Not Responsible for Goods Left Over 60 Days

 

I'm sitting in the middle of the field,

dunned and flattened by winter just past,

in a rotting wicker chair with my head thrown back,

watching clouds and listening to crows,

feeling less alone in our cosmic aloneness

for the company of the afternoon — I needed this.

This morning I took my diamond to the pawn shop.

As the jeweler squinted on his eyepiece

I lifted the lid, and it knocked me back,

the flash in the stone, and I remembered

starlight in the cut, starlight in her eyes —

nothing settled, nothing forgotten, nothing gained.

Damn necessity, for showing me

I had failed to change, leaning on the heavy

beveled glass with all those future

promises illuminated under my elbows,

and woe for the silence of what's dead,

not silent in my head, not silent in my head.

And His Tigress

It's just

          you and me now

Apart from all the others

Who think this is wrong

          think I was right

When I say

          that I

                    am not in love. 

So go ahead

          brush your hair

                    tangled

In sunlight

          that

Filters through the screen

Sears the skin

                     head thrown back.

Who was the one

                    exposed?

          You, or

                    me?

It's madness,

                    and we are

          addicted to it.

—Raw, from a time capsule

Habitant

First day of spring, 2024

I climb the hill

on this cold, explosive day

to know what world I inhabit.

Crows cavort on gusts,

and the sounds of their calls 

soak into my spirit.

I left the house to escape the present,

but I've found it, instead, on this hill.

The world I inhabit is sky.

Inner Woods

 

Feral daffodils bloom

and now between the trees

a temple appears.

—adaption of an 18th C. haiku by Buson

False Spring

Drifting in sunlight, Please enlarge with a click.

We drifted awhile

on the surface tension,

tapped into the essence

as the earth warmed

and our minds unfurled.

We had what we wanted awhile,

then lost it without knowing,

the way sunlight rises on the wall

as the room fills with shadow.

—after Saadi Youssef's Exhaustion as translated

from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

Touch in the Slower Hours

Eightieth Spring

Old woman, be not ashamed,

We'll leave the lights down low,

For also am I old.

Yet, are our minds not beautiful,

As love can be,

In our closing seasons?

What years we spent

Discovering gratitude,

Kindness and grace,

Let them not be wasted.

See the child in me,

As I see the child in you.

Touring the Ruins

NYT photo

Out of order, arrhythmic,

the center unspooling,

we stood on the sidewalk

with little to say,

the woman I married

no longer my wife, 

twenty years signed away,

unable to awaken,

unmoored and numb,

and never the same,

our children, our children... 

How much can a man leave behind?

Ancient History

A cold wind came between us.

Around a wind-whipped fire we passed the bottle,

antelope leaping in the theaters of sunset.

A wedge of geese dropped out of a cloud

like the thin edge of winter over the plains,

and a cold wind came between us.

Snow fell through the steam of geysers,

flakes floating on her honey-colored hair —

this was the snow that would smother 

the Yellowstone flames

as she lay in her bed with her children,

and I lay in mine alone, far from home,

reaching out for her hand in the West's tall dark.

How much can a man leave behind?

These days I awake in the tree-scattered light

of a spent life, the house empty and quiet,

rising from calm to fear and back again.

All you I have loved are alive in the dawn,

I remember it all, sometimes as a nightmare,

sometimes as a song. You'd think by now

I'd have the notes down.