Ascetic

I tuck my pantlegs into my socks,

it being the height of tick season,

green and warm and humid,

and head for the woods.

That's where you'll find me,

reading old poets,

making a few notes,

clinging to the planet

as we ride through infinite night,

but I'd rather you don't.

Ebb and Flow

click to expand

 

Bring me again to the edge of the sea

miles past the end of the hard road

to stand at the tide line

in the cries of seabirds and wind,

the erasing, replentishing tide

sighing on the chest of the sun,

dreaming of the moon,

a deserted beach

where a man can cry and no one will see

if he remembers how to let go,

the sea helps with that,

the surf effervescent,

the swells' rise and fall,

the running collapse,

the merging of wave and sand

leveling mountain and sea,

tide of perpetual change,

and who can say

I will never hold you again

under the live oak tree ?

—with two lines by Octavio Paz

Blind Critic

 

I judge by your despair and anger

you have become an artist.

Tell me, what do you think

of your own work?

Not enough night, I answered.

In the night I can see my own soul.

That is also my vision, she said.

—from "A Setting Sun," by Louise Glück

After Uvalde

Dandelion mandala

Words and words and words

Things fall apart

The center cannot hold

Those who've ever lost a child

Awaken now again

Into a nightmare,

Sitting with their ghosts again

To stare into the flames,

Hoping to find their way again

to simple, ordinary things

that keep them sane.

—with lines from Yeats' "Second Coming"

Sit

    

Stillness at the center

of all things

A few quiet lines then

in the absence of engines

To lose yourself

in the currents and colors of living

Watching the air

stream through the leaves

Mind calm, heart open,

a placid being

In the noise and chaos

of a moneyed world

Lifted by the wind

in a moment's peace

Assigning a number

to the summers remaining

When you can face it

for it adds to the value of now

Sitting in stillness,

the center holds.

Almanac

 

    

The rain stopped,

and summer moved in.

The valley filled with mist,

and the ridges thinned blue.

Doves called in the dusk,

like children blowing in empty bottles.

I Iike the sleeping room cold,

the AC chanting Om in the window hole.

No one is coming.

Ego

Poets shoulder-to-shoulder on shelves

     are dusty company—

     bound gray skies

     stitched with rain,

     pain behind the spines,

     remaindered truth,

But nevermind.

Be kind, dear self-styled critic,

     read to me these lines aloud

     in your best basso profundo,

     set our bones abuzz, 

     catch your breath,

     have a heart,

And lie.

Five-Thousand-Year-Old Poem

 

Blooming in their drift

This poem written since writing began,

clouds blooming in their drift,

the pitches of bees, the function of grief.

A small, brown ant searches the page,

mad for pheromones—so like us, you say?

Yet I have grown weary of searching.

I wait, instead, for my time,

turning away from the end

to watch rain falling through oaks in the gray.

I wait with my words and my questions.

Did I love the right people,

stopping this moment to wonder

at the chatoyance of puddles on a dirt road.

Have I squandered my life?

—after Louise Glück's "Winter Recipes from the Collective"

Cuts

     

On the honed edge of morning

a poet slumps in his chair

in a clutter of lines

too pretty to use,

the phosphor-bronze sun

just clearing the trees

where shadows recede,

goldfinches dipping

through the anodized air.

The open blade gleams on its tray.

Writing is easy. You just open a vein.

—Nietzsche, Red Smith, Hemingway, Paul Gallico, et al.

Fallow

A hollow, broken apple tree

blooms in the scrub

where an orchard used to be.

A murmuring comes toward me

from those who died young,

forgiving me.

May rises through the bones.

—with a line by Rilke

Accelerant Spring

May apples and halbred-leafed violets

Now sunlight now small

hovering towers of gnats

newborn and backlit

yoyoing over the path

to awakening woods

where mandrakes unfurl

above yellow violets

blackbirds giving chase

across manure-spread fields

now sunset now absence

Now memory now hope

after all these years

I sent you an email

I wrote and rewrote 

for three dismal days

and clicked to the piping

of Hyla in twilight

with low expectation

now morning now raining

now vernal remorse.