To the Cloud
No wonder at dusk I find you sleeping in the hollows
in the crook of the mountain’s arm: you had so much
to carry, so much to let go: yet you are unchanged
To the Cloud
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Tag Archives: haiku
The Roots
The Roots
Under your house, in the middle of the night
the roots are spreading across your foundation.
The roots are not a solid base for the visible,
they have never claimed to be that, they have
never even spoken to you. What roots do
is reach out for available space, where roots reach
Is a place you cannot see but which you feel
pulled towards but you are not being pulled,
you are reaching further and further. Up above
your head in the unseen inside you are also reaching.
In the middle of the day the sky’s foundation
is laid again and you are reaching across it
without knowing because you are distracted
by an oak tree’s afterthought ankling out of the earth
And back in where the world is constantly displaced
by the unseen middle, unstraight path.
Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April
Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April
Incense rises up the wall
in front of my mother’s painting
A village clings to a cliff a thousand
white rooms open to the sun
No separation of inside or outside
to me this painting is a memory
Of her, about memory about how something
no longer exists but still exists
Like smoke from an incense stick
it is entirely spent lighter than air
More solid than the air we breathe
my mother painted it from a photograph
To learn perspective
After a Late Afternoon Run in Thornrose Cemetery on the Last Day of March
After a Late Afternoon Run in Thornrose Cemetery on the Last Day of March
I lie on my back on the eastern slope.
The clouds are close. Moving as if on an escalator.
When I get up, ten thousand blades of grass
do the same, rising slowly, bent in the middle
But straightening, unburdened.
The Other Ones
The Other Ones
When the ground is soft enough for the spirit to stretch
beyond the numbers of endings and the numbers of beginnings
And the numbers stiff in stone grow warm in the spring sun
the cemetery down the hill fills with people walking.
I can tell the ones who aren’t ghosts because they notice my children
playing on the one patch of stoneless level grass just inside the gates.
The other ones are distracted by an old song in their ears.
The other ones, the ones carrying a large number in their arms
that is always one number larger than the last number they had
when the number was invisible and weightless and fit in a back pocket.
Some numbers are meant to catch, it is why they are shaped like lures.
Zero doesn’t catch, zero falls out of your pocket and you never miss it
And when you see it fall out of the laundry with the dryer sheet
you don’t worry that it’s ruined the rest of the clothes. A young
couple walk past us, hop over a stone wall on the way
to photograph tombstones. We see them come back, leaving
a trail of decimal points like breadcrumbs. When you’re a ghost
that stops you in your tracks, and you pick one up like a penny
and then spend the rest of your life trying to decide if the point
goes to the left or the right of your number.
Spring Wind
Spring Wind
Old pine tree seems the only one
excited by the first warm wind
Empty-handed, the others barely nod
at his hundred foot tall child’s soul
Who remembers the world with no flowers
no leaves no bees who knows
What was and knows what’s coming
Lament Over Nothing
Lament Over Nothing
Somewhere between the tired moon’s glow and my unfocused eyes
I keep seeing winter—snow heaps when it’s just a white van
Across the street; accumulation on the metal roof next door
instead of the bored shine of a lazy evening rain. Tomorrow
It’s spring, I know, and the rain outside should sound less
like ice and more like the first words of flowers and grass.
Wife! every night you cradle your guitar for an hour and put the spirits
in harmony. Come over here and pick me up! And put me back in tune.
The Other Side
The Other Side
I got close enough to the image
to see the street lamp and tree
And graveyard beyond it
Tonight, with Nothing
Tonight, with Nothing
Tonight, with nothing to say, with all the absent things
crowding around me like a teapot with a parade
of friendly continental guards and crows encircles
tea from China, with all present concerns poured
into an empty cup and spilled for good luck
before drinking, with a mild wind from the south
whispering threats in another language to the last
of the hard-packed plowed snow on the streets,
I remind myself of nothing, and the long envelopment,
and the cup filling with jasmine and spring, and earth.
#fullmoonsocial // Icicle and Full Moon
icicle and full moon
one grows from its attachment
one shines in the divide
Translations from the English 