Patience

Patience always brings
springs.
Mornings with May flowers
a thousand-fold on hill tops
the smell of dew on
lazy apple blossoms
violets in leafy clumps
like blue butterflies,
strong in morning sun
and atop a red-budding maple tree
a robin flutters its feathers and sings –
patience always brings
springs.

Perfection

You and I are perfect,
although I dream deformed –
garbled features, missing fingers
twisted arms, stumps for feet,
hunched backs and warped necks;
I shiver and wake
and see we are perfect.
It is as if we had made each other.

Third Sight

I think I must be made of smoke,
I can’t see or feel myself.
I must not seem to exist at all,
like light or music or breath or love.
So I can hide like a fleeing soul
in cracks and breaks in the outer world,
slip my fingers in the holes
and feel beneath to beating veins.
That is all I know is real
since I no longer trust my eyes.
People, you trot back and forth like dogs
and believe the surface reality you see,
believe the stars are pasted up,
believe in the muteness of forest trees.
There is more.
The trouble with being too solid is
you only see the solid things.
You are afraid to let yourselves
become smoke, become your own dream.
I haven’t been real for a long time now;
the earth wears a mask and I feel it crumbling,
there is something under, beneath, beyond.
I can’t see it yet but my finger tips
touch it, if I twist them down in deep.
You won’t believe, I must sound mad;
the mad are the only ones who see it.
They laugh because no one else can see it.
I would go mad
to see what they see.

Until Forever

If I were here forever
the world would be only green
and blue
with feathers of grass on my nose – the green
and blue sky
and I can lie
forever here
and never know
until the dawn.
All the night the sky will be blue
before the sun spills sun softly to color the sky
then forever will be gone.
But until then I can lie
forever here, under blue skies
and never know anything but green
and blue
only darker blue as the sun steals the light
and when it is night
there will only be blue.
Unless there are stars.

Woodland Mouse

Caged.
Walls of glass and screen
and floor of wood chips
that smell of my forest far
and smell of freedom.
And only one metal wheel to replace
the forever lost streams
and the rocks and the grass
and stones and wet earth
all gone.

I wish
for my forest again.
I wish that these walls
were really of air.
And still, in my mind
I see the tree trunks wet black
with cool, fine-misted falling rain.

The Choice

Wait!
How can I, can’t I, I cannot follow
what you’re saying, the sky is in my ear!
All is lost, like rings in the sand,
it is I have gone, going to go, will be going mad.
What is there left to try?
One dead end, like the drunk’s end,
like the hooker’s end, like the old man dying,
the dead end, there is nothing
coming after, except more
of the same.
Life should be like a carousel
or the ocean, lovely things,
not a bat cave, black and squeaking
tiny bodies tangled in your hair.
But by choice, my own choosing, I chose this;
grains and particles --
soul, strange time now to be afraid.

Psalm

You wrap your fingered hands around my skull
and crush – heat grows behind my eyes.
This love hurts. I stand in morning
before the silver sea – it speaks –
love hurts, all beauty hurts
and man is clay. One day
I will leave you, and find another cave
where music is baffled by the stone
and deep back, where I will sit
the music will be a dying sound,
but I may take charcoal in my hands
and run swift lines along the wall –
images of you, words the charcoal feels:
this love hurts. There will be no
going far enough to go. You are where
beauty is, and beauty hurts. I feel
perhaps pain is what makes me real.
When I close my eyes
you drag my feet for miles and wake me
where I am lost and no one knows my name
but all around is beauty, and it hurts.
Only give my knees a place to pray.
I love you, but this love hurts,
and I am only clay.

The Edge

She is in love, love with the edge –
where thought falters thin,
where sun browns the feathers,
singes the hair on the head
and the knuckles, white from flapping;
wind dries the sweat and glues the eyes
open, like the eyes
that greet the dead,
meet the dead
over the edge.

At night, chasing the edge –
cut her wrists and drank herself white,
blood dripping
over the edge.
White blindness from headlights of cars,
mad dogs snarling behind the stars,
bloodless the stars sing,
and wind in her ears –
she is in love
she is in love.

Invocations

Over the green hills the conquerors
are coming.
I see their fires burning, smoke over the trees,
it won’t be long now. I lie on the grass, flower-open,
arms wide,
waiting.
Come fast, welcome invaders,
you are welcome and welcome
to me
waiting for music to take me over,
blue melodic insanity.
I wait,
and the night comes.

There are cats in the night.
First the black forms are shadows,
blending into the hemlock trees,
then breaking
away from corners,
sliding footless into grey space of moonlight,
blending still at feet tips and tails.
And when they turn,
consciousness explodes from their eyes,
their souls beam out with the force of wind,
demonic, fear-absent,
a billion years
of speechlessness forced through green, silent
portholes of glass,
singing inside, bright inside
with music. It sings out from behind the eyes
but can’t break free.
I could chip around the glass,
pop it out, reach a thumb through,
but the song would fly back
to the tail-tip and stay,
twitching, leaping, captive still.
How does it feel to hold that inside,
how does it feel?
The eyes look away,
the light is gone.
Blackness under the trees absorbs
itself again,
leaves no dent or interruption.
I could stay white and awake like the stars
or I could sleep.

And down inside, the lungs are working,
rhythm, rhythm, like wings beating.
Follow down,
in the middle of body-whispers and drum beats,
and deep where the blood, sticky-thick,
goes slow,
up to the island, the beach where my feet catch on the sand
in my soul.
Pull up, dripping,
and close my eyes lest I see anything
- that would be death, might be Hell –
feel across the floor to find
the other, outer
edge of ledge, stand straight,
firm, fine,
lean over shaking, raise both hands,
fall to my knees and call
the music home.
Echoes
come back dully,
and water sounds.

I heard a mother call her child at dusk;
across the woods I heard the dogs called in;
on a hilltop a man in grey
lifted his voice to the steam-covered cows;
and if I call the music
it is sure to come.
Stretch and watch the sky. Wait.
It is sure to come.
Wait.
It is sure to come.

The fog-dam
broke; here
it is waist-deep in mist.
All down the stone street the lamps are on,
fuzzy circles, glowing,
sconces lighting the passage way, and he
is coming.
I stand on the corner under a light.
(What will he sound like when he comes?)
Away so long, his horse may not know
the way.
There will be a harmonica
and the horse hooves from under the mist,
hollow and vibrant,
sweeter than trumpets.
They will be breathing hard.
The horse’s mane may sound like brushing of leaves,
but before that sound,
harmonica and hooves, beating a time –
that is what to listen for.
Morning is grass-pealing,
violet dancing,
wide, wonder-eyed, wistful dew,
edible air, and, west,
the sun’s reflection.
away west – wait –
sound!
Horse’s hooves and harmonica down
the street where it curves
into the trees.
Oh, this way, this way!
Twirl round the cool lamp post,
laughing,
the music is coming,
the music is coming!
Open my mouth to take it in,
fingers out, questioning
(Why were you so long? I waited!) and
running.

The Sea

Beaches in the sun,
almost too much sand to comprehend,
and shells.
Tiger striped porcelain, left by a wave,
tidy wreckage and fragmented bones
of seagulls, clean of flesh, hollow and white.
A rubbing stone,
and wood of an unknown
tree, stripped of bark like everything here,
like me,
stripped of cloth and covered in sand,
I stand
where the water turns dark
the sand of the shore.
Water pulling ground from under my feet,
grabbing at gritty treasures and fleeing
an innocent evil
back out of sight.
Fish swift as night,
so small they leave their shadows behind,
dart through the swell
of incoming tide.
Hear them laughing?
Hermit crabs war and argue for room
in seaweed-swept, sparkling pools,
a thousand islands of world in a rock.
I let them be.
Schools of gulls fly like fish in the air,
and I bare
myself to the sea.

Quest

Five years fly back to find us here
still wanderers,
rough with a dream that clings to our hair,
will not wash off in mountain streams
or free-blown wind.
Through brush, swamp elder,
cattails snapping – swooping herons
bring no news of unicorns.
Through forests petrified to stone,
waterfalls, apple orchards,
cracked robins’ eggs, and bits of string –
thrushes, catbirds, crickets sing
no songs of beauty such as this,
give us no hope at all.

Till, there in the lush grass soft to the touch
of steaming hooves, carved ivory,
the unicorn, moonlit white with beaded tail,
braided mane, star-speckled eyes
in a world of mirrored dew.
One moment we have
to catch the wonder that hangs
like silver music in still air,
and then it flies – hooves over moss,
deer-swift, snake-silent,
no rock cloven,
not a branch touched.

When She Died

What did her eyes look like when she died?
Moment of fear frozen to crystal,
like the eyes of the squirrel by the
side of the road, eyes only
squirrel-like,
moment of pain when the blood stops moving,
cells die quick deaths,
drawn brows and wrinkled nose,
final, animal fear?
Or were the windows closed,
lids locked with eye-spit,
mouth half open and not receiving
visiting wind but only flies,
note saying “we give, take
no info now”?
Or did she look at you with knowing
as if she were God, take your hand,
smile to make you catch your breath,
to see you catch your breath?
And then the eyes
stop recognizing but only stare,
marbles in a marble face?

Summer

Summer is
forever.
We will be young forever.
Sing,
lunatic feet,
follow wild
to the sun-singed edge
of grassy green earth
and leap
off
into air,
wingless, tearless,
a moment weightless,
then down.
Celebrate the summer –
this will be forever,
we will be young forever,
a thousand mornings come,
a thousand skies turn starless,
the dancing die young.

Bats and Fireflies

In the low field
summer breathed around us like sleep;
we sat on the ground and watched for bats.
In the evening
black forms swept over a purple sky,
returning and dipping wavelike
yet never breaking,
the sky being shoreless
and bats, not as reckless
as the sea.
While we were there,
while the wrinkled wings rustled
all around us, soft
and small,
black bodies of fireflies moved in the glowing night
- fireflies –
and none of them came back again.