Some questions on opposing roads have the same answer:

How important would today be if you went on forever? How

important would today be if this is all there is?

We’re all beings from elsewhere stitched into life, moving in

and out of view as the needle draws the thread above or behind

the fabric.

I’ve been crowned king of the bone yard, endlessly worrying

the same four ghosts—your fault, why me, if only you had, if

only I had. They chase each other like dust devils on a dry field

in August. When my attention makes them solid, dawn dies in

my hands and the rest of the day follows it to the grave.

What sends thought to pioneer places on a wandering journey

where sudden insight may erase the map?

She had a flypaper personality, all glue and tell me but no

wax for my wings and no sense of where she stopped and I

began.

I am your almost nothing, fulfilled every where at once. A

laughing man may yet become a dancing bear.

It’s harder above the clouds where the sun knows its full

power and lays light full about.

Carpals and tarsels and their meta brethren worship different

faces of God. Tribes of reachers and supporters, each about

a different business, compose yet another duet within creation.

I am the warp…

the weft…

the shuttle.

I move in circles…

in cycles…

in patterns.

I am color…

texture…

vision without end,

No less the loom

than the weaver’s hands.

Our penchant for shoes, sandals and sneakers leaves our

soles longing for the ground. Picture trying to smell perfume

through glass or caressing the one you love while wearing gloves.

In this proprioceptive vacuum our feet grow soft and uneducated

and we lose true partnership with the Earth.

Wilderness, fierce and full, visited me yesterday. A hawk,

fully a foot tall, flashed onto the limb outside my window. I was

captured as surely as a mouse in its talons by its echoes in me, by

the wind-over-wings feeling of soft flight, the parting air in a

dive towards prey, the fullness of hunger in winter.

Nobody lives a ruler-drawn life, straight-lined from beginning

to end. In truth, our paths waver like the scribblings of a

child, rambling over the page, stopping and starting as the pencil

leaves the surface entirely and descends to it again.

I will miss my toes when I die. They make so much else

possible, especially balance amid the storms of life. How will I

find purchase in other realms without them?

Such a slow learner! Perhaps 10% of what I’m taught takes

root, and perhaps 10% of that bears flowers and fruit. Even so,

after six decades, my garden is full.

The future knits my present into garments I’ll don when I

awake tomorrow or next month. Don’t bother me with details.

It’s all I can do to laugh or cry as the present unravels me for the

stitches yet to come.

Five-year plans offer false hope, filling time, never space,

ever hungry, never full.

A string’s catenary in gravity is simple compared to a person’s.

What shape does a life take suspended between the poles

of birth and death amid the pull of genes, family, culture and the

freeform dance of chance? Our early shape sets the support

from which the roadbed of our lives is hung. It guides our

choices—who gets a smile or a scowl, do we splurge or save,

where we hold or freely give. Those who gain in wisdom can

slip the bonds of imposition and align with their true field,

bridging greater distances and bearing greater loads. Winds

blow through them and, though they sway, their integrity is

never in doubt.

• • •

Will you open the door for the fierce ones brimming with

compassion and let them see the majesty of their place through

your eyes? So few stand aside. Fewer still grow into the gifts

they bestow.

Laughing sand-in-the-mouth,

sand-in-bathing-suit laughs,

they ask the next wave for another tumble.

Such joy between buoyancy and bottoming.

They say:

Take me.

Toss me.

Teach me what spume knows.

Help me thrive as a plaything of forces

so much larger than I.

Like crankcase women in whiskey bars, I’ve known the hard

and known the soft and still believe in Jesus. I’ve walked the

night in silk and steel and still believe in mercy.

Would you find a continent in a bath tub or a horse in your

desk? Keep looking. You never can tell. But there are better

ways to spend your time.

Behold black and the excess potential of its days.

Compassion your world with bricks and flowers.

My bridge ends in mid span, reaching for the far shore. I

didn’t sign up for this, this calling into the dark, arms outstretched

towards the other side, hoping someone will build

their bridge toward mine.

Want ad: Tough old bird with tender plumage seeks fair-haired

fortune finder. Object: creation.

I awoke early and walked naked into the predawn, clasping

a cup of tea to my belly for warmth. Quiet set itself in me and

I swore to carry it on. But the sun’s first rays also lifted my fears

and pain above the horizon. I’d forgotten that light’s secret is

the darkness it also bears.

Squatters in the house of wholeness are soon evicted.

Poetry dances down the aisle at its own wedding and marries

me for a while.

If I’ve learned anything it’s to walk in softer circles and let

my heart speak louder than my words.

May I be the last against which God shapes shoes for the

foot-sore and the weary.

No matter how you practice disaster, difficulty will enter in

ways different than you had imagined.

He collapsed in a Paris Metro station the day after

Christmas 2003. Dozens of strangers looked on as other

strangers stripped him to his underwear and tried to start his

heart. He said to me in death, “It’s so simple. Just a step

beyond. I’ll see you soon.”

The angel of return deeds you land to build altars of possibility

and becoming.

I am the clapper and the bell, the hand that draws them

together, and the tone that seeks awaiting ears.

He took charge of the silence, stretching it until the sun

shone through.

Know yourself as perfect plates of snow falling through the

years, softening the shape of sharp things. You glisten as crystal

mirrors beneath the sun and moon, embodied and reflecting.

She sits and sorts,

careful of the seeds before her,

sensing where the life in each leads

and which calls to fullness.

He waits, knowing those she selects

will bear full harvest,

repaying his effort

in sowing, tending, reaping

many times over.

It’s been years since that porcelain toilet sat amid the trees

by the road past the town dump. We’d joke about finally knowing

where bears go to shit in the woods, and squirrels and raccoons

too for that matter. Images of hairy rumps balanced on

the edge of that bowl brought smiles each time we passed it. I

still look for it in the leaf litter, that shiny, white, incongruous

object, and with it the presence of my six- and eight-year-old

daughters who delighted in it and delighted me.

There’s no end to conversation in a world where a thing is

itself yet touches all else.

When rightness catches your eye and bids you follow, pack

your bag and take leave of your senses.

I value some words more than others. So much for wisdom.

Take chatter. I’ve prided myself in rejecting surface words,

lightly uttered, as so much foam dispersed by the barest breeze

or as hanging in space like bridges to nowhere. Better the

silence that holds all things, I tell myself, and the words beneath

words.

Yet many find social conversation like honeyed tea, sweetening

the way to more profound tastes. They see shallow and

deep as each other’s preface and postscript, each bearing fruit in

the soil of connection.

The time has come to reckon with my unease with myself

and allow harmony with others no matter what is said by fol-

lowing my curiosity’s fascination with each utterance.

Turn a corner

on your love of life.

Invite kittens to play

where spite had camped for years.

Wear surprise

like a flea-market shirt.

Let shadows vanquish habit

and soften your belly.

Take no for an answer

and make it sufficient for love.

Become simple

so you grow full at empty tables.

Let’s name you as you are: a finite being with infinity at your

beck and call. Simply close your eyes to see how your mind goes

on forever, how the smallest of the small and the broadest of

reaches leap in to view. Truly you are a vastness that wakes to the

morning and the eternal that walks at night.

Rain is a flowing, wet thing that touches and moves on. It

should not go solid. Yet here it is glazing the world, surfacing

the wonder of reflection and the freshness of taken-for-granted

shapes. Walking is chancy until I give into the lack of purchase

and live a glide-step-glide existence. There is such pleasure

in a world gone strange.

Choose your paths on the slopes of being with care. Those

well trod and paved keep you flaccid and empty. Those ending

at impossible cliffs and unfordable rivers leave you impotent

and forced to backtrack.

I love the stream and the dipper and the full canteens I

strap to my body. Why can’t I remember to share what I carry

even as I slake my thirst?

Solid air and concrete water await mere speed to prove their

case.

Two people, butt to butt, alternately bowing. “You wash, I’ll

We hold the pry bar of history in our hands. But when to lift

and when to let be?

Give grass a warm winter day and up it comes. It doesn’t

scan a calendar and say, “Hey, it’s January. Let’s sleep.” Instead,

it’s more like, “Toasty. Go for it.” It simply spends itself on the

chance that today’s 60ºF will be tomorrow’s 60ºF.

Surprise upon surprise in great bouts of wonder lift me and

tumble me as would surf rolling landward from distant winds.

Upended and bearing gone, I am another form the sea can

shape. A quick touch of bottom, a flash of sky. Who I am in

contact with the sand is not who I am in the light. I am

renewed by each if I give over to the laws of breaking water, the

pull of the moment, and my yearning to be just as I am.

We are a forcing race, setting our will upon the world. But

here’s the rub, push a system and it pushes back. Change within

complexity tugs on all manner of things so outcomes grow

uncertain and instability rules the day. Each meddle or tweak

sets off shifts that have us dance to tunes not of our making no

matter how we fancy ourselves the master.

What if the faces we trace in the clouds are real? What if all

opinions are true, no matter how far fetched? What if all

minds, stable or unstable, are divine and occupy a rightful place

in the universe?

Raechel returns from 12 days in Italy: The loofah is back in

the shower, and I am two in one again.

Poems are flakes of gold separated from common gravel at

the bottom of a rocker box after all the sluicing is done.

Will you be your own tourniquet and stop the bleeding?

I listen for my true voice and find it everywhere.

I grow slow and empty headed. Brilliance flees. It is a time

to hold confusion precious.

Incarnating angels sing broken hallelujahs. Their imperfect

praise of creation lights the night sky and their basic wholeness

shines through their conflicts, fractures and failures.

Gratitude is sewn into the garment of reality as a continuous

thread that says, “Everything opens to God and is worthy of

praise.”

A peach is a pit’s ticket home.

Given the right sweetness, it will be

desired,

taken,

devoured,

discarded.

And, should fortune smile,

it will find soil

moist and friable

for the next ride round.

The best poems are where you find them, breaking the rules

as veiled things do. Some crash through the foliage and others

move only at night while danger sleeps. Like any other bush

meat, such poems are fair game for wandering hunters. The

heft and flair of their verse make them more or less worthy for

sale in back-country markets. Those who buy seek to sate their

heart’s hunger to hear its song sung back by another and relearn

words it has said to itself hundreds of times before.

Oh make me a mystery solid and spare, breathed to life by

your lines and shadows. Here sleeping dogs converse with open

windows, careworn boots go on forever, and flame transcends

heaven and hell, enlivening in one what it consumes in the

other. (After seeing the Andrew Wyeth 2006 retrospective in

Philadelphia)

Snow lilting straight down in still air, all softness and expectation,

opens that time between breaths when gathering and

spending rest in each other’s arms.

The heart never beats alone. Even in isolation, it crafts

golems from the past and snatches of the present and tunes its

ear to them.

Distant thunder at 2 a.m. The night drips and spatters.

Stephanie at 10, budding poet, never let her inability to spell

stop the tumble of words taking shape as her pen sped the page.

Once you’ve taken the leap, enjoy gravity’s journey.

I am life walking as a man, more made by the world than

I’ve made it. Even so, the making in my power is beyond imagining.

Wonders spring from my hands. Do I dare?

If you plant peppers, yet pray for tomatoes, you’ll still get

peppers.

Raechel’s said her eyelids dropped suddenly one morning,

both at once. They’d been softening for days and now it no

longer made sense to wear eye shadow.

The silence stretched between us like gentleness on soft

ground. “Relax in me,” it said. “Give me your weight.” Though

I held above its comfort and made inane comments, that

moment lives in me now, remembered as if it were a fine meal

shared with a friend after a long day of striving.

Moths flaunt flames.

Their singed wings

and charred bodies

follow a pull beyond pain.

Go to light!

Go to light!

Whatever the cost.

I pass you on the street. Our eyes meet. For the briefest

moment I lay my antiquities at your feet and you lay yours at

mine. We know each other in our cells as only fellow travelers

on a billion-year journey can. At root there is only one of us.

The shards of shattering – perhaps a betrayal, car crash or

illness – brighten areas we’ve refused to explore. Moving on,

we can either embrace the new constellation as a higher harmony

or selectively cobble events together to regain the world we

knew. Mostly we do both: grow where we are ready and

reassert the old balance where we are not. Such is the path of

healing and the seedbed of the next crisis.

If I could sleep but one more hour, what whispered wisdom

might surface from that strangeness called dreams.

I swallowed other’s systems by the dozen. But with a gut

full of my own beliefs, they passed clean through. Now I no

longer even pretend.

I make empty things and sell them for a lot of money to

those who judge them full. While I think the joke’s on them,

I’m the silly one for only emptiness sustains, not the passing

forms I fill it with.

I welcome my demon du jour and feed it from my larder. It

rewards me with familiar tunes. I am without volition. Though

I stop to catch my breath time and again and edge toward the

beckoning garden, my feet pick up the steps again. Eventually I

dance in and through my compulsions and other roads become

possible, roads to fuller states where demons roam but do not

rule.

From bones out, I won’t be defined, won’t be told what I

need. Don’t try to know for me, know with me.

Chondrules from the origin speak of eternity in the present

and its possibilities.

One day I will rush past you through that gate at the far end

of life and know again for the first time what I knew before.

How might the world taste if I wandered it unencumbered

by my bowels like an infant freely pooping anywhere and everywhere?

How might I walk without a tight sphincter? And how

might I think and feel? It would be, I suspect, a sort of twilight

place, where the memory of control and mastery vies with

heady, spontaneous expression. The world would simply pass

through and sustain me on its way elsewhere.

Water on a polished floor beads to droplets. On a ‘surfactant’

surface, it forms an even coat. Between the two lie patterns

shaped by competing forces, an unsettled place honoring

the unpredictable and ephemeral.

He’s an expensive ax cutting water, all power in the upswing

and downstroke, though only bubbles mark his passing. For all

his brilliance, his vision and common sense failed him and he’s

become a mixed metaphor: water-ax. How did the reality of

swimming and wood disappear?

Unhinge your mind and find hinges beyond hinges in endless

progression, each opening more improbable than the one

before. Play in such a universe explores the sudden corridors

and rooms you open through attention and desire.

I often awake with the desire to visit that schoolyard in the

Bronx for a quick game of stickball. Enough tasks for others and

the loss I feel before sleep of yet another day outside myself.

The fears and jeers, once yours, are mine now. Thanks a lot.

You ask where the compass points? Inward, ever inward.

I know what you’re not thinking and where you don’t live. I

see the gaps where vibrant life should be, where your sap runs

sideways on its way from root to crown. Here lawfulness grows

stale, tangling right and wrong, and your heart wanders backwaters

scummed by duplicity so your hands grab what love gives in

a one-sided exchange.

I cherish the shape of lives, their complex geometry, their

intersecting planes and hidden forms. They turn and tumble,

catching light and giving light, each a beauty to behold.

Down that road, unsettled by fire, awaits the thing that will

set you free.

Grow original things in an easy gradient back toward yourself.

Whirlwinds dance across my mind. Sometimes they catch

me unawares and blind me with sudden grit. I am beset by the

fear they bear. Afterward I wonder at the strangeness of my

vulnerability to such spare forms chasing their tails until they

unwind in a far corner of my psyche.

No matter our age, we remain cisterns filled by seeps from a

deep source. Some water goes to sustain us, but most is meant

for the world. Dam your riches at the risk of drowning.

True giving starts as a trickle, like the first opening of floodgates

in a dam. I climb to the great wheel and turn the gears

that slowly uncheck the flow. There’s no rush when it comes to

unbinding waters, just the one-way journey of giving in its time.

There is the hope of snakes on a summer’s day for a meal

and a doze on warm rock. There is birdsong just for the sake of

it and the slow dance of seasons. And then there is you and me

and the wonder we are together.

Hills are so similar in gravity it is easy to forget the one that

shaped me, but my heart knows where it began. It sets all land

forms against that slope where Fairmont Place empties into

Southern Boulevard with its traffic, stores and brooding church

towers. Here was my first village. A Bronx hill town, both

refuge and hell. I return to make sense of it all. Why there?

Why then? Why those people? That street and its alleys

became my home and my friends became my family when my

apartment grew uninhabitable. I walk there often at night.

Long before I hefted words into verse, I hauled 50- to-75

pound shale slabs and stacked them into stanzas as walls and

waterfalls. Here is poetry for the ages, a kinetic form at one

with falling water and gravity. I turned those constructions

loose. Now, 30 years later, they still hold the shape I gave them.

I take the light streaming towards me and give back to the

light givers. My albedo may run bright or dim, but still I glow

toward the heavens in a spectrum all my own.

Secrets peer from dark windows in closed rooms, flickering

round my edges. A simple welcome calls them home.

Clouds open far beyond their name. How many just-right

forces must act to make water visible. It’s a wonder they do so

at all.

What do age spots talk about in the middle of the night

watching blood rush past them?

When surprise is the order of the day, order takes surprising

shapes.

What has not travelled under before over? Been hidden

before found? My name was before I was, as was yours.

The cedar by the spring house calls me still. So many hours

spent in its shade watching slow-rising water and cress in soft

waves below the surface, just as the unknown lifts from my

depths and plays in my shallows before continuing elsewhere.

Blessed are those who make today’s ceilings tomorrow’s

floors. Doubly blessed are those who also make today’s floors

tomorrow’s ceilings. They follow a ready yearning that joins

roof and basement and all between into a structure holding all

parts as one.

My mother at 93 sleeps sedated in her nursing home bed, a

bridge between worlds, more there than here. Her skin, drawn

tight over cheek and forehead makes her look years younger.

She intones a mantra in her drugged state I imagine she spoke

as a child, “Leave me alone.” Here is a cry to have herself and

her volition without the impositions of those who should have

cherished her. When I stood at her bed and jostled her awake,

I became another shadow human who wanted her to be there

for them. “Let me sleep. Who do you think you are?” I back

off. She quiets and the room fills with her shallow, frequent

breaths. (Beth Abraham Hospital, Oct. 3, 2006.)

Poetry, the art of new eyes, follows tidal rhythms all its own,

sometimes neap, sometimes flood. It fills my low places, renews

my life. Some of my watery creatures move beyond the margin

to become grass and grass-eaters, worms and winged things,

each a wonder. They explore my finity in a crawl or in leaps that

taste random patches leagues apart.

Reflux is my teacher. It returns me to choices I made an

hour or three ago. Did I eat wisely knowing my stomach’s track

through time? Or did I let the food of the moment override

good judgment? Acid’s flood or ebb is driven by the pull of

appetite and how I ride it.

Know a person by what they eat and what eats them, who

feeds them and who they feed.

Let your heart slip its mooring to sail before the winds of

happenstance. Become fast friends with fear and fulfillment

and extend beyond your limited perspective. Tumble with

events, inner and outer. Catch those you can as they surge past

and fashion them into new ways to spend your days.

Wind-driven rain is a sideways thing, plastering your hair

and sheeting your face. Learn its ways and follow the contours

of whatever you pour yourself against, wet it fully and pass on.

It’s a fair exchange: take a bit of each intimacy with you as you

leave a bit of yourself behind.

Listen to your endings. Like the dregs in the last glass of

good wine, they hold the taste of what went before and the

wistful knowledge that no other will be as this one was, though

other good wines will come.

Each flaw in glass, each bubble and fracture, each gathering

of otherness, turns light from its course. What began as pure

source follows a twisted path round countless detours, illuminating

the beauty inherent in imperfection.

Am I as thin as yesterday, or will today fatten me for some

purpose all its own? Ask me tonight. I’ll weigh myself against

the day’s events and if I took sustenance in sweets or true food,

added flab for easy living or muscle for stronger standing, reaching,

shaping. Ask me tonight and I’ll let you know if the coming

hours make me more or less than I am just now.

Give thanks for the map makers and those who author

cookbooks and manuals. They may not invent or explore, but

they show the way. And give thanks too for the source of candles

and light bulbs. Their handiwork brightens darknesses

they’ll never see.

If you ride a mare the first time out, she’s likely not your

horse. If you solve a riddle upon hearing it, it’s not your puzzle.

If you see your mark clearly years ahead, it’s not your life you’re

planning.

The true way is uncertain in the fog of being. While the

mists may clear momentarily to reveal vistas, finding sure footing

on the ground you tread brings you back to the now. This is

as it should be, for we’re legged not winged creatures, and each

step must live in us before the next is to be taken.

If I gave in to gravity, to what center would I fall? Surely not

the one where I rework the known world in familiar ways like a

child moving blocks endlessly about a table. There are new

rooms with new toys awaiting. What else am I about if not

leapfrogging the self-same for the never-before in a search for

new mastery.

I used to be fog, but now I’m happy to report I’ve become a

pain in the ass. Before, people would walk through me, a bit

confused, muttering. Now, they bounce off, still muttering, but

at least they know who’s who.

Avoid mauves and taupes when they come round, those

trendy medium violet and soiled gray moods that would shunt

you down false paths. Hold out for hues of true substance: tart

yellow; dense blue shot through with white; and red shadows

tinted black.

Flowers in a vase from the local market.

Behold the winners.

In exchange for beauty,

they gain a charmed life

pampered at every turn,

fed and watered in a world

without competitors.

Flowers in the field beyond my bedroom window.

Behold the free.

They live on their own terms,

taking their chances,

at one with the world.

Time, up close and personal, converges and I am all ages at

once. A heartbeat separates my kindergarten role as the seventh

Indian in the Ten Little Indians from my joy in mapping

mesoscale eddies on the Gulf Stream from the leap into husbandhood,

fatherhood and business owner.

A compass needle is not north, nor is a second hand a now.

A marriage of equals, like some giant bird in flight across the

wind, finds its own vector through space and time. It travels in

great sweeps, touching down as desire or whimsy decide.

Partners to such a marriage belay each other past the rough

places. They treasure the eternal they hold and become exceptional

to each other. They span the distance between their

hearts with bridges of stone, steel or hemp so goodwill can cross

to gain goods crafted of understanding and vision.

In the field of emptiness, circles center everywhere and

nowhere. You become tangent, arc and radius at every turn

seeking expression, never definition. In this place the tail of

certainty never leaves the mouth of doubt so questions and

answers entwine as far as the eye can see and knowledge is ever

fresh.

It was a leap day and a hub day, a pivot day, an axis day and

a fulcrum day. It was a rare step-change day when gathered

forces moved in consent about the center and direction found

its voice. It was an all-inclusive day full of promise and shouts

of yes to the joining of paths.

The three sister logs, part of a branch as big as a middle-aged

tree broken by ice off the ancient oak at my back door, had

graced my woodpile for a year. They now sit on the andirons

blazing quickly, spending the suns of yesterday with great abandon.

They grow gaseous and insubstantial again, giving back

the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen they’d borrowed. Sixty

pounds of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin devolve to gray ash

in minutes. The wonder of their burning is exceeded only by

the beauty of the liquid, yellow-blue flames they flare.

If responsibility is your lodestone, you shortchange those

you hold dear.

Touch your heart to your toes. The ground’s long awaited

your return.

Only say how you are in exile to begin the journey home.

Feed your longing and your love. They’ll do all the work.

McDuff died two days ago, put to sleep after a long decline.

In his puppy years, he mainlined the vitality of wind on a March

day, never still, brushing all within reach. Then there was the

extended time of evenness, where he lay at the feet of life, giving

heart and receiving heart. It was here I knew him best and

loved him best. It was here we played chase or fetch and I gazed

in his eyes, sharing his timeless place. I remember most the tactile

things: his Bijon fur all curls and softness and his spare

body, surprisingly slight for such a substantial presence. I take

comfort from having known him. (For McDuff Shulman, August

What comes of struggle when the best we know to do carves

us deeper into the known? Not to worry. Eternal sameness is

its own medicine, eventually succumbing to its own weight.

I’ve known those breasts through many seasons. They were

tits when I first found them, firm and high with nipples gazing

straight ahead, pert and welcoming. When they flushed with

milk to feed our daughters to toddlerhood, they grew globular

with nourishment. Now they’ve settled into matronly form,

broad and full, gathering the world.

Trees touched by the wind become composite, vapor-solid

beings far more than wind and tree alone.

I tread the same paths repeatedly and call them new. I tell

myself the same stories and am captivated time and again.

Newness enters my door, and I file it in prepared categories on

prebuilt shelves, preempting disruption and disorientation. I

take change in tiny doses and think I welcome it.

There are days the world and I sit holding hands like new

lovers, shy in discovery. Other days, it is as if we face each other

across a lawyer’s table, jaws set, negotiating divorce.

I am an interrogative, a dot in a question mark. The inquiry

curls about me refusing to let go: What do I truly want?

Make me wise dearest God

in your ways,

just as I am.

Help me cherish your night

no less than your light

down all my days.

Solitary life for a herd beast is like a finger without its hand.

What grand design altered the cervical trapeze when man

stood upright? The shoulder tells tales of dependence on soft

tissue, free movement in space and loads borne and released.

Bone alone won’t do when flexibility is as vital as strength.

Only a floating construction stayed and guyed by muscle and

tendon will do.

My curiosity rises like a kite in a fresh breeze, ascending the

string to grow eyes to see to a far country.

The old ones sent out as emissaries from a magnetic sun

dance across the heavens, towing lines of force and great curtains

of light. (Upon seeing the aurora borealis.)

In turning 60, I asked for meaning and insight. It came in

part in a dream: “He travels the night in a bowl of knowing. The

ground arrives calf high 20 feet ahead and disappears at the

same height and distance behind. New things come as strange

stains on the roadway, oddly branching trees and sudden dips.

They enter and leave him, but traces remain. The road becomes

a darting needle patterning seams across disparate parts, uniting

him simply from his desire to meet what is.”

Blankets knotted. Bottom sheet sweaty and pulled loose. I

war with my bed, as if sleep were a battleground and ancient

forces I keep at bay during the day clash in me.

It’s a complex face, this 59-year bevy of lines and hollows.

Though it holds resolve and directness, it also harbors a gauzy

quality as if it might drift away at any moment. And always

deep-set eyes behind glasses, watching, holding. It is a face in

waiting, offering little until a smile opens its planes and deep

creases arc from orbit to mandible along old lay lines. The

humor hidden there then emerges to share with the world jokes

it has been telling itself.

The silence between notes on a solo sax is snow’s song on a

windless night.

Give me your elbow or hips and I’ll give you my shoulder or

thigh in return. What, after all, are friends for?

Even after the main struggle is done, guerillas arise from

hidden tunnels to test my resolve in old ways.

Let go of things past their prime: old computers and shoes,

cars, friendships and jobs. Practice loss. Pull the bar that sends

them spinning from your side. It will happen even if you don’t

do so, but at a greater cost to your peace of mind and ability to

get on with your life.

In the open, sparsely treed meadows above Rio Caliente, I

walk the early morning hours alert to flowers hidden in knee-high

grass. It is how I would live: noticing small vividness close

to the ground in soil born of ancient heat. Each day has its

dimension, be it rolling ridge tops as far as the eye can see or a

waterfall at the source of a steaming river or ancestral groves of

oak and pinon pine. The basics at 5,000 feet, a bit askew from

those at sea level, steady my gait and free my vision. (Near

Guadalajara, Mexico, August 2006.)

Whatever you got from your parents is not enough, for currents

will sweep you beyond their reach toward your own vulnerabilities

and revelations.

No matter what your mother told you, scabs are for picking.

Keep at your sore points before they find a home between your

cells so you can battle them in the open rather than in house-to-

house combat.

I would like to write poetry like this fire, all wood at odd

angles and random flares of blue-hot gas above sequestered

coals.

In a world that values flowers more than roots, I wish you

great bouquets of roots. I wish you roots in profusion deep and

strong, roots nurtured by Self and anchored in essence, so you

grow true, full and vibrant. Trust your roots for they tap experience

long before it breaks the surface, opening the most surprising

places and fostering the most improbable shoots. (For

Steph when she turned 18.)