Just Words

Words. Just words.
They cannot fly or pull
a splinter from the nail,
change oil in the car

or wash dishes.

But how they sit,
ridiculous or wise
like angels on their white,

white page.

Tonight, I write
"O beautiful words,
silly, playful, bleeding,
meaningful words-

why can't you
pay my mortgage?"

Of Wolves and Men: Love and Mercy (a medieval draft)

The sad, dark song of wolves and men
traveling oe'r cold and sleepless fields
hath thrust a dagger in hearts of them
who could not weep or sorrow hold.

The night hath wrought its justice so
to spare the weak and tender souls
no sound nor fear to wreck them woe
hath reached their blessed ear.

O! silence of the rising light! the tears
of dew that bead and shine so brightly
glisten in the eyes of those who fight
for love and mercy.

The Well

Nothing has happened, yet;
how many minutes are spent
between thunder and storm?

Faith, a booming sound
which summons soul; no!
precedes it like a bucket

blindly lowered
into the well;

how carefully we listen
for the resonance
of water.

Lessons of Flame

If I have loved you quickly, called
you, silver moth away from night,
flickered in your small black eyes
like burning star with promises
so cruelly broken- how can I

expect forgiveness?

If I loved you, certainly, the scars,
the marks you have so rightly gained,
will teach you not to love again without
a thought of happiness or sorrow.
For my light, the heat that you have

borrowed, will glow and spark
to captivate, to captivate another.

The Freedom of Having (Nothing)

Did you think I would
carry you forevor like
a sack of coins-
never spent,

never lost?

This question, too,
has value, equal weight.
I spend my thoughts,
my life, my worry on

the price of wisdom.

When two people love,
like cypress trees standing
in the garden, truly belong
to no one but to please

the world; like stars

whose shine resembles
precious diamonds, yet
cost the dreamer nothing,
so must I remember

that the contents of
my emptied heart
were given freely.

Unnecessary Epitaph

I slept late, for no apparent reason;
the day moved on without me
moving in it.  And I thought

how like death, this obscure
absence... even to those
who haven't really vanished.

As for my psuedo-missing presence
dreaming in its linen sheets, there were
no sorrows, lamentations, tearful prayers
nor funeral or ashes spread; instead

the sweetest yellow daffodils
that often line the altar of a final
sleeper's bed were still outside-

growing in my garden.

Substance and Longing

When the grace of earth
and air surround me,

I am a piece of world
that is but puzzle with

all my irregular edges
and fears. Where are

the missing shapes
that belong beside me?

Where is the hole
I was built to fill?

Some displaced things
were meant to be stranded,

wounded, unfashioned.
Consider the soul whose

vacant form is nothing
but prayer, whose unseen

presence fills the "nowhere"
with all it has to give.

The Remains

I've let you go. I have not
let you die. You are like
the wind, now: invisible
yet present. See how small
leaves tremble as if
their bodies are alive?

Making

Before this life,
we were but dark,
open, quivering.

Inside a planet
not unlike the cell,
a secret dream

is forming-

the tiny shell
that holds
so many things.

Who could know
that life was pleased
by "making"

that it gave
the "made" ability
to make itself?

And what of
suffering, when
shells are emptied

every gathered property
expelled: its light,
its well-earned love?

This is self-less;
making room for
something else.

Infinity

is the poison of discovery,
the chance of dreaming
recurrent dreams as the mind
is slumbering. Death,

and the notion of death,
a stringless kite surging
up and out through black,
black night until it disappears;

and what we're left holding-

a ball of twine fastened to
a small hole punched in the wood
of a handmade spool.

The Quest

You are looking where
the eye becomes a stone;
darkness is another form

of "finding".

And depth? there is
no ending to this silence
that feeds upon itself

from "within".

On a patch of snow, just
below the window, sparrows
scratch the frozen surface

with blood-stained talons.

Again, I Ask

I know too much about life
and so little. The writing
is on the wall, they say-

where is that wall?

Profoundly intelligent,
the river says nothing
at all; for this reason,

stones are deaf.

What great knowledge
the empty bodied stars
impart without knowing

the meaning of love.

On a hillside, the moon
begins its nightly walk;
no question or doubting

its well-worn path.

For All Things Promised

A new thing comes
from all things: what were
we before they gave us
science?

Wherever we go, there
is conversion; I have
struggled to be what
you had hoped-

simple, free,
immaculate.

Torn from seclusion,
an oyster scraped and
eaten from its jagged shell

leaving only hollow
outlines of our missing
bodies; I have struggled

not to be what is
missing, but what is
touched and travels.

Afterward, the molecule
unwinds and passes on
its fiery promise.

Just Deep Enough

For love, in ways of planting: seeds,
gloves, a hole just deep enough
to coat the husked tight bodice.

A wary eye kept sleepless, trained
in science, schedules chronicled
and followed; the wakened sprout,

frail green, lengthened threads
a burden on its troubled lover.
Chance, devotion: walking through

a garden, purpled, pulling vines
laddered to a thoughtless sky whose
education- light, a bird, a weeping cloud

and nothing else.

A Different Kind of Debt

Those hours, formed
like rock, fasten
earth into its body;

violence is a spice
the taste of salt
and soil. I am, at last,

the separating wall,
hip from heart, lung
from blood, the sea route

from its buttressed
path. Landlocked miles
gather heat and fog like

memories of loss; while
water thrusts then rushes
back from shore.

These nights, I practice
flowing past the breaking
point; a wave whose arc

fixes on the waiting
darkness. There, dissolved,
extinct and silenced,

what moves, what strains,
what struggles
disappears.

What Did You Expect?

Wait. Your body
is a tool for measure;
surely, now you know
the helpless are immune.

Once, I saw
my father's face
stranger than disjointed
bone, blue and swollen;

I am not as
useless as I seem.
Someone sees what
someone else is missing.

On a stretch of
beach, fragments of
a shell. I gather pieces
of a whole and glue them

into art, into memory
nearly reaching likeness
or an effigy of God; how
marginal the difference!

What the Night Brings

Prepare yourself; shadows
leaking over ridges
in the mountains

lengthen.

Not one but three
hawks circling
the fallen prize-

circling.

Blackness grows in
toothless woods, hurries
towards the sunken valley

eating light.

Just outside the safety
of your house, evening
knows the secrets

of your heart;

prepare yourself, the shadows
bringing home your grief,
a phantom of your sorrow.

Deeply, like Rain

Everywhere, rain following
rain. Everything

in the world
is drinking.

We could be happy if
I could hold you

captive in this
storm. Even I,

am beautiful
when its raining.

Capturing

Cup the hands into a bed to
hold the sick bird, gently place
on colored leaves; the sky
does not appear to notice,
a piece of it is dying.

Roll the hands like periscope,
frame the moon. A hole of light,
a tunnel to the soul emerges,
haunting, lovely. Later, in the evening
stand beneath the cedar trees; listen

to the silence of its shining.

Open up the hands for sleeping;
fingers poised to catch a dream or
shadows moving over linen hills
like waves of sea. Forget the hands,

the heart will tell you, mark
its drum, the beating darkness.
Use the muscle, its hollow rooms
to capture love.

An Ordinary Morning

The less you look
for happiness, the more
you find it. I am not surprised

or puzzled by the darkness.
What leaves no visible sign of
being- the oiled palm print,

the disarray of foliage altered
by a heavy foot, the streak of
daylight bleeding in a summer sky,

the shadow of a passing bird
moments before disappearing
into a wall of fog and cloud-

need not be understood.

Everywhere is sadness, shame
nothing saves us from it. Here,
I close my eyes and quickly see

rays of light, blazing edges burning
outward like an ordinary sun just
rising in an ordinary morning.

To Live in This World

Those circles beneath your eyes
like bruises; lips that rise subtle
as the Mona Lisa smiles-

a disappointed mystery.

Who doesn't love the ringlets
dancing off your neck? What
star's beauty suffers from a lack

of pleasure?

For miracles, alone, I stop to
wonder how the light reflects,
cast back, regressed and shining

on your blessed face.

If sadness sketched is loneliness,
if where you look, my heart must
follow; there is rapture in my body-

there is rapture.

The Guest

Pulled down like root, twisting
secret, I neglect the city's splendour-
sleepy cafes, gleaming streets,
young girls leaning out of
cotton-curtain balconies, watch
the children play below with stolen fruit
or marbles.  Did it rain today? I would not know,
these eyes sunk down inside their coat.

If I were guest, this riverbed would greet me,
now its body barely moving, shuts me out.
The light it needs, the whirling skylarks often feeding
from its tangled banks are missing;
what is missing stays with me.

About Forever

Of heaven: gaping eye,
all silence, light. A sea
of light; white, white

silence. Of darkness:

implausible, distant
distance. Not like
anchored night but wider

as in blindness. Of spaces:

wall of fire, shadowed wood,
floorless room. Floating,
falling, hacking,

bending. About forever:

enormous waiting,
sleeping, waking,
dreaming; no escaping,

no departure.

Blame It on the Wind

Rain or so the sky stained cloud; it was
the wind (your trail) made flowered,
dew grass, butter root and shallow
bowls of soil spring.

I hear the thunder, resonant and rich,
your speaking weighs the blue light
down, travelling to some high point
then burning.

I don't appear to love you only when
I cease to dream; a storm is coming,
heading home relentlessly. Rain or so
the sky stained cloud-

it was the wind.

Back to Hearth

Fashioned like a particular life,
they say, beyond living
the process takes a turn;

and so occasionally, a sense
of stillness within motion brings
a folded surface forward.

What emerges differently than skin,
the bones, the body; then, naturally
the subtle act of forming void? Here,

the spirit splits apart, patterned as
the evening sky; so oil, water, smoke
and dust, morphs itself to light.

We leave some trace, a tremor, fixed
and spiked the body stays, stripped of
dream or violence in its mossy grave.