Tag Archives: The Drift

Two Consecutive Nights

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Two Consecutive Nights

[fog and ice]

Morning settled on the mountain and decided to stay.
When I passed through it earlier the peak stiffened
the moisture on my windshield into a new vision
neither reflective nor transparent. Now it is still
there! at nineteen hundred feet near sunset
morning is napping, the trees and shrubs and rocks
strangled in its white sheet. This ice-capped time
capsule; the past and future locked in a single seed.

[windy night]

Just last night the world was a bead
of dew caught in winter’s blink:
Now everything is moving. All things
fixed will flap, bend or break
and, even gently pulled free
by its invisible roots and spinning
westward must join a thousand
voices mourning the passing moment

Pondering the New Moon

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Pondering the New Moon

It is not as the full moon shines on us both
that I am missing the walks we took at the edge of dog stars
it’s with each full moon I am aware that you go on
and what the moon looks down upon is what I am missing

On Saying Goodbye

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On Saying Goodbye

 

Trying to catch up with the hills rolling
beneath my feet I’m lost to your light

then at the mountain’s top you are waiting for me
unmoved by the ruckus and dust below

in this valley I’ll hear a bird, catch my breath
then keep running west til the Star River

laps at my feet–who would not climb mountain
after mountain to keep saying goodbye to you?

Years Ago, At This Very Spot

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Years Ago, At This Very Spot

 

I sit at the bottom of a shallow sea.
Above the surface, the old mountains are all wavy,
leaning down. They are stooped and as patient
as the deserts of wizened lizards they will become.
The new one, the one I will drive over to work
the one on which I will see the maple’s early change
the one on which I will see the brown bear’s lazy gaze
the one on which I will stand  with my aging father
has still not taken its first tectonic steps.
It’s not even the apple in extruding lava’s eye,
yet by the time I am old enough
to put on these eyeglasses
it will already be ten-times diminished
from its highest peak.  I miss this part as

A big thing blocks out the yellow white sun above me
and swallows an ancestor or two.
When it is gone only the Star River shows the flow.

Happiness

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Happiness

 

I know these  petals unless pressed
in your own life’s book will not survive
and even then as a shadow of love’s shape
or unless adrift in your river’s endless flow
come to outline any eddy worth circling
and even then could gutter off a bank or
regret’s cold stone where air
tears at life’s evaporating edge
or unless emblazoned with wing
of robes softly opening to heat and
even then burn only as a blindfolded
assurance of need, need:
or unless left alone a becoming
drifts around it, swirls it down just so
like snow a mile up lands finely
at the foot of the sky

Small Song for Time Passing

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Small Song for Time Passing

 

Even below freezing, the slight snow
melts under sun to show hard ground

But behind the tree trunk’s bulk it stays
whitish, slow-blurring across the day’s drift

Outside In

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Outside In

 

The garden is in the recluse, not the other way around.
You rivers and mountains pale against the heights and gorges

She must climb. I am the hand in her mind where thought gets tough.
I am the step suddenly appearing. In the calm harvest fields I know

I have often been missing, off on the mountain’s other side.
But in the slow running river my boat is not far away,

she’ll call a breeze to fetch me faster than words paddle. Here in her
garden, I’ll meet the better me, nodding as I pass on my way to her.

Drinking Wine with Li Po

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Drinking Wine with Li Po

 

The bottle-less nights dead-man’s-float on the drifting water
the moon’s cup fills with early January
until it is sideways with days but nothing spills out
these brown maple leaves hanging on by mistake
like old hands brush against me
I know them but they do not recognize me
but still they reach out: old moon keep your drink
I do not wish to embrace you