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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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