“couple of possibilities”

(written on November 7, 2009, early in the morning)

She ran barefoot through cold wet leaves
weighing down winter stained grass in her front yard.
A morning rain fell in thin lines from windless clouds
not far above the reach of barely branching walnut trees
rooted along a damp blackened front road.
She had been watching from the window
where she’d sat a night gowned vigil waiting for him to appear.

As he told her he would, he returned finally from the city
by train then walked from the station to where she had made a place for herself.
Without an umbrella he was rain soaked when
he dropped his bag of clothes and embraced her at the end of the driveway.
The sweet words of their affection and longing were roundly muffled
in mouths covered with long breathless kisses.

Without speaking the words they knew were true–
his home was with her where she breathed and laughed–
they embraced the fertile truth of being a couple of possibilities
in the midst of a winter morning’s scape
of chilly barren land and gray sky.

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a waking mind aware of being here nor there

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the knowing nothing drumming, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of engorging, the nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating stream of being in and out of touching its accordian stops and starts. Attuning done by ear in darkness, not seeing measurement in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be being begun. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

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a time for wintering

(written December 12, 2008 at 6:00 pm)

The axe hangs by its cold handle on the wall.
Its steel blade honed to a sharp edge again.
Oak wood stacked autumns ago pops and crackles
aflame in the hearth we’ve made for keeping winter’s chill outside
in the suspenseful silent darkness that surrounds us.

We’ve made room enough to talk warmly about spring plans
and for singing smiling songs of summers past
when sleeveless sweats and sweet pleasures
were bared of flanneled and sober constraints.
We’ve gladly received the dispensation winter grants
for remembering why we live and love.

Enduring days of dimness, discomfort, and dormancy,
we’re keeping safe our kerneled hopes from winter’s discontents.
And when the light of day lengthens enough
for a season of new growth to begin propitiously,
we’ll sow these seeds, sacred to our resiliency,
trusting in the efficacy of their multiplying in summer
into an abundance we’ll gather in autumn.

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child likeness lost

(written on Sunday, August 24, 2008, in the early morning)
(not a poem, just a “nut”)

Once-upon-a-time-spiresome minds
now rubble a place
ground less for footing,
reck less for pathing,
end less for proceeding,
rest less for dreaming.

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transformation

(written on Thursday, February 14, 2008, at daybreak)

help another hunger
help another eat
help another feed

help another cry
help another belong
help another laugh

help another shout
help another speak
help another listen

help another doubt
help another relate
help another learn

help another see
help another watch
help another make

help another need
help another work
help another share

help another feel
help another love
help another sing

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seven times seven (a rhyme)

(written on Saturday, February 9, 2008, at 5:30 am)

Seven times seven
are not enough times
to get you to heaven
by writing what rhymes.

Sheets of burnt cookies
ev’n hell would decline
are baked by mere rookies
with trials few in time.

Stir up mind’s moist batter
grease sheets and drop lines
no promise will matter
if consumation’s mere mime.

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hysterical mimicry

(written on Thursday, February 7, 2008, at 6:45 am)

Nature bundles its selves
and nests the faces of self
like reflections echoed
between two affronting mirrors,
a long tail of pseudonymous figures
one inside another without exemption
in what they seem to us to be.
The same brooch
countlessly glinting the same sunbeam
daggered into the same lapel
always below the same buttonless hole
regularly flattened against
the lengthy expansion of
gray suit jackets
whose pocket flaps crease
at the very upturned corner
none out of character
with exactly the same fold
telescoping to a sightless oblivion
without end at infinity
beyond seeing
the trickle of blood beading
from a razor’s errant cut
in morning tug across
the stubble of hair
intending to curl in beard
if not denied lengthening time
at feverish temperature
stubbed from bursting out of recognition
in facing itself again and again
across a mirrored emptiness
engorged with flying radiation
unseen without reflection
returned timelessly from faces
under suns slanting beams of light
through innumerable windows
whose panes quadruple an infinity,
the would-be hairs bending back and tickling
the seeming hot skin
like arcs of energy on solar surfaces
cooled into relative wisps of dead particles
who’ve lost the hotness of
follicled roots beneath
their rising (but how?)–
a trick of wonderment
at energy dancing on
tireless centipede feet
kicking ahead and dragging behind
a rhythmic traveling
for which none knows
where reflections end
their hysterical mimicry
at an edge of nowhere’s sphere
nor what their origin means.

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silent soundings

(written on Tuesday, January 29, 2008, at 5:30 am)

He heard a piano playing the melody
without touching a key,
a voice singing the lyric
without sounding a syllable–

the music mounting in concert to make
a symphony of his imaginings
without the vacuity of a hall of mirrors
echoing the glamor of echoes.

Silent soundings of mind in solitude,
like yellow canaries once suffocating below in the dark
now breathing above on wings as a flock in the light,
play a music without intention,
of no use to anyone, not even to him.

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