Tag Archives: 8

The Barrier Keeper

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LOVE

The Barrier Keeper

For you the music is a stillness. Only what is still
Can walk the two roads. Here is your list

Of things to pack: did you forget the water?
Forget comfort? Forget profit and loss which rub

Against each other behind a tree? There’s a fire
In the woods between the roads. Forgetting

How to run you run without pain. The words
In these lines are here as guests and if you do

Not forget them they will have failed
Like guests who stay too long.

Along one road I found Chuang Tzu’s skull.
I only remember because I wrote what it said:

The ukulele and violin have traded hands.
The nine ordinary openings are closed

And the owl guards the dead rat.
This daughter exists because of what you

Didn’t do. Tell her this: As you play
Your fingers change as things change

And you forget them, and there is music.

Smugglers

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Smugglers

Easy enough to call the contraband
Memory but is it? We didn’t mean

To find ourselves at the border
Of the moment with unexplained

Stuff in our bags. Mood altering
Substance. Clouds move away

Inexorable as a tango. The earth
Rolls us forward with everything

Every hour’s hand has held.

Summer Midnight

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cactus1

Summer Midnight

A man wakes in a hotel room
In an unfamiliar time zone. He has all his memory

and yet he carries nothing with him from that time.
Like the new summer from the spring he is all effect and no cause.

Outside in the dark he walks as if on the floor of a great sea.
But the ground plants have sucked all the water from the place

And have taken on a strange bristly beauty as if floating upwards.
Opening his mouth to say a name the word dries on his tongue.

One hundred and eleven degrees: three above auspicious.
Of the river his lover grew up alongside and the low-tide’s waves

Of the bay he knew as a child he hears nothing. But he hears
a message as when a great wave has washed over you

And floating in the foam you find a scrawled message
from the past forecasting that a wave is about to crash.

The hotel swallows the moon like a horizon.
One lizard on a row of stones.

Mid-day coffee, garden path northeast of Phoenix

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PHO sky in coffee

Mid-day coffee, garden path northeast of Phoenix

Sun is a small white speck on the liquid’s curving edge
Halfway down the paper cup. In the depths

The trees are turning, turning on the caramel sky
That has already consumed half the day.
.
Wakefulness branches out across the surface
Of consciousness.Inside the hotel, thousands

Of my colleagues are putting a lid on such thoughts
To walk quickly to the next meeting. I will leave

It all uncovered, walk more slowly than I need,
Carry the sky inside like an open notepad.

Full Moon and Firefly, early June

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JuneMoon2

Full Moon and Firefly, early June

in my backyard in an hour’s calm breath
a lifetime of moons can flash in and out

of memory too many to count how many
might we get meanwhile a found penny

rolls slowly copper color up
this one slow night’s dark spine

The Present

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The Present

Last day of May, first night of fireflies.
All the details of the day a blur and flicker.

Try to catch one and you’ll miss the all of it.
Look up and the leaves have turned black.

The sky pale as a wet cloth absorbs their dark.
The bat caroms off air with a voice we can’t hear

And at ground level the day stays a little longer
All that little lightning and no thunder.

Praying Mantis and Peony, Late May

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mantis1

Praying Mantis and Peony, Late May

After the peony scrolls have been read
And the leaves of the peonies are clustered

Armor, I stand for a while to hear what comes
After the words on the scrolls have washed away

After the rain on the cascading layered leaves
Stills I see one poised on one leaf then grasping

It fully stepping with little effort to its underside then
Another smaller within inches and more

On either side praying mantis and praying mantis
So rare in my childhood I saw only one and now

For the second year they are here roaming
These leaves among the scraps of longing

And the sturdy sky boats of green even
On the porch we have seen them last summer

One the size of my hand climbed
On my daughter’s head and would not come down

The cicada they say is so pure it can live on dew
But the praying mantis who catches the cicada

Is emblematic of courage and perseverance
Here at peace after the rain when everything

That can be read has been read and the mind
Is perfectly balanced on the leaves of days

We stand silently knowing something purer will come
We will have to grasp before it changes yet again

 

mantis2

Song Sung to The Mothers

1 Reply

flowermoon

Song Sung to The Mothers

You are the gate and the path leading away.
Not the nest but the many things

The nest was made from. Built of mud
And moonlight. Without you nothing

Can bond or find its way through darkness.
The mistakes of recognition were all ours:

That you are immortal and unchanging.
The nest by our feet on the path

Is the one we built of such dead twigs.
At night when I sleep it is to the song

My mother sang in the trees before
I was born as the moon pulled

My empty soul across the water