The Tree

I come to you as one with no names,
a breathing statue riveted to overwhelming suns;
naked, with no explanation,
my golden clothes glowing beneath me
in a tapestry of dead and living,
a tangible illumination
of the person impenetrable
who colors all that withers
with the power of chrysanthemums.

When you touch me, I am twinned in twilight
as time, reflected by a time
inside ever out.

I come to you
as the living lustre
of your future.



Off the Cuff Poem

It is not that I am otherwise interested
in anything other than the scent of mown clover
and milkweed seed blown along the stream.
I am not interested in the dead telephones
nor the bad dreams that you had that make you jealous
of my former lovers. I hate you
for invading my private life with your jealousy.
I hate anyone coming into my disastrous home
that feels just right to me. I don't want you here.
This is mine. It is not, and never will be, about you.
You adore me for that, and I don't care.

I love it that we saved some of the redbud tree
after the brutal winter. I love it that the magnolia survived.
I love you even when I hate you. Very little is important.

I find myself not at all easy.
Some people want me to argue myself into their affections,
and I won't. I will tell them that I am not interested.
I may also tell them that I don't like them,
but that I am open to reconsidering that in the unlikely event
they ever give me a reason to reconsider. But I am not holding my breath.
It happens, more by my grace than anything else,
but that is rare enough.

I think that people who think that talking about a raw and awful reality
is somehow unseemly lack heart. I don't lack heart. And when
it comes to pass, season after season of acorns,
that there is to you me to talk to, don't be surprised
if i say that you truly will never know
me
and I don't really want you to
because I would rather leave me to myself
who better knows, loves, and just lets go like
that milkweed seed blown along this stream.

Or the owl at twilight that graced me by just being there
in the nonevent that was unforgettable.

July 28, 2010


Daughter on the Mountaintop

and now the rain.
The dense gray gathers up,
weighing like stones of winter;
snows, already a burden,
rise up like barricades of a prison of ice and water.
So cold.

Betrayal comes slowly,
a gradual awakening
to a lost dawn and raw wind
that stings, then numbs,
The drifts circle and enclose
in a blanket lie
frosted.

Perpetual circling
of stranded rooks
lend witness
from the thermals.
Wasted landscapes,
words, time,
frozen.

Glad enough for solitude
and the hope of silence.
Snow like sanded salt,
rain like livid blood
surround it.
In the midst,
No thaw.

Comes the rumbling
of avalanche, like the thunder.
Echoes follow the warnings.
No waiting for a warming.
The streams swell
and escape is fading.
White.


February 23, 2003

Middle Sea, wind, Sun

I settle into the shadows under the eaves
and there, with the rain, make my song.
Sand powder clings to my feet like dust to leaves
and remembrance begins of the sea, and of what floated there.

You are between my shoulders, drifting
with your eyes closed, your fingers sifting
through the waves of my solitude reading
each bubble and current like braile, meeting
all foam with a calm, silent touch.
Ashes of palm leaves, spinters from a crutch,
oil and glass and a thousand crustaceans' remains
dusty, brittle, slick and sharp tumbling in silk refrains.
In motion, I am space sliding still below
while you press and brush the messages you know
are wrapped in tortured delicate unconsciousness;
knit with threads of awkward tenderness;
You are wood, I am water
and we together
are sea and ship:
liquid, like living,
knotted like lovers
in melody of many calls ~ some, wind-ravaged
and some laced with unintended salt.
Vulcan, the coral light is only a lamp
that gives me shadow since the sun has gone.
I turn alone to the endless thoughts
and raindrops on the window while you anchor between
the blades of two piers ~ duty and devotion.
Writing through the hour of tears, you remember
how i am always singing to myself,
but the ocean beneath your pen is the ink shadow of my hull,
a reflection, and image, an echo of my voice, my song
through darkness to the unseen sun.

December 26. 1976



Siegfried

Peeling back layers of time
like the Empress her lotus gowns,
millions of sidereal leaves blown in a flare,
my skin sees and seizes you, now, here,
as in a balm of a thousand flowers,
sunk in crimes and charities,
awash in the sweat of impossibilities vanquished.
Be. Just be.

The bitter light, the waking sleep, the faint knell
coming from the House of God,
the horror, the voice of the oboe,
the bent and ochre sound-shrouded shrines,
all that rings on the wind and brings earth to Earth,
searching past the past to that silence
that to silence rhymes,
it is the unseen, hearing the unheard, knowing the now nothing
that is as well
our world without end.

January 29, 2013