Caught Between

Where I've come from, first
a white room, then the city

full of voices and flashing
colors; the world lengthening

every year darker than the year
before. Someone with bright skin

and dancing hair looks into
a mirror. The mirror sees nothing

it hasn't seen before. Now
transformed my aging body walks

through fields of wheat and corn;
buried alive in trees, the dark

green creek, the rocks and
grassy rolling hills.

What compels an innocence to end
its life with happiness or joy?

To that last bird caught between
the sky and storm, a certain thrill;

where it came from, where it will
surely be destroyed.

Fully Drained

You did not expect this- the waiting, the heavy
rocks sewn into your pockets, the counting of
vultures wheeling above a carcass, the distance
of wilderness you woke up in. A man begins in dreams,
rising from a river with no memory of struggle. Then,

a stranger says: "You are what grows inside you"

You want to share the things you've learned to love:
your body, cherished words, the light that draws
the moths to flutter against a windowpane, nights
that come like creeping lions over the hills. Defying
gravity, you give until your heart runs dry. Then,

you realize you cannot save anyone.

The Color of Loss

Each day brings longing;
light and love of light
on a dark, remote island.

The night is also desire,
flames of black, the sweet
scent of shadows widening.

In a small room the student
is taught lessons of loss-
the color of stones.

Blue Tower

Please, let's go like tameless
winds wandering the sky. If we
were wind, earth will miss us,
the moon will be our mother.

Two proud hawks twisting up
together in an arc, let's go like
birds towards that blue tower
rising in the midnight shadows.

Like a Dream

You tell me what you've seen
or heard usually at night

your slow, dark voice
a shroud, a glove or

soft-petaled flower.

I've listened to your songs
before; I know you even as

I know the heat and bright
moon's trail will be there

fastened to this quiet world
and I call it dream.

Draft

We stretch to see the light. We bend
down to touch the darkness; the narrow
spaces between the spine are the hands
of our soul. Since when have we, moving
through the world, learned to mark it
like wolves in the woods; our territory
found by smell, color, trampled grasses?

Once there was a man who could not move;
his body was a building made of steel,
glass and concrete. But his heart crawled
through its window every night to fly
over the canyons like a bird and brought
back with it the sky, the clouds, the red
black dusk.

The Sound of Wing

Like memory of womb, the sound
of her voice reaching farther back
than pain which light causes.

The only other comforting audibles:
water moving, streaming, the nearly
imperceptible hummingbird wing

caught below a fushcia's stamen.
Once aware of silence, how it opens
out like folds of paper, the way

its shapeless mist and starless
constellations resemble what we
know of loneliness, we are changed.

Passing Through

Forever turning from the eyes,
arms, the small pink ears,

flowers in their last brief burst
of beauty; there is no terror

for the dead. But I am caught
between perfection and the dormant

blur of flesh like grounded silver
fish whose tidals have expelled them.

There are rituals for evening, not
unlike the layered stones of bridges;

geography becomes a journey here to
there without prosperity or destination.

In these moments of lucid resurrection
choose the river or the blue-cast hills

or walk a path that intersects them
through the quiet, thistled meadow.

The Mystic Jawbone

When we find the one
star that shines stronger
than the others or the mystic
jawbone of a Baiji Dolphin
wedged into the sand-

this means we will be
remembered.

When ashes fall like
flakes of snow resemble
one another or night rewinds
a kaleidoscope of blackness,
dark and deep as blindness-

this is how the soul
forgets.

Natural Wounds

Late in the evening a flock
of crows agitate the skies;
there will be no sleep tonight
for coyotes or the open eyed.

There are stranger sights than
nature. See the heart build
its concrete house without
a single window; imagine

the darkness of its history.

This is what I know: a claw
positioned on the pulse will
drop the helpless prey. Stay
the hand of fate and you will

only wound it.

The Old Dark Mare

Today comes the hope that all
will be forgotten. I spent it
thinking of you after a dream
of how I left you while you
did nothing to stop me.

Two bowls of milk, one full
the other hardly filled. Hunger
is incentive for the prowler who
will not steal gifts, instead
reluctantly wanders away.

Today the gates have opened.
The old dark mare lifts her head
with youthful motion, not confident
of where to go, how to get there
but sure she will not stay.

After

All day the mind recites
its lessons. In the evening,
the heart unwraps its cloak
and prays for patience. Sometime
after midnight, the soul escapes
its prison and dreams of leaving.

Bitter-Sweet

They pronounced her dead or
monarch of the underneath being

fragments of damp twigs, shards of
broken stones and blind auburn worms;

no wonder blue flowers grow thick
in the place where her heart lived.

Now the light remembers her like
blossoms in the depth of winter

or bright-winged birds fallen into
tiny heaps of bone and feather.

Life above, the emptied just below,
the raging blood, the yielding soil;

on a summer's day it's impossible
to separate sweetness from the bitter.

All That Glitters is the Mind

Literally, mystery is an accident.
Fragility though not unique is
inevitable. A boy finds a marble
in the streets; suddenly his world
becomes remarkable. A crow scratching
with its claws uncovers fresh larva
then flies off desperately searching
for more.

Shield

We will take ourselves seriously
when the dark tunnel winds its way

towards us; the tunnel that brings
terrible, difficult things. There are

no fallout shelters to kneel in;
even the sun can be damaging to

the whitest of skin. On a good day,
clouds with tightly, interlocked rims

shield the timid from sorrow.

Could You Be?

With someone watching you,
the moths, the ghosts, the holy
onyx night, you cannot be
yourself. Outside your body
there are no eyes but pieces
of shadow that glue you to
the light, pin the tail, prick
the bird, stone the heart.

Remind me what a real thing is.
There at the end of the hallway
a photo of myself; not beauty,
not art but history frozen to
the woolly darkness. He asked
through a bullhorn "Could you be
my lover?" Still the golden flame,
the dreadful silence evaporated.

Stop-Clock

All heaven calls for patience;
wherever you're going
it's wise to get there

slowly.

In a blue morning once
I tried to sprint towards evening;
imagine losing tinted golden-green

afternoons.

Nights were also made for savoring,
languid pleasure; the pulsing rays
of starlight moving through

eons of dust.

Wild Tulips

You brought me
wild fists of tulips, white as herons;
it seemed injurious
to tame them.

All morning
snowy egrets flew over the lake
feathery petals falling
from their vase.

Nearly Always

To know what you have
lost- a key, a shoe,
a hair beret of ivory

from things that you have
borrowed, stolen, a flower
from the neighbors garden,

a cherry from the grocer's bin,
a quiet moment just before
the rain and thunder quicken

is to understand what rivers
know from start to finish:
all things given are always,

nearly always taken.

A Single Strand of Darkness

I am sad like eyes closed.
What touches my hands does not
belong there but slides away-
rain against the glass.

Don't we slip away with it?

I've loved like spiders
spinning webs of silver scar;
their world all feathered moths
and flies and sun. Is there

a single strand of darkness?

When I sleep like sinking fog
knowing stars are light imposters
a thousand years before tomorrow
burning for a dreamer's sight-

who is cruel enough to tell us?

Secret, Blessed

How shall we understand
the purpose of night,
its blackened vaults,
moonlit columns, endless
labyrinths of tunnel?

In the shadowed garden
the slow, blind slugs
appear from nowhere
licking dew and dirt
with tiny tongues

and whose to say
their hearts, devoid
of malice or any kind
of violence, deserve
to be silenced?

The faultless night
whose roof of trees,
shimmering arcs of sky
and star, the colorless
flower that blooms for

no ones eyes but
darkness, need not be
challenged but witnessed
by candle's light as just
the paradise it seems-

the cold black pearl
of secret, blessed quiet.

Less Real Than

I'm not aware of many things.
How do I prepare myself to wound
what I have healed?

I must ask the soul simply
how to recognize itself
in the dark

like the owl who leaves
its home and flies
focused and low.

Our path is not defined;
prisoner or freed our road
is dream, our wakening

shifting, changing.

Everything else, the beautiful
fading images, the coherent
fabulous things are less

real than memory.

Barefoot

Black-footed, the girl
becomes a wolf.
Her mother's kitchen towel
a tail, her cheek pressed down
against the earth,

smelling earth.

In a city made of steel
wearing high-heels
shiny, red as blood, the girl
becomes a captive wolf, her heart
sunk down against the world,

her heart sunk down.

Joints

Take care, the love
in your life will not keep
bones from breaking.

Notice the stalk, how
bending preserves the delicate
swan-shaped flower;

here, in the joints
of my jaw, a hinge to hold
the secrets of my heart.

Internal World

I have been gone
awhile. As if life
had lost its voice

or more seriously,
heard itself
for the first time

and fallen, shamefully
quiet. What has been
said before can only

be said again, even song
with some diversity, like water
is re-arrangement afterall.

It begins like this:
astonishment. The texture
of grass, the blazing color

profusely bleeding from rims
of sky, rolling seas whose thunder
is a heart split open, rushing

towards an isolated beach,
the nightgull piercing through
the sludge of darkness. Then,

as eyes and ears are filled
with violence, awe becomes
a hammer tapping on the skull;

its nail securely fixing
what was found to what is lost,
that which gave us joy

to this internal silence.