Monday, February 24, 2014

A Lover's Life

Yesterday I ventured
into deep snow
by the river
for a lover’s look
at the curves of her
I had not yet seen,
she, a dancer lightly
on smooth stone
pavements,
the air of her
swirling skirts
moving water grasses
to ecstatic praise
and me to
weightlessness.

Alas, in the deep snow
I am a lover
tightly bound to earth
as if by a
white pulse
of gravity,
a sudden surge
of friction,
down.

The world’s surface
is a pastry crust,
a paper face,
a planar geometry
of symbolism
for what lies below—
a man’s foot sinking 
to frozen ground,
stepping and sinking
like stones overboard,

but most of all
a man’s willingness 
to sink
in search of
a lover’s look
until firmness 
find me again 
and grant another step.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

If this apple had known

If this apple had known
last summer
when a tense
crescendo
of cicadas
and crowcall
sent a shiver
of suspense
through the orchard—

     What comes next?

If this apple had known then
about the
rapturous
arousal
of oven love,
the union
of cinnamon
and butter,
and the 
rounding embrace
of crust
like a
snowfall of
sunlight,

If this apple had dreamed
of translation
upward
into the
brightness
of my ecstasy
at breakfast
on a blustering
winter
morning,
perfected,

Would it ever
have feared
the fall
so much?


Sunday, February 16, 2014

he wasn't a god at all

I pulled back a corner of
loose wallpaper in my kitchen
and found a colony of frantic ants,
building pyramids for their dead kings,
a manic labor of fear and hope

only they weren’t ants at all,
they were men driving dusty elephants
chained to blocks of stone, and
some had whips and some had scars,
and furnace winds scorched the earth
with a sound like a low moan
from the bunkhouse of slaves

only they weren’t men at all,
they were angels and demons
and a vast middle class
of spirits in between and
as I pulled I drew back the veil on the
crimson palace of an emperor-god in a walled city
full of the near dead and the long dead,
full of hungry-eyed priests
peddling eternity

only he wasn’t a god at all,
he was a familiar child asleep,
dreaming of waking from
an epic dream

Friday, February 14, 2014

This Love

for Issa

This love
lives in my body
where seventeen fierce men
with shovels keep the fire hot,
a fire with stars and volcanoes
and new continents in it.

This love
lives in my heart
where tameless horses carry
enchanted children from village to village
in search of parents they’ve
never seen, only dreamed.

This love
lives in my mind
where an aging alchemist sits in a dusty library
trying to remember the word that when spoken
will open the rosebud.

This love
lives in your eyes
where water is born and spirit salmon
swim upstream for centuries
to lay their eggs in your voice
and die.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

unbroken

a lone elk
crossed the river
last night
within sight
of my window,
a migration
of one under a
drawing moon

i read the news
this morning
in signs she left
moving
through snow
and willows
and bristling
villages of
wild rose stalks
and, for a while,
along the trail
i have made over
days and nights
on my own
solitary
migrations

the mirrored commas
of her signature
superseded
the imprint of
my boot heel,
professing a
prior claim

then straight away
she crossed
the river,
though not with
hopes held close
like the fox
or the deer
who take the 
narrow chances 
held up by ice over
silver water

her steps
showed 
no sign
of pausing
on the edge
of the future
to tally the odds,
or map the depths
or sweep her eyes
up and downstream
in search of
perfection

here
now
on
and
into
the dark and
surging current
she went

the way of
her life
unbroken
by doubt

Monday, February 10, 2014

Checklist

The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.
—William Blake


Be the fountain,
            not the cistern.
Be the flame,
            not the wick.
Be the music,
            not the reed.
Be the sun,
            not the sleepy seed.
Be yourself,
            whole and free.

Friday, February 7, 2014

between

morning sun lights the mesa rim
daring me to fall upward again
with all rising things

while down the valley
a twilight pillow of snowfall
approaches

plunging cliffs and cottonwoods
into watercolor softness
suspended

a wire fence can no longer distinguish
between here and there
and the border falls

causing mice to sink deeper
into each other
home

I watch in a glass room and think
about paradox, my place here
between.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

A Captain Adrift

After many years at sea
mapping the currents
and the stars
and reading omens in the
migrations of seaweed, divining
by any means
the expected alignment
of bow
and keel
and rudder,
the perfected attitude of
sail to wind,
eye to horizon,
where treasure calls,
ever correcting the course,
impaling every fearsome beast
on the compass point
of my will…

After dreaming myself Captain,
master of charts,
merchant of destiny,
I recently awoke
to discover
I am merely
driftwood,
drifting,
adrift,
perhaps the remains
of a crate that once
carried spyglasses to
Napoleon’s lieutenants,
or a broken oxbow
swept down the Ganges
along with a peasant’s
last hope.

I am driftwood
with no destination but to
be present each evening,
witness to the Evening Star,
I am driftwood,
as gloriously buoyant
and full of sun
as any Spanish Galleon
that ever sailed, and
infinitely more free
to go with God
up and down
a while longer
until one last storm
plunges me into the
quiet deep,
or tosses me again
onto a far shore,
to break upon flint
and throw firelight
across the breathless
kisses of lovers
dreaming themselves
Captains of their fate.


Tuesday, February 4, 2014

old lines on snowy mornings

the horizon is close
on snowy mornings

the world is a single
blank page of white

until hare ventures a
new line of poetry

an ode to softness
yielding

until hawk punctuates
the verses with

brilliant incisions that
shift all meaning

toward fire