There is a mystery in the water,
A darkness more than a hundred feet deep.
Drop a coin and it disappears
So wholly, so fully gone.
Deep Waters
19 Tuesday Aug 2014
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Dreams of Storms and Geese
13 Wednesday Aug 2014
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Tags
Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Bird Poetry, Bits, Canada Geese, Death Poems, Dreams, God, Life, Mental Health, Poem, Poems, Robin Williams, Suicide, Suicide Poetry, Thoughts
The storm came, like so many storms,
More dark, more swift, more rain.
Before that, the first migration,
Canada Geese in mid-August clouds.
I wonder if nature follows news
Or news follows nature.
We quiver with uncertainty,
Our frail choices to live boldly.
Etta says, We get on our knees,
Pray for help, sometimes we gotta,
Just help ourselves.
But it’s hard missing,
Each one gone too early,
Disappeared into our dreams.
He’s an old man, he’s crying,
It scares me. Am I scared
Or sad, or terrified?
He’s an old man, he’s crying.
Says his brother stole his–
He says, his inheritance.
He’s an old man, for god’s sake.
Does it ever get easier?
And when did I start to envy geese?
September fifteenth, two thousand one.
When they fly by, I escape.
When they honk, I worship.
I think that’s what I wish I was–
As buoyed, as certain, as free.
This is what he said,
Before he was gone,
But only in their dreams
can men be truly free.
It was always thus
and always thus will be.
Why are we so afraid of leaving?
It’s much worse to be left.
We don’t know; we’ll never know.
The storm came, faster than we knew.
It did things, storms don’t usually do.
An Idealist Short of Ideals Turns to Weaving
12 Tuesday Aug 2014
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Tags
draft poem, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Weaving
Weaving, the taking of all things
Gently in your hands,
Resting strands between fingers,
Feeling silk and heft,
Crossing what is,
With what comes next.
There is a rhythm to weaving,
It sounds like this. Steady.
Unhurried. Like your heart.
Hear it beat?
That is the beginning. And the end.
And all that’s in between.
It’s rest. Everything that’s beautiful,
In this world, starts there.
The Days of Chardonnay
07 Thursday Aug 2014
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Tags
80's, chardonnay, Poem, Poems, Poetry
The 80’s were Chardonnay
I’ll have a Chardonnay, he said,
She’ll have the same.
We served it slightly chilled
From a cruvinet, all brass
And shiney. Wearing black pants,
White shirts and ties, we poured gold,
A days wages, sometimes two,
As they’d sip at lonely tables
In dark corners. We came and went
As quietly as ghosts, taking orders,
Delivering food, changing linens
And crystal. We placed forks to the left,
Knives and spoons to the right,
Folded napkins like tents,
And at the end of the day we clocked out,
With cardboard timecards, then walked
Emptied, dark parking lots to our cars,
Under slightly chilled, star spattered skies,
Lingering nights filled with elusive dreams,
Pockets bulging with a few dirty fives
And a whole bunch of ones.
half-gone and important things
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
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half-gone.
everything seems half-gone.
he was among statues,
our gatherings,
a shadow on the road,
now he’s not.
once, I thought,
if I were to lose him,
i’d be gone.
now, i know
i’d be half-gone.
important things.
some fires burn slow,
allow you to wander in dreams,
a ghost of rooms and things;
they’re supposed to be important,
you think, but can’t remember why.
Sacred Moments
15 Tuesday Jul 2014
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Tags
Bird Poem, God, Hummingbird, Hummingbird Poem, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Sacred, Soul, Soul Poetry, Spirit
Once, and only once,
I felt a swift beauty–
A flutter, a whisper of wing
Against my bare arm.
I sat alone, encircled
By sunshine and cigar,
The beating of wing upon skin
And the bird, no bigger
Than a honey bee, a butterfly–
A hummingbird mistaken of me,
As I of him.
He danced, suspended,
Hovered over white petunias
Like spirit, or all of spirit
I wanted to know:
No maxims, no morals,
Only something as profound
As God, as miraculous,
As if he’d spoken,
Or moved the pencil
I’d dared him to move.
I sat for a while, still,
Hoping he would come again.
He didn’t.
Because that’s life, isn’t it?
An eternal flight of song–
A brief touch of this or that thing,
Sacred moments–
Out of our control.
A World That Killed John Lennon
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
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Crows, Hot Summers, Husbands, John Lennon, John Lennon's Death, Madness, Murder, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ravens, Red Tail Hawks, Souls, The Atlantic, The Atlantic Magazine, Wives
Everyday, I try to find peace
In a world that killed Lennon;
Not only peace, but poetry.
The skies are open here, broken
Only by straggly stands of Ponderosa,
And, from my place on this earth
I can see the Red Tails hunting
Over the fields, and two crows
Gathering at the barn, for what—
To eat something that’s dead there?
Or, the thing I choose to believe,
A kindred reconnection of souls.
Today, I don’t want to know
The truth. It’s too hot.
Almost 100 degrees and much of what
Was on the verge of madness,
Has gone wholly to madness.
A husband entered a building, killed his wife.
Another man admitted doing the same
Only a short drive away.
Israel is at war, again, with Hamas,
As I sit and read The Atlantic, contemplating
The creative, communal genius of rock stars.
And, trying to find peace in a world
That shot John Lennon four times In the back.
The Mystery of Trees, Cats, Crows & Coyotes
06 Sunday Jul 2014
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When our black cat lay dead
at the foot of the crooked mailbox,
her sister circled nearby in the trees.
Three days later, she too was gone.
I thought I’d heard before,
cats will disappear
when someone dies.
Often, in trees near our house,
we see hawks, hear crows,
sometimes, they fight.
There is a madness in the trees;
it resembles our own madness.
Like the funerals of crows,
their gathering in trees,
their communal mourning,
their many scold calls.
Have you heard them?
They go on like that
over their dead.
Coyotes also gather in sound;
their howls manic and frantic,
the way we imagine demons,
if there were demons.
There is a place in the trees
where everything disappears:
cats, crows, even coyotes.
It’s a dark mystery we dream,
the sounds coming to us on wind,
through lonely skies,
and brutal, beautiful trees.
A Silent Post: Barn Sparrow Gone
01 Tuesday Jul 2014
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The past is but a second,
A rotation of our body under the sun,
A few wet steps through grass,
On a path lit by a full moon.
So it seems,
The beautiful singing boy was there,
And then he was not.
What was left was a silent post
And a rafter full of chubby fledglings
Trying to find their way out of the barn.
The Most Beautiful Thing: The Barn Sparrow
13 Friday Jun 2014
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Tags
Barn Poems, Bird Poem, Bird Poems, Bird Poetry, Birds, Poems, Poetry
There is a barn sparrow
Who continually sings
One clear note.
I hear him every day
Above all the other bird sound:
From the deck of the house,
From the garden,
From the dirt road.
And, below where he sits on the fence,
Two cats criss-cross
Back and forth, leaving the barn,
Returning to the barn,
One half-hearted jump
From the beautiful singing boy.
But that’s not the most beautiful thing,
This is: He sings to lure us away
From their nest inside,
Built into a light socket above a stall,
A nest filled with the newly hatched,
And their mama tucked with them,
Her protective wing wrapped round,
Keeping them hushed.
I wanted to tell him I knew,
That I saw him flying away from it,
Landing on one wall,
Then the next, and the next,
Singing and tempting me slowly
To the outside fence,
But when I got close enough,
He flew away,
And when I followed,
He flew even further,
Until I was so far from the barn,
I was no longer a threat.
He gave me one last look as he perched,
Tipping with the wind,
On a scraggly branch of Toadflax,
Then he flew back to his fence post,
And continued his song.
A Poem Written In Terror at 3:00 AM
23 Wednesday Apr 2014
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In school,
We carried eggs like babies;
All of them broke.
Now, at midlife,
We small talk around fear,
We drink, laugh,
And drop “F” bombs,
We wake at three a.m.
From terrible dreams,
Where broken bodies leak whites,
And precious, unseen yokes
Scramble
To pour themselves out.
The Barn at Night
22 Tuesday Apr 2014
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Have you ever felt the quiet,
A sundown that steadies your bones?
I stood for a moment as the horses ate grain,
Big, bold geldings as gentle as whispers,
As noble as gods:
Old Red, his eyes blurred with cataracts,
My horse, the orphaned-pinto,
His breath always in my hands,
And the arthritic gray herd leader,
Now totally white with age.
Some people hope for castles,
As for heaven, I’d prefer a barn.
Chasing Birds
03 Thursday Apr 2014
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Every spring,
when the birds come back,
the cats disappear,
and I wonder if they’re dead,
or gone wild,
chasing magpies and robins
until they’re so far from home
they either don’t know,
or don’t care to return.
There are cats
who come back to me in dreams,
and I wonder if it means they’re alive.
There are theories of dreams,
that they’re infinite
pieces of our perceptions,
some hidden, some obvious,
but jumbled together as we sleep
and experience sweet things
we never thought we knew,
or horror we didn’t know
we could imagine.
Often, I wonder which is real,
if the cats in my dreams
are as much themselves
as any of us living can be,
and, if we are all,
always chasing birds,
wandering further and further
from some home.
Death Makes No Sense
10 Monday Mar 2014
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Tags
Death, Death Poems, Dying, Poems, Poetry
Crocus in late March,
Canada geese in flooded pastures,
Frisky horses, like land-Orcas,
With their wide, wise eyes,
And mysterious trust in humans,
All that makes sense and speaks
Of some grand, beautiful plan.
But death makes no sense to me,
And I’m sick of everything dying.
Waiting for Safety
07 Friday Mar 2014
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Sometimes, all you can do
Is wait for safety,
Theirs or yours,
it’s hard to know,
You’re so utterly bound together,
You can hardly breathe.
Sometimes, all you can do
Is wait for safety,
Counting the geese overhead,
Rather than the minutes,
Counting the cups of coffee you’ve had,
Rather than the minutes.
They say you’re never given
More than you can handle,
But I wonder if it’s true.
Sometimes, love
Really can kill you.
Requiem for Johnny Cash & June Carter, Ring of Fire
27 Thursday Feb 2014
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The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet.
—-June Carter to Johnny Cash in the song, Ring of Fire.
Who’s to say what love is,
Or what it should be,
Or who can love who?
Isn’t it enough to want so deeply
You never stop wanting?
When that very love takes you
To the outer-edge of your ages,
Together still,
When it takes you, even, to the edge of death,
Together still,
In your mutual frailty, buoyed
and bound by your wild desire.
I think, only then can love
Be a thing of true beauty,
When it ventures out
And suspends itself upon the precipice,
And claims for itself,
In a rare moment of honesty,
And courage,
What it truly needs.
Meditation: Three Recitations on Forgiveness
19 Wednesday Feb 2014
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1
Breathe deeply and directly
Into your heart
And consider
how you’ve hurt others,
Betrayed
or abandoned them.
Remember the sorrows
You carry from hurting,
Because we all do,
Betray, abandon, make weep,
And shred each others souls.
I remember now,
and feel in my body
These sorrows I carry
And ask forgiveness.
2
Breathe deeply and directly
Into your heart
And consider
how you’ve hurt yourself,
Betrayed,
or abandoned, your deepest self.
Remember the sorrows
You carry from hurting,
Because we all do,
Betray, abandon, make weep
And shred our own souls.
I remember now
and feel in my body
These sorrows I carry,
And I forgive.
3
Breathe deeply and directly
Into your heart
And consider
how others have hurt you,
Betrayed
or abandoned you.
Remember the sorrows
You carry from being hurt,
Because everyone does,
Betray, abandon, make weep
And, sometimes, shred our souls.
I remember now,
and feel in my body
These sorrows I carry,
And I forgive.
Waiting for Crocus
17 Monday Feb 2014
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Crocus,
When will your tender leaves pierce the snow,
Petals tight as arrowheads?
I remember you white against rocks,
I remember you standing bravely against snow,
Not as tall as the droop of a Snowdrop,
But more profuse, more stunning;
You came in purple and white and pink.
Buried, you’re probably starting to tremble,
With the excitement of our first warm days,
Brief breaks of winter’s harsh winds,
Winds, which can’t break you
(And maybe me either?)
You army of self-determined survival,
You harbinger of rebirth and resurrection,
I know you’re starting to wake, I have faith,
And I tremble, too, with anticipation.
My hope: What’s dead in me will rise with you,
An army of crocus leading the way.
Inspired
12 Wednesday Feb 2014
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It doesn’t interest me
what your opinions are,
Or your opinions about opinions;
Tell me, instead, what can be.
Tell me what makes you want to sing,
Or cry, or scream,
But don’t worry how you say it.
Sometimes the precise word
Really is fuckin’,
like That fuckin’ ice we’re all gonna get killed on.
It doesn’t interest me
who you think you should be,
I want to know who you really are;
I have a suspicion
I may be that person, too.
I’m not interested in your perfection,
Tell me what’s wrong with you,
And let us both feel the glory of want,
The hopelessness that’s cured
By wanting hope,
The faithlessness that’s cured
By wanting faith,
The lovelessness that’s cured
By wanting love,
The loneliness that’s cured
by seeing each other’s true, laid-out-souls
Bared, yes, vulnerable, yes
But invincible, too.
A Few Fine Dots
07 Friday Feb 2014
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As we look back,
Seems our lives were squandered,
Except a few fine dots
Spread through memory,
Those rare moments
We were as we should be.
We think what could have been
Had we been our better selves more often,
Understood the value of time;
Time, that passes first
Not fast enough to get past our lack.
Time, we think, moves too slowly
Then later, we think, too fast, too fast
And try to slow it by observation:
The smell of summer mornings,
The smell of the Memorial Rose,
The smell of Thyme, and Rosemary, and Pine,
The smell of sex,
The smell of our babies,
And our children’s babies,
And theirs.
And sounds, sounds, sounds
We begin to name them
Saying, that was the Great Horned Owl,
Becoming more and more like Adam,
More and more creators and sustainers,
More appreciative
Of this beautiful, dank earth
Even as our time on it
Comes close to its end:
Its suffering; its need; its joy,
And the never-ending-fear
That keeps our lives confined
To a few fine dots
And infinite regret.
Bits of Poetry 