This story could be true,

a thousand interpretations of light

gold and poison in my ambitious veins.

Coming down into that Montana,

that highway of broad masculine sky

was swift resuscitation.  It is with me now

in this boxy moment

the curving wall of obscuring breath.

Will my patience grow so free

as crabgrass, kudzu, wild white pines

on a full night of life?

I have always been lost

in the mountains,

even as they rescued me

laughing.

a dual winter

the yearning moon is
aching its way around
the other side of February earth.

in dawn's silver needles,
my gaze is enormous
my slightest movements appetitive...
my root fingers explore the old knots
of Rumi teaching.

making the whole winter a song,
we can pray it to the 
lake sky, joining all those living
in oppression
in our own faint way, real candles
in a long night of unknowing.

here on the edge, competent snow squeezes us still,
my relevance and Big Thoughts
eaten by the space between
sparrow's cluster of voice.

everything that last night's moon
wanted me to receive -
the dull silver light of which I'm tired,
the crazed squirrel leaping full and true on powdered limbs -
is infusing space with a vital breath.

joining it again, we upturn to
the memory of spring sun
and leaving our pine box
right in time.

Wild atlas of the cold sun,

trees pointing the shivering way

in the bare late morning

grasping with evil or good

all this art and ordinary life

become what they are

traceless... the old rafters

fill the kitchen with knots and nails.

a particular way out of this

All shades of people talk

'what is to be done?'

a starting point leans out a tenement window

on the ashen street,

young yet in these dark times she says

'the world is on fire'

somewhere, the sun shines

on an oil tanker bobbing the Pacific,

moonlight falls on a suit and tie

embezzling someone's million dollars.

a man from twenty years of innocent prison time

is suddenly turnkey free

without a whisper of sorry

from the crooked bars.

perhaps justice begins with loving ourselves

and not salting the wounded world

quite so much...

clear a space for contrition,

forgiveness echoes forgiveness.

graffiti our tight dead habits

with news of

Wanting to make good.

poetry ends and begins again -

redemption is without source or edge,

the space beyond what we can cage

with our Knowing.

that girl skinned her knees

listening to the world.

here are the gravel and flesh bits

for you.

In This Gift Trajectory

Wild for the safety of now,

I get a glimpse in the sage night

that if I got it all just right -

brick sidewalks of my childhood,

seeing each thought lovingly

cutting potatoes with full attention

in the chilly dawn -

I am still swaddled in the Endless

stream of things.

Everything ripening in its time,

each sweet or tart apple

drops

into the broad meadow,

full of seeds

full of sacred devotions,

bowing in the nonchalant free fall.

I walk through that field,

wild grasses and sky

slipping gently through my

rough hourglass hands.

cold comes in, always a surprise
when its vine is in your marrow
(you know)

it's as if the wind has permeated
like a feeling that photoshops the cosmos
into love, ambition, restlessness,
nothing rearranged but everything
touched and retouched
down to the space
between the subatomic whirlygigs...

my fingers, His fingers
touching the earth...
could have been a night like this,
upstate New York bearing deep witness
to the endemic pandemonium
of beauty, as expressed in modern dance of
shivers
rippling the hot mug enclosed
in these old two-step kind of bones

self-resolving threads

inkbrush drawing of night

hours before the moon busts

feathery down to earth,

ten million dreams

taking the shape of empty space

time to disappear,

flannel evening a rising tide

to dissolve the thin fortress

of today's Making Sense

lilting gently to sleep

everything rights itself

in the trade wind of Now

stone fireplace warms

an unperturbed cat

stretched, eyes closed to the flames