts, wandering through an alien and malevolent wilderness.

Sailing - Part 1

One windy day I made for me a little boat to sail across the sea. Half a walnut shell and a bright red maple leaf for sail. I had not string to rig it, nor any other thing. So in I climbed and raised my bright red leaf, and off I went, blown by the wind and tossed by the waves. I knew not where. I had no rudder and really did not care. I held fast against the wind though my knuckles ached, though my fingers felt that they'd soon give way. If I let go I'd lose my leaf. So the sea battered me, the wind grew frigid, and the boat heaved to and fro. I knew not where I was going only that I should go. Daylight faded, the winds and waves they did not cease. Off I went determined, headlong into the thickening darkness without even a star to guide me, no moon for dreaming, only the winds whispering and moaning, and the waves tossing me to and fro. I'd ceased to feel my hands, and it now it was my arms and back that ached, and still I did not let go. The whispering winds condemned me, and the waves they beat me relentlessly. I dared not sleep, and fought to stay awake. Then came the Ghosts to ride beside me and tell me all their sleepy stories. As I'd start to nod they'd try to pull me over into the deep dark sea beneath me. I'd brace myself against them holding fast to my leaf. I saw at last my face before me in the gathering light, reflecting in the sea. I realized then despite all my resolve that sleep had taken me without my knowing it. My hands were empty, I'd been betrayed by the weakness of my own arms. The sea, as still as glass, surrounded me. The winds went on without me, the ghosts had sunk into the darkness, lost in the depths of the sea. The slate gray sky, a diffuse light, gave no sign of time nor direction as i drifted in what seemed like circles in the sea. I'd touch the water and watch the ripples and wonder what shores they would wash away. I laid down my head but for a moment. When I lifted it the sea was reddish and lined with ridges and had turned to dust. I stood up, looked down and saw my dry white bleached-out bones, half buried in the sand. A steady breeze blew me up and away from my bones. I guess they'd become unnecessary. Castles of clouds grew along the horizon. I've always wanted to dance in the clouds, but I went right through them and kept going up and up and up until the Earth was but a shiny blue marble, and then a point of light, and then there where so many fading points of light that I lost it.

A Day on the Road

I realized something today. I know what chasing after the wind is. I can see how we all seek after the things that we feel we need, and want, and how they destroy us because we can never have them as we think we should. I have come to find that seeking them has a season, and when that is over we need instead to seek to eschew them, realizing that they are not really the things that we need most. Drugs, travel, good times, sex, food, relationships, order, disorder are just distractions. They are attempts to find meaning outside of ourselves, even seeking spirituality is a distraction, when in the end we must realize that we are just imperfect and needy and can never truly know the elation that we seek, that is we can never reach a state of continual elation, at least on this side of Heaven. If Heaven is our home then we will never be content here, but we cannot know Heaven until the days allotted for us here are spent, and we don't know that number...I am not a gifted writer who knows the words to write. The ideas that come to me are not sweet things that I relish or savor stewing them in my mind until they come out. They are burdensome things that gnaw at me, that burn in my hands, but ideas I can't let go of. My writing like my life is a struggle, I am conflicted, wounded, I am not one of the perfect and beautiful. I am not sure that I have any of the answers, except that the questioning becomes a form of knowing, and answering... I drove and drove, through the mountain passes, through the beating rain, fog, periods of sunshine, blinding light, deep darknesses, unable at times to see anything but vague shapes, crazy wrecks of spinning cars, not seen but indicated by skid marks. torn up sod, messed up road signs, uprooted trees. A friend read to me, in the sunlight as I drove, a book by Anne Lamott (titled Grace eventually), who fascinated me by her honest vulnerability,finding joy and life through pain, and emptiness, and loss. All the while I took in the scenery constantly sliding by, remembering and imagining, happy above all to be driving miles and miles of road. Time was meaningless except for the shifting weather and the westward creeping of the light. In the end in the darkness I spoke of the duality of nothingness, the duality of up and down, light and dark, + and -, this and that, past and future until my friend rebelled in laughter at the absurdity of trying to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. I am left alone in the darkness each night to contemplate these things, and I get lost in the infinitude of the infinitesimal, the fractal nature of the universe, attempting to connect a loop, settling at last, in the end,into a state of prayer, a reaching out. I am taken up and led out into it, traveling on and on and on.

"Woman, Why are you crying?"

They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have taken Him. I do not even know Him. Truth? What is truth? Father, Father why have you forsaken me? Struck in the face, flesh torn from His back, briers beat onto His head, this is my body that was broken for you, eat of my flesh, this is the blood, poured out for you, torn from me for you, they looked upon Him whom they had pierced, woman here is your son. They meant to break his legs to kill him on the cross, but they didn’t, they pierced Him instead and he bled water and blood, He died alone, they all abandoned Him. Write “He said He was the King of the Jews”, I have written what I have written. I wash my hands of this. For which of these words did you strike me for? What lie? They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have taken him, taken him. They led Him through the streets, horribly disfigured, bearing the means of His death. They spat on Him. They drove iron spikes into the hands of grace, the hands that healed the sick. They hated Me, they will hate you. His feet they pinned to a stake, the feet that walked across the sea. They you say? They? You. Me. My hands are stained with the blood of the water of life. Where have they taken my Lord? Where? Where? WHERE? IF only you would have come when we called you then he would still be alive. My brother is dead, yes I know I will see him on the other side, I know, what? Today? Surely there is a stench. Oh, oh, oh but how? HOW? How is it that He who saved others could not save Himself? Write “He said He was the King of the Jews” he said, he said…I have written what I have written, what I’ve said what I’ve written, written, written. Hands that healed, feet that walked on water, the water of life, life and not death. How is it that He could not save Himself? Father, Father why have you forsaken Me? They looked upon Him whom they had pierced, woman behold your son, hail the King of the Jews, by His stripes we are healed, His stripes, torn into perfect flesh, disfiguring the lamb. Where the Lion? the conquering King? laying there moaning in a pool of blood, torn to shreds. This, This is our King? Our King? Ours? Not mine, no not mine mine, the Lion of Jerusalem, the Cornerstone, how could I have let myself be so deceived? I tell you I do not even know this man! I am not His disciple. I was not with Him. A rooster crowed that morning that they crucified my Lord, the day I drove the spikes into the hands that would heal me, the day I lifted Him up, a spectacle of humiliation, and placed the sour wine to His lips. Do you love Me? Do you love Me more than these? Do you even love Me? Then feed My lambs, feed my lambs. They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have taken Him. He said to her “Mary.”

As They Let Go Their Leaves

Now the mornings bring condensation along the edges of windowsills. Although the sun is hot on my face at the height of afternoon, I notice cool breezes. Evenings come sooner, and my longings return. I look for some indication among the maple trees. The ones that have suffered distress have already started. Their leaves are turning yellow and red. Some have fallen. They have fallen and started to curl, their edges are brown. I say to myself, "That tree is ill, that's why." I look to other maples still green, but I lie to myself, "It is the height of Summer, the skies are blue, It's sunny and warm." I try not to notice the traces of yellow found in even the healthy trees. The ones that have lost their leaves litter the ground. Winds arise and whisk their leaves away to who knows where, off to some corner with other debris, perhaps remembered by the trees, but forgotten by the world. There the leaves might dance a final dizzy waltz before they crumble utterly away. Inside me it's Summer still where nothing can touch it, perhaps a Summer not yet realized, that maples dream of as they lose their leaves and anticipate conceiving next year's buds at the tips of their branches, a Summer which one must once again surrender, and replace with hope for another time. When Winter comes naked branches, still alive, rattle in fierce gales. The branches wait out the cold dark days, the long bitter nights, because they understand that time will pass. They are accustomed to Winter, and have learned to endure it. Do maples hope? They know in their way that though there is a season when life is hard, when merely to exist at all is a struggle, another season will come. I look to the maples as they let go their leaves.