tender moment from a Japanese master

A world without

the scattering of blossoms,

without the clouding

over of the moon, would deprive

me of my melancholy. 

- Saigyo

I like this poem for reminding me that my whole journey is nourishing.  It's not even that I find myself in a melancholy mood right now.  For me the power comes from the simple reminder that every passing cloud and shadow in my heart, as well as all the sunshine of joy, is a precious gift given to me.  It's the only life I have.  

child river summer

claims you in that sweet breeze...

the maples, not uprooted a sacred inch, are

        carrying you home.

those crowded thoughts

are rendered                  nowhere

in the wholeness of

a warm cradle solstice.

all these collected efforts are similarly empty

to the shadow tangibles

of ducks on the sky,

rocketing downstream

as a creatively simple braid

of eloquence.

our life is laughter and forgetting

        into the pickling tears of wiz-dumb,

speechlessly recalcitrant.

tonight left me Nothing

as the broadest gift conceivable

in the rhapsody of moon    

on rust

on shivering

  bright

   water.

drop spindle of june morning

it is not exactly joy

that brings me

softly through the barefoot pines

of a June dawn

it is perhaps the dew,

the awe of feathery grass clumps

under my rough arches,

the harsh press of 

acorn caps loving my whole journey

the sweet stolen moment

of solitude,

the vain attempt

to do the nothing work

of dissolving...

just an arc of breath

by the sycamore,

the slender black bird, hopping

on a dead branch

among the ribald orchestra of summer green.

rediscovered porch truths

speckled May mountain

said a prayer for all that is gone,

bowed carelessly with devotion

to what is.

a small listing hut gives shape

to the whole valley - you are a hermit everywhere.

sleeping on straw,

you midwife all the wild roses

and swinging arcs of cardinals,

razor red in the smudged green canvas of trees.

your hands and thoughts are so clear,

they must be integral

to this dream fabric.

look! a sleepy vice sits with rusty bolts,

perfectly still on a leaning table

between the lanky pines.

an old brass lamp hangs

in soft morning mist, glowing

on the stream's surface.

a bough tugs at my shoulder -

leaning, I gaze in the swirls.

On a Bridge Before Dawn, Recollecting Last Night's Rain

you friends friends friends
hurled sweetly
three hundred thousand deep
jewels bursting on the drive home pavement
in the high beams
wrapping the backroad car
in poetry demands

stepping in from the broad
sheet of blank canvas deluge,
did we join 
ordinarily
in dishwashing the slender volume
of preparing for sleep?

the roof sounds of steady gale
call all over this skin
and ease into dreams
(steady Cadillacs on
easy broken highways
filled with vacancy)

the lathe of sleepwake, sleepwake...
an old hand is working on
this body with a tested gouge,
the soul pickles in an oak barrel
with loose slats,
weeping into the gaps,
breathing the joy air of
a roughed-out container

this palette consciousness
of Wow
Flowering Gratitude
Fall On My Knees Simplicity,
all the Bestest things
to pallbear our dancing days
across the river dark
at appointed-by-no-one time

my old friends with Big Sky beards
coarse wilderness rivers
women with strong joy and laments,
hop on a prayer-bead string
and meander on down
the backroads,
lead me
with sweet songs
of a place n' time

a smooth cobalt bottle
eased through the rapids
and quietly turns
in the stillwater and last
moonlight

I pick up its emptiness
and turn it out
on the sand banks -
the gentle heft
of its thousand lifetimes
ripening towards
this ordinary today.

tanka of turning seasons

Taking wild refuge,

the sun has cut off torpor...

cold water sparkles.

Endless as sweet blue rivers,

spring sweeps road dust in soft curls.

from out of here

heartbeat larger than time

like a tall pine

splitting the sky darkly

things reconciling themselves

as old friends

jagged strokes simply enhance

the soft space of a silk canvas

across the roiling stream

stepping stones vanish gently

into the cool shadows

winterlong

a few barefoot steps

breaking into old ice crust -

sparrow laughs on down.

feeble winter in these sounds...

hard river cracks for young oaks.

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

words sound like this - snow

drowning green needles, wood drifts

spelling broad kindness

Held and Belonging

river of wind, wide throttle in the big
big night embrace.  dreamt of feet slapping
slapping the pan earth, of belonging
belonging anywhere in that way of helpless
wounded healer.  cultivate such
such an approach, injured by dint
dint of walking a time, a peace
on this great earth, this pan earth
clods broken by my plow-effort-living
living separate for a while, such a 
fuss of dreaming it right from wrong

maestro trying to vanish in plain sight
sight of the blind thread of my journey,
tell me is the atom's song 
song really love?

stuttering on these thin ideas
ideas are big two-hand stones
smooth for making a ring of held fire
fire where I'm always belonging
warm belly and cold back to the
big night embrace.  fireflies or winter stars
stars respond to the plain, the
apparently usual small things
where we belong.

the perfect vanilla bean of nights

dark crusted yard
on a lumbering heart
with a broad hug of wind
and icicle dart

windchimes from nowhere,
a cast iron stove,
warm air is sweeter
in the orange empty glow.

both sides of my skin
are a savory mystery,
the tides of my grin
are shifting with certainty

multitude dreams
and empty word wells
leave a bit too much space
for those who would tell

a descendent of visions
a reader of leaves
i can't find my ground
nor want to bereave

profoundly okay
and dancing with friends
we cut to the core
as the beginning, it ends

on good days
I'm a carpenter by smell...
pine sawdust through and through
in my socks and mostly empty pockets

i sniff out a table top
in a delightfully split slab of black birch
rippled and laughing its way into another incarnation

light icy snow
smells like nothing,
like the sound of the creek below
as I smooth planks
alone in the low hemlock woods

I can't say if I'm a craftsman or not
this is what I do because I enjoy it
because I'm afraid to leap elsewhere
because of ends that sometimes meet
because of the smell of winter
on the sunset drive home
John Denver riding a dusty shotgun
in my old
truck