The mirror lies today. No child
looks back in innocence except
with the eyes, the same startled ocean green,
those changing moods.
Today, the tide rushed in and
I thought I was in my Easter outfit
sewn by my grandmother,
pink and white striped cotton with white frills
of lace, gathered waist, bunny buttons;
the hat a woven bonnet
with acrylic daisies.
Such
a happy child, buoyed in the world,
treasured starfish.
I see her image dissolve into the pool,
waves loosening at my feet.
Without Persona Monday, Jul 28 2008
Poetry 4:19 pm
Husk Monday, Jul 28 2008
Poetry 4:17 pm
In time, the wind pulls seeds from the husk
at will, by season’s determination.
Nothing stops this, not all the wishes
in the world.
I slip out on the wire of air,
An acrobat in my own invisible life,
One foot upon what’s known, one foot lifted
on the hidden path of desire.
What drives such performance is a mystery,
resists even the hardest resolutions
not to fall.
The inevitable descent,
gravity
plunges a seed to unpredictable landing, into sand
or rich soil, to a foreign field, the debris of rebirth.
Unlike You Thursday, Jul 17 2008
Poetry 5:05 am
Your ducks in a row, your fields plowed,
your dishes washed, meals on a plate, geraniums that bloom –
such a sane a nest. So wise a decision.
In such a world, heads and lives blown apart,
sacks of flour and gourds of water a nurturing gold,
your geraniums bloom bloodred and sunburned pink,
so beautiful; silent to envy and longing
the threat that all will be taken away.
In this one life we awaken to, keep your eyes
open. Be gentle with those geraniums, add
a creamy peacewhite bloom, a hopeful peach,
a prayer of water.
saturn’s disguise Monday, Jul 7 2008
Poetry 12:17 am
If Saturn’s rings were gold I’d wear them
round my neck and ascend to ice,
My eyes can touch her through the speed of light.
She is the beacon, illusory and pragmatic.
Who rides those rings? I have, in a dream,
the same dream I witnessed Pluto shed himself
of identity and Chiron find his place.
I’d wear those rings of golden ice,
buried in her heavy mottled cloak – it’s
Saturn’s price to orbit her voluptuous body.
There’s sanity in not wanting to be bound to Earth,
its lack of sheen, its distant blue forever.
Wind Wednesday, Jun 18 2008
Poetry 9:53 am
“An’ as it blowed an’ blowed I often looked
up at the sky an’ assed meself the question,
what is the stars, what is the stars?”
- Sean O’Casey, Juno & the Paycock
Forever wind annoys me, pushing in
dirt and despair from the West, a country
of bald landscape and suppressed rage,
a mockery of expectation. A truth-teller
of the content life, wind sweeps that illusion
bare and rough.
Wind is unforgiving, always in my face
demands confrontation, twists my words,
Wind is the force of god slapping me
as I daze in the gentle dreams of day.
A reminder
that what is on its way is a reckoning, a decision,
the devastation of all that came before.
Wind whips my hair in sharp snaps
on my cheeks: “Wake up! Or continue to avoid me.”
Of course, impossible, unavoidable.
I think of you when there is wind.
When we once curled up in the house and wind
cursed against the windows and doors.
Or when we walked a peaceful trail and the sudden strength
accosted us and lifted us up like angels, blew sand
and tiny bits of gravel into our eyes, we could not see.
Wind would win, tear us asunder as we gripped
One another’s hand, the help we needed to keep us
together.
Against wind’s rough push I clutch the steering wheel
fighting death on the road. I wonder
if I could do it. Die. It’s just a thought.
So simple to release the wheels into wind, to be gusted up
clad in wings of dirt.
Wind keeps me close enough to death
to want to live. Most of the time. It isn’t even
my decision, depending on
the wind’s mood that day, that hour.
Rainmaker: Monsoon Lessons Thursday, Jun 12 2008
Poetry 10:52 am
Rainmaker: Monsoon Lessons
It takes
so many thousand years to wake,
but will you wake, for pity’s sake?-Christopher Fry, “A Sleep of Prisoners”
I.
I began to make rain at an early age.
The weeds exploded with sharp, tender stickers,
the laundry dripped small rivers from the clothesline,
and puddles of crystal liquid stood still as glass
in the cornices of buffalo grass and dandelion.
Not all such efforts were appreciated.
The hook-shaped yellowjackets jerked
into their dirtpod nest under the carport eaves.
My mother cursed the sullen sheets and towels,
the dog ran in circles as if possessed.
Rain can be unpredicatable in the hands of the uninitiated.
I wanted to do something about the thunder -
it was cause for alarm – the same sound as a bomb, I thought,
never having heard a bomb. The voice of doomsday.
Nothing could be done about the thunder.
So I learned to love it
and all its wordless warnings and commentaries
on such a small world as mine.
II.
The knowledge of the world comes on the tip of the tongue
it rolls in with the tide, covered in salt,
and leaves its bones to dry.
I picked the spiked and funneled skeletons from the beach
one by one.
put a shell of a word to my ears
and it whispered
shhhhhh…………….
There is a message in words beyond their remains,
and beyond the memory of what has already been said.
III.
Behind the great thunder that announces rain
is a question a thousand years old:
What is it that we see?
The same answers come back to us
in familiar shapes, scents, and textures.
There is a reminiscent blue, a sad green,
love’s round corners, and a pointed guilt,
the rough edge of a thorn, smooth oil of blood;
small roses that smell like hard red candies,
the twisted shadow of an iron gate slanted across sunlight;
an empty house deranged by ancient morninglory
vines that open full magenta mouths at 6 a.m.
In this life it’s the job of the rainmaker
to call forth a cleansing wash of color
over everything preconceived,
thought ordinary, over all the ten thousand
things.
Without intention, the clouds release rain,
Pockets of debris from other universes.
Their soft pink bellies hold food
for the sacred fish below.
When you begin to understandthe connection of water and words,
of sacred fish and food multiplied
for centuries;
when you begin to understand
that one contemplative footprint
is a word in sand, consumed by water,
you are ready for the vacant hope
of faith.
Faith leads the rainmaker, with no motive at all,
to wrench water from a sky that was hot and pale
with emptiness, just hours ago,
and to love the miracle, again and again.
IV.
Rainmaker’s logic is all about focus.
Begin looking now, into this light:
a candle burns without intention,
and holds in its waxy heart
the light that comes and goes.
Ask without intention. Pray as if breathing.
Prayer is a language cathedral
that goes dark at dawn.
V.
Soon after I decry the absence of clouds,
it’s monsoon season in the desert.
Kamikaze rains attack at random,
Wet steam rises from the cacti,
low-lying roads swell with dark water
and we swim through the air in a trance.
The sunsets are Neopolitan ice cream,
the sun a bruised peach simmering in custard.
When this is over, I’ll be waiting for
the wisdom that’s supposed to follow the storm.
These 40 days and 40 nights have gone on forever.
VI.
Something from that life spills into
this life
I’m waiting to hear my name called.
Like familiar water full to the lip
of the glass, I want a taste
of what I have created, sediment and all,
till it flows pure and smooth and empty
as faith.
Transit of Nothing Thursday, Jun 12 2008
Poetry 10:50 am
Transit of Nothing
So Venus is running us down with her Love?
I lay on the highway, glued to the sweetness of
Her necessary trail of decay.
Love’s other selves remain behind Her galactical spin,
salving the wounds of cracked hearts, opening
arteries and swelling them in unison, pumping
blood Love blood Love
So this is the Initiation? I’ve read about it.
Forgot about it – and here it is.
No lacy hearts & pretty roses, this one.
Long days of rest so deep it’s death,
arising from a nap as if a tomb
stretching arms in resurrection.
Nothing is remembered, but somehow
I know more about this world.
This body does not control itself.
I follow the coaxing pull of Venus,
its multiplying rules of change, its determined
path to mortality — cracked heart —
If one survives this introspective broken dream
then surely wings will lift us up.
calculated risk Sunday, May 11 2008
Poetry 4:35 pm
Downwind of Los Alamos
the dream mathematicians calculate
the invariable ratio of poison to cell.
When we wake, hungover from a spell of radiation
everything glows with such an unnatural light,
those old mercury fillings
the rocks and sand in the arroyos
the edge of the world past the Sangre de Cristos
your children’s bones.
When we speak
what is not said
is radiation.
This equation will not change:
for each seamless particle of controlled radiation
emission
a cell dies somewhere,
in a brain
a sheath covering a nerve
a baby’s soul.
Life mutates closer to its imitation of death.
Technotalk detaches source from symptom,
the numbers and symbols conceal your broken
heart,
the smell of blood, a taste of something evil.
This isn’t a dream at all – it is our flesh,
the bones of our children, a baby’s soul
dissolving, like morning-after memories.
The percentage of survival slopes off
the chart.
some sort of meditation Sunday, May 11 2008
Poetry 4:30 pm
I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details. – Albert Einstein
You think you will be protected -
Oh, but nothing protects you
your dreams are a mass of longings
illusive archetypes, loves never loved.
I pray I will be protected -
Oh, but nothing protects me
I search in my dreams for clues, a parlor game.
I swirl in my dreams toward the Holy Grail
over and over and over
I am digging through the morass, I am looking
for nothing
it feels so real, this nothing. What is it?
The aborted child has darkened the
Holy Grail. It is covered in moss and
mourning glory vines.
In your angelic heart you forgive everything. . . .
Maybe this is just how it’s going to be
subterraneon meloncholy all the hours of the day
seeping into dreams, awakening into disorientation,
in another country, another body, on a train or
traveling in this very bed, the bed that holds
such sorrrow, in a body of such imperfection.
This is how it will be.
So, Oh…get used to it. Move on.
ocean’s edge Sunday, May 11 2008
Poetry 4:27 pm
In a clear rinse of tide, in a place
I cannot remember it is over and all is washed
clean. Smooth sleep, no more complicated dreams.
It seems the undertow of longing had hooked
me in forever. I saw nothing but your face.
I felt nothing but your soul. It was a drowning
of elegant energy, but oh so finely felt.
So there: it is done with. Breathe
into the void and forgive me for drifting
so close to the liquid rim of assuming this
or that. It is done with, the tide recedes
and this water so deep and divine
flows clearly through my heart
and the strongest currents escort you
safely back to sea.
