Light in January

January on the Cape,
clouds heavy with threat,
ice and storm, but a rare winter
wind from down south made raindrops
dance on the frozen beach
and chide those furious
breakers till the ocean
lapped the sands penitently.

Sometimes one may find
redemption in the presence
of just such an extraordinary
vision, sometimes peace
and the healing of wounds,
so I stood patiently drenched
with the wordless glory of the place,
the weather, the early morning
sun just creeping through
a cleft in the gray, a little gold
illuminating the face of a child

I had overlooked somehow. Her eyes
were gray as storm clouds
yet bright, glinting with rain
or tears maybe. Something
in her face radiated longing
I have seldom felt, a pull
so devoted to one desire
that she seemed to belong there
at least more than I and perhaps
more than the impassive sands
of that stark beach or the grim
toothed rocks lurking just beneath
the surface of the vacillating
and often unforgiving sea.

Sound and Space

A child deems sleep

with deep suspicion,

protests the obligatory

hour of bed,

resists slumbering

mind, listless senses

descent into the ocean

roar of dreams

only to wake and find

a world turned without

conscious thought

keeping sidereal time,

waltzing to a music

made in the heart of stars

darker now than night.

What sound

is the space

between notes,

a progression of time

ticking in hearts

that ends when

baton is stilled

or dreamers wake

to new suns

and old loves.

Perhaps there is another

chorus that humans

do not sense,

spectral as it is

just those spaces

between us

a breath of separation

parting the quick

and the departed,

spaces

that make you

not me, D natural

not A sharp. Fancy

if they were not

how all would be

one dreary dying

monotone.

What sound plays

between notes

in the score of all

our lives that children

perceive as only the small

beat of time deafening

their elders, just a rest

between the notes before

and those as yet

unplayed.

After the Game

This will probably be the last piece from me for a bit. Comment if you can. I'm not even sure if it's finished yet. Thanks.

I still see him sitting on the redwood
picnic table, chin in palm, bare chest, playful
breeze tossing thin hair and thoughts.
Mulling through the hereafter or boyhood yet
for him the two were always balanced
on a blade of summer green.
Those trying calls from a longtime
companion melting among
sun showers or fog showers while mischief plays
over his too tanned lips as he picks off
another runner with a frozen
rope throw to first or simply
that icy green stare of certainty.

Boundless

Consider those impetuous
dream horses, calico chaotic,
visions colliding at some
times as they will

with the forests of our reasons,
or ordered hedgerows of conviction

falling as if never truly
expressed just rolling green

pastures of infinite possibility, spare
features of mayhem like the fluke waiting

patiently inside the mind
of one crazed ant perched high
atop tall green blade tip lingering
to hitch a ride on one unwilling

hapless sheep who will
see before falling under soundless
embrace of that long last dream
how boundless life was.

Memento

Final version of this, I hope. I think it's now much clearer and hopefully the title is not too much of a problem. :D Thanks!

She said, the black cat,

the one you purchased

as memento mori

for new love, must retire

outside her house

permanently.

She said, he could not be trusted

to curb masculine urges,

pulling back sharp

claws while near her

velveteen newborn,

so out he went.

Slinking

out of your house

with disgrace

hanging on his fur

like alley cat stench,

your black cat

took refuge

on the stoop,

waiting for you

to soften her mind

as every day

you stamped concrete

slurry that begins pliable

enough but is stone

nonetheless.

Nothing changed.

The cat was still

waiting as the child

turned two, robustly toddling

on pale uncertain limbs

even near perilous pets

of the cul-de-sac,

those pekes and mini pins,

resolutely daring to teeter

even near those razor

ribbon tongues and cluck

of prying neighbors.

What the cat said

was nothing as you spirited

away your tools and bags

of personal things

late in the night while the child

lay sleeping and his mother

watched your movements

from her second floor perch

never noticing that subtle

shadow silently stealing away

breathlessly under a blazing moon

perched in the branches

of her whispering acacias.

Tortoise

One new piece from me and thanks to Tiger for keeping us going. God bless.

Tortoise

One last long

sweep, fluid as fine

writing. When she goes

she scoops then smoothes

past what myriad futures rest

in uncertain sand, the countless

clutch waiting on time, waiting on one

certain time, a singularity then

racing to the mystic blue green deep

home to legions still one always

in the eye of this ancient

mariner slowly keeping

the eternal.

Rewrite: In Your Left Hand

In your left hand, furrowed
lines from your past, little
more than some pattern
your mind cultivated
while dry details were turned
asunder, words buried
like jagged rocks in loam.

Still emotions grew
beneath networks of memory without
even one word. Anger is anger
in any language. Love is power
that leaves scintillating trails in tangible
air and airless moments alike. False
prophets have read books on the self
help aisle, offer you a past and future

crystal clear but you know history
is not insight. Your fingers slowly close
against the crumpled lines.

How subtle this tracery like moonlight lace
over mountain pines that will be broken by fearful storms
or quarrelsome voices half heard through heavy doors
where the wise child treads lightly by.

As fading lines of an ancient book whose words
cannot be read anymore yet the heart
remembers every broken glyph. Will you ask
another where the lifeline runs?

In your hand, naturally, but still
never in hand nor along the specious
creases the palmists read. That soft and surface
line is only an empty wrinkle in your time.

You’ve always known these things
where you carry home in your heart
letting memory and love spill out with grace

of your touch like baptism. The link
keeping all those you’ve loved ever present
in your life and now in mine.

Rewrite: Learning to Read Sanskrit

Just revisited this one because it's always annoyed me. I don't know if I made it less annoying to you but I think it might be less annoying for me. Thanks for looking!

Learning to Read Sanskrit

We have dreamed
of touching one another,
bare nerve to naked
synapse, common
language conquering
the certain solitude
from living free
of one’s animal past.

Forgetting
how Aleph signified silver
horns of a sacred herd, hidden
gift of an ebbing moon,
a crescent left to slice
the breathless
dark. So our kindred delved
into stone, seeking the language
of creation so founding
artifice on chaos.

Do you see
the confused
etchings of gull
prints on the beach,
the cuneiform
of winter sun falling
through green,
painting scripture
on firs? Let us speak
the language of trees,

chant the wisdom
of the sea birds.

Shall we go out
under a new moon,
no guide save the cold
distant stars? Shall we trace
the arcane Brahmi forms
that we discover in ancient
sands on the shore?
And when the sun
illuminates our texts,
shall we have learned

to read Sanskrit
in the dark?

Memento

I never leave without
visions in my heart
lit by summer moon
of dark blue tinged
peering through ample
foliage where I last
was loved by her.

With the stars
melting in a honey dawn,
feet treading the hard
calm black river
navigating stones and holes
with a wit of their own
leaving the heart free,

entwining its passions
like so many valentine
parcels stowing them away.

One Daybreak

The pearl shoals of dawn fog
rolled away with sunrise
like a brooding winter gray
roller when blue spring
skies appear. Chasing after
came schools of expansive snowy
fish, adorned with improbable
fins, curling and bristling.
Then coming rapidly apace, clouds
like white breakers chasing them
all further inland. It will be a hot day.

The ocean rises along
all our coasts sending picture
postcard announcements to these
many islands in advance. Learn to swim.

The Good Father

This one is totally raw so bear with me. :) And yes, it has been a long damn time. Hopefully, not so long the next time. Thanks for looking and all the best!

I see a small girl,
hair in pigtails, dressed
in a pale pink pinafore,
playing with a doll.
She is kind even
to the pretend child
while she waits.

Father will be home
soon. He’ll kneel down
on his lawn where she
has already spread
the tea things, seated the bear,
the dolly even convinced
the sweet yellow dog
to mind his manners.
Father will kiss her
with pride and somehow
regret, still the wait
will have been
worth it to her

yet into her pensive
heart creeps a little shaft
of light like ice
that naughty brothers
slipped down her sundress,
that she learns to love
even the shock of cold
hard truth melting
illusions and clearing
away the tea things.

I feel this place and time
the heart would rather not
know the memories screened
in dreams every night.
Where even now amid broken
sidewalks and balding
shingles there is a genius
loci whispering from inside
those droughty rasping
hedges what was lost
in the leaving.

Ghostly thoughts
of good fathers close
round me lost in a gray
pinstriped army of them,
weary stooping slightly, minds
bound elsewhere obliged
while their remains languish
blindly indulging pretend cakes
and polite conversation

then daddy must leave,
bound by his sole
occupation building
a right kind of life
that never could be found
except at a little girl’s tea party.

Christmas

Okay, one more that I should have posted here a couple of months ago. Sorry it's late but maybe you'll still find it interesting. Thanks for taking a look.

We wait in the terminal
quietly near the cool tiled
walls surreptitiously
deciphering the gin
blossoms growing
up around Miami
and DC, overrunning
NYC, obscuring LA. May reds
twined through December
blacks, denim blue as poet’s
ink raw under quavering
fluorescence—

some boundary markers,
declarations of love
and hate, digits metaphorical
or obscured, Jesus saves but the end
is come, and there’s a girl in 12C
who wants to be my friend—

Still, I am just
waiting on Christmas,
all of us here were
schooled to believe
good things come
eventually as Christmas will
save us, God rest ye merry,
and maybe offer a pass
before another snow laced
with diesel and exhaust.

Fate Is the Unscheduled Freight Train

This is a first draft with what I consider to be a dreadful title. Feel free to have at it. Thanks! :D

Somewhere in genes or woven
through gray matter maybe

there is static

a radio broadcast from late
50s, an announcer reading
the same old news, Diamonds
strolling through from St. Louis

maybe, a sax grinding down
and dirty while expectant

parents quarrel

then a freight slipping slowly
improbably like a razor
slicing away some conclusion.
Small details which make a choice

that isn’t.

It is a splinter’s view
into one unbalanced
mind teetering as it will
on fragile seconds—
the real and unreal,
the knowing how those past
seconds live on somewhere
waiting with iron breath
and piston beats if only in a human
heart, lingering along those rails
before the birth as present seconds
may be unreal and the future
more dead than radio.

Epiphany

I posted this one over on the Café but I thought I should post it here too. This is the latest version. Thanks.

Beneath the ancient snow
draped dogwood tree
I lay myself down, skull
resting on one of her exposed
but smooth roots. Her skin
still black with the dew
sun just risen and the stars
still littering the horizon
like petals. An early Easter
approached that year
and I was thinking
how I should like to give
my spirit to the universe,
just imagining myself gone
no more I here at all,
no more seeking,
no more struggle in just
spring rejoicing in reunion
of everything.

Shaking off ashen
sleep and clinging petals,
bright green of dew sodden
lea streaking white sneakers,
the seat of jeans,
the shirt all soaked
with sage and starred by stray
dogwood snow. Confused
cricket wriggling near
an ear, a tender twig or three
caught up in wild mane, and I
smelling of grass, blackberry
winter and crisp spring breeze
strode off pondering
the answer
for which we have
no better questions.

What the Heart Cannot

Memory of sky over
the constant fog of illusory
loves no not even abandoned
junks, useless washers
or iridescent foam
in the lifeless trickle
swirled through secret
childhood sanctuaries,
these are the wastes
of time and excess
in paradise.

The heart can bear
loss with age
and grief, hear the wood
dove at morning, certainty
rises in a new spring
greening on a day
nature will choose,
with or without us.

What the heart cannot
bear is the maddening prick
of desire, sorrowful embrace
of our own yearnings forever
lost beyond the visible
horizon, far past our reach
or the present season.

Scripture

They found me
as I was leaning
against the uneven
bark of a sycamore
trying to satisfy
an itch
or maybe nothing
more than resting.

And they said,
Have you read
Scripture, do you know
Jesus Christ
as your personal
savior? They stood
as still as the sun,
naked in expectancy
as Adam and Eve,
the billowing green
hills rolling toward us
swaying and restless,
offering up the wild
jonquils in praise,
a vaulting ocean
blue sky heavy
with the scent
of dogwood
blossoms
and chimes
from a church
near to us,
remembering
the hour.

What I said was
nothing.

School | Substantial Revision

Odd things we teach
to little ones still,
before they learn
true words or leave
a footprint in sand.

Picture a beach, a bright day,
a mother carefully
drawing straight lines for a game,
tic-tac-toe maybe or maybe
just boundaries

for a castle yet to be.
She shows the child how
lines never really meet,
always a ridge of sand
between each and each

line going on invisibly
over the restless white crowns,
piercing blue sky, retreating
ranks of sullen fog alike

then pointing to the forever
we cannot reach, or dare not—
each a solo course
we cannot touch, or fear

what inviolate laws of nature
topple should those minute
sand walls fail—

Still at the end of day

the tide returns, clears
the board, deposits shellfish
remains for chalk of another day

while this lesson melts
into the sea foam
under the taunting gull cries.

School

Okay, this one is very rough because I literally just wrote it out. No editing from me yet. I thought you might like to sink your teeth into something. So have at it!

What odd things we teach
our little ones still
sooner than they form true
words or speak our names.

Take a beach, a sunny day,
a mother carefully drawing
the straight lines
for a game of tic tac toe.

Showing her toddler how lines
can never really meet,
always the ridge of sand
between each line

and each line runs straight
pointing to forever where
we cannot reach, or dare not
each a solo course where

we cannot touch, or fear
what inviolate laws of nature
topple should those minute
sand walls fail—

Still at the end of day
the tide comes along,
politely washes
the lesson away.

Idiom

Did you know when the words
escaped your lips they were not
words at all rather a breath
released, a tensing of the voice
box then a running start
like a child taking
a first dive off the board
but the water is just as cold
and the lie at the bottom
is as cold though being there
beneath the water
you can’t hear this heart
or see this sorrow, there is
only the illusion and it is hard
to tell which of us
is drowning.

The Languages We Speak

The languages we speak
first dark as soot and scraped
from a charred end
of stick or bone maybe
some Neolithic artist
talented with chisel
on stone words clean
as water rising
from spring
thoughts, clear
as a howl in winter
over fresh fallen snow

and the blossoming
moon face.

Mine is the language
of weeping willows
in an arid country,
words dry as ash
scattered in the desert.

The words we speak
came with one mind
from one mind
branching like twigs
in Spring
thoughts twisted
as Prometheus tree trunk
progeny broadcast on smoke
and wind, seeding the whole
earth teaching humans
to think in sound,
to char bone or stick maybe

slicing fresh made
rock faces.

I speak the language
of desert love unquenchable
thirst, yours is the long
cool language
of goodbye.

The way to the source
leads down
through ages of ice
ages of deluge and drought
to the Eden spring
where none of our kind
has been since the first
people sat by the talking
waters creating new
poems touching

souls capturing gods
with soot and chisel.