Category Archives: Uncategorized

Full

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march31moon

Full

It’s after cats but before owls.
The moon fills its pockets and hangs

Out behind the house next door.
Like the sky’s a comfortable side street

You can ride a skateboard or bike along
And find a new favorite skipping stone

You’ll hold onto until the next time
At the creek, which will be days from now

And you think of the curve of her shoulder
As she threw and the water was too

Respectful to swallow the stone, the
Three steps it took on the water and the click

Of it coming to rest on the other bank
And like that you’re rising, full of someone

Else’s light, up above the neighborhood
And the whole world can see you now,

Like the sun on her shoulder,
The whole world can see.

Tarot Basics for Late-Night Walks

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Tarot Basics for Late-Night Walks

All things being equal
I will take the eight of swords.

The lady in my dreams sits up the tree
A ways next to the star. The card

For the eight of swords has only four edges
But each is a double edged sword

So you should keep it in your pocket
When approaching trees in dreams.

Before Sleep and Work

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Before Sleep and Work



Tonight I will enter these lines in the shared diary of souls

Because I know I must add them before they disappear 

And I alone am responsible for their care.
It will be read by a few, the words all that is clear

But the meaning, while not obscured, different to each

As if we each see the same thing with our own eyeglasses, which focus things perfectly for that one or this one.
If there is a single meaning it will elude me as well

Though I am first to chase it down 

Like a boy chases his shadow.
Then I will be able finally to sleep

And when I wake like a child sitting up

In the surf as dreams cascade around me and fall back into a larger mass of presence,

I will open the double doors of the newspaper office
And say hello and walk up the old stairs wide enough for a car to drive up them

And type out the writing that will reach thousands

And be quickly read, thousands of words instantly forgotten 
Though it must leave a single shape of meaning, even if muddy,

Even if only for a short time, like a child’s castle by the surf
Still standing amid the roar of nearby waves

And the flutter of a newspaper pulled out of a sunbather’s hands by the wind

That will distract other beach goers,

Who will turn as if the shadow of someone familiar could be seen on the sand.

The Burnt Chapel

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The Burnt Chapel

The chapel of Ease was destroyed by fire
Left by a population fleeing the ruins of war

Along a stagecoach connection overhung
With spanish moss. Two brick walls hang

On like stagecraft from the sky. The foundation
Seems hardly to touch the ground, never had

A chance to dig roots into the sandy soil
Around the river whose local inhabitants

Called Big Bends. Two lead-crossed
Round windows, like cartoon eyes of the dead

Stare uncomprehending through spanish moss,
the wisps of song surviving on air alone.

The Yemassee started the American Revolution
Sixty one years too soon. They’d already left

One home and decided to stand and fight
For the second one against slavery and cruelty.

Sixty one years. People live and die
In that span and tribes disappear. The chapel of

Ease was rebuilt and destroyed and will
Not be rebuilt. The hanging moss, like so many

Lives, can be light as air but drape a haunting
Stillness on the trees even as a breeze flows through.

March 4th

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treeshadow

March 4th

Suddenly it’s spring. The trees say so.
They don’t confer with the cold

Morning or mountain gusts. They don’t
Ask if we’re ready. The maple says, mind this–

And flecks with red punctuations like starting
A sentence backward, all the year’s statements

With their periods, leaving language to unfurl at its
Own, slower, pace. The trunk’s shadow runs down the slope

Like a creek then rivulets of branches reach across
The road towards your porch like it has

Something to tell you, only you. But come closer:
You must get up and step into the road

To see what it means, trickling black
At your feet. And definition depends

On surfaces for the depths to survive:
Too late you see how at its outermost edge

the message in twig shapes
Crumbles across the texture of street

Pebbles, first like a word breaking into syllables,
Then slight sounds of insistence or regret,

Then a breath then the thought somebody
Was about to speak but you turned to see no one,

Then your own breath, held, while you are
Listening for its shadow

Lyrics heard in a dream

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Lyrics heard in a dream

Out of the earth
Up through the dawn
Into the sky
It won’t take long

*

Over the trees on the trestled
sky we traveled

The roar of time’s grooved
Wheels fitting against the tracks

Of consciousness the brakes
Of waking squealing into song

*
I like holding an old penny
Something seemingly worthless

Older than me, yet still here.
It is like holding something

From the future
Another place I haven’t been

And from which many worthless
Things will also survive me

*
Waking to a song that does not exist
And forgetting it then humming

It in the shower and from there
The lyrics came back and I told

My wife and then forgot them
But my oldest daughter who’d

Overheard remembered them
When I remembered later

That I’d forgotten something
So now it is a song

Last Days

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Last Days

Told me to wait another two nights.
and the truth would rise like ice cubes

In a celebratory drink. Without taste
But accentuating the taste that’s there

Already, then adding volume to it
While weakening the taste but by then

It’s not the taste you’re after is it and where
Has it got to finally, absorbed, invisible?

The moon looks full but it’s not. Not that
It matters but it does. Like other things

That never happened but did anyway
And because they never happened never end

Dusk and Beyond

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Dusk and Beyond

 

The dusk sky is a gameboard of bats,
everyone’s lost apologies for what

They knew they did wrong but could not find
The words to admit. Homeless things.

The poet’s night shift has me emotional–
The moon’s pendulum scythe swings

Below the tree line and I wake up astonished
To be alive. The poem holds a word

To my throat and the word is your missing
touch. In the world are some animals whose feet

Never touch the ground. Birds who only
Land on the uncertainty of open water.

Just as in you there are poems
that may never land on the tree of language

But whose wingbeats keep you awake,
Whose migration over open space

Turns everyone’s heads though they hear
Only your voice on a quiet morning.

From the tribe of Asher

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luke

From the tribe of Asher

The necessary second witness. Pointing finger of a lost tribe
Finding its place again. Behold the blessed castaway.

Even her age meant a completion and a return.
How can we trust anything when every thing

Means something? Is every father the face of god
Until the glimpse of the infant visage, God the beginning?

Seven dozen years waiting against the stone of the dead.
Father stone, husband stone. Waiting as the days dry up

To make the math work wonders. What else did she see
In the intervening hours but a name in another tongue

the same backwards as forwards? I would believe you
Against all the world believes. I cast a pebble at the well

And the hand that caught it before it fell

Leaf

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LASTLEAF

Leaf

Idea of autumn’s end appending, calling a leaf
Bad for hanging on, for adding to loss its

Very material structure, surface-veined and colorful.
A sensual wave turned brittle, age as implement of end, extended–

That’s not bad. To signal with a last incommunicable strength.
No. Bad would be not waiting to watch it linger, then fall.