A Conspiracy of Ravens

A conspiracy of light absorption
flew across the morning,
shaded a meadow,
momentarily cooling
the ground.

Ravens cast a shadow
over the field where seeds,
answering
the sunlit summons,
for a quantum instant
darkened,
chromosomes altered,
genes switched on.

Ninety days later,
in a field of red
white poppies bloom
in an undulating swath
the width of a conspiracy.

~ ~ ~

Dark

As if by one accord
in sequential harmony,
the facets of evening collapsed.

Birds song ceased.
Light drained out.

Breeze stood still
and breath moved
deep into the diaphragm.

What remained of day
lay prickly on the skin.

Sudden dark a keen,
thin whistle,
a place remembered.

~ ~ ~

The Riding

On the long straight road at twilight we sped alone,
on the two lanes bordered by wilderness,
past jungle trees and blackened swamps past the low slung
barbed wire of pastures, in the cool mist of night.

The gibbous moon coursed above our car
swinging back and forth through threads of clouds
first on one side and then the other
as our car kept the curves.

The faint road, turning under the dim stars
was all there was as we were riding, riding
in the brimming dark, Father at the wheel,
quiet with his thoughts of youth,

Hunting in the crackling woods of his youth.
Mother holding the baby, his head warm in her lap
and the backseats with sleeping children,
whose minds rolled on toward tomorrow,

Wrapped around with innocence, a fragrance,
an incense of infants breathing
the sound of lullabies half remembered, half hummed
and the ringing road unwinding.

The silence closing behind us, in a wake
of endlessness, we rode forever, the night our capsule,
the car our vessel, bodies all together
in the roaming moonlit night.

Everyone was alive, all were whole and becoming
the nightfall was a mother’s kiss,
the young bodies brand new for earth,
like earth when it was altogether young and green,

Springing forward into life, more life,
down rushing waterfalls of becoming, springs
of mind, thoughts cascading and brave
like the falling that is a rising.

The pounding heart hammers spring
into the bones, and the sleek river washed stones
lie still for us, while the stream bends under the moon
and widens over the wire grass plains

Where water is blood and grows into fleet runners,
wise walkers, and giant trees that embrace
with resurrection moss branches of velvet green.
Pass them by, pass them, seeing them all,

The kneeling oaks, reaching low across the fields,
the shadows where earth smells sweet like birth,
and we are riding, rushing past our guiding headlights
that pierce the dusk and take us into expansion,

Into knowledge, into the chorus of the songs
that emerge into bone. And at last we own the time,
with lives grown pliable, malleable,
separated into you and I, and forever moving on.

~ ~ ~

New Leaves Weave Crowns for You

She said, whoever has not topped the hill
has never seen the view.
the rolling land, shades of green
the smooth black road,

She has climbed to the halt,
then ascended another rise,
the hills still call out our
comfort and truest victory

Valleys, those easy places,
once full of flat roads for racing thought
and feasts of kinship
honor gravity and lie halcyon

Beneath the plenilune
where white shade
becomes a close held light
encompassing its own shadow

Moon-haired and sun touched,
she climbs and sees.
The eye is the glory God,
the mind’s vision can reach to infinity.

Beloved in every grass blade you pass,
wise to the why of all that is made,
you, strong to rise, delicate for all you can find,
circle back, you entity,
new leaves weave crowns for you.

~ ~ ~

Back To Sunday

She walked into the room
flushed, illuminated
like first light of October
in the mountains.

If Jenny is coming home for Christmas,
only the gleaming mornings of October,
sunset colored pumpkins in the field,
and corn stalks drying crisp light brown.

Only mountains rolling burnished
yellow and green
with flashes of peach,
and rust and glory.

Only the Hackberry tree
covered and undulating away
in each of four directions
a trillion trillium-leafed world.

If Jenny comes home for Christmas
upward gold will leave gilt
our ground. To see her
we will not need to travel far.

Her face crinkled in a smile and I
slid down the slope of her
into a sunny place
with harvest blooms

A hummingbird glint of emerald
and blur,
Sunday dinner smells
through pale yellow,

Dust motes hang in space,
everlasting, in days abundant
in memory forever.
She was there, and life was.

~ ~ ~

Digger

I dig the holes, she tells me where.
She kneels to place the plant
gentles each leaf, pushes down
the soil with cloven feet

Everything waxes tall,
rampant every shade of green;
she picks the blossoms arms full,
a petal crowned queen.

Birds call through the open door
she takes the cups
full of seeds
scatters them along the rail.

Birds heed as if
come to heel,
squirrels quarrel to be first,
all gather to genuflect.

I see her fingers hovering
over every vase,
they scintillate in emerald haze
and then, faceted, reappear.

~ ~ ~

Flamboyance

What piercing person
connived the name,
somewhere in the sultry south
where colors gleam luxuriant,

For creatures flying northward
from florid lands with vines,
A name for Flamingos
sunset arrayed across indigo,

Each feather a thousand
thousand flames
peach passion in the eye’s eye:
a flush flamboyant.

~ ~ ~

Earthwoman

“all is radiant and near” – Gibran

She got at last
what she could not
put into words,
but must at last
live to see,
the stars came down.

She wore them
in daylight,
they lit up solitude
until it was beautiful.
Immeasurable,
her memories,
Weightless,
her love rises, above
the radiant and near,
the blue-green
spinning home
of which she was
the heart.

~ ~ ~

Morning in the Backwater

He laughed in his sleep. I woke,
scooped coffee, ladling out beneficence.

Beneficiaries all must pass,
but not before they pass it on.

Uncanny, inappropriate,
this one hundred years of sweetness.

I look deep into my cup,
dark, honeyed, bitter, drink it up.

He laughed in his sleep, and I,
live only to go that way by.

~ ~ ~

Chick Apostate

My chin sags and breastbone is weathered
as the red hen behind the barn, where the roof peaks
with a cast iron cock spinning high in the wind.
Brooding on and on, eating in restaurants alone
perched over the steep slope of not getting laid,
egg days over, I stew.

Souped-up for something more
than spoon-fed decline,
scratching aimlessly the well-worn ground,
watching the rain slide down the wires,
the grass greener where I’ve been from here,
ruffled, under wraps, cooped up inside discretion,
I keep trying to rise from the fricassee,
up and out-
Posture!—Now Strut!

~ ~ ~

Living by Feel

Out of touch, abandoned
by the sense we were born with,
living off adrenaline
and unrequited lust,
we burned,
barely breathing, till it
caught us up at last,
budding, bleeding life
upon us unawares.

Everything hinged upon
the riders of white horses
racing round the track
of urge for bedding down,
and betting
on the winning hand.
Hand that ringed us in
at altar, traded kiss
for kiss, knocking
at the doorway to bliss,

Poisoned for love
and needing it,
we birthed in one fell scream,
our womanhood,
with each wizened
wrinkled, newborn face
suckling life at breast.

~ ~ ~

Lovers at Eighty

She wanted to hear him say
all was nonsense,
we are alive and well,

But she dare not mention
how every evening now
she hears the bells.

~ ~ ~

The Threshold Jumpers

They spread hay redolent of meadows drenched by rain, fields fresh scythed
in raven red dawn over the packed earth floor,
bundles tossed inside, careful that no foot should touch the threshold,
barrier stone between the worlds, the living and the inscrutable.
Beeswax tapers dipped by young girls bend and curve in dim light,
in the round aperture over the altar a mouse balances, scattering at the rippling sound of wings.

A mourning dove alights, her black eye reflects the yellow candle light.
In her beak she holds a rowan berry to drop into the flame.
The dove perches there waiting as through the open door her mate comes furling,
swirling suspended dust beneath the chapel beams.
Roosting wing to wing in the bright round wind’s eye opening the two doves wait
for their time to sussurate and sing.
Those who come wrapped against the evening chill step carefully, these threshold jumpers
chary of the border between the worlds, mossed stone where no footstep had the surface worn.
Faint songs rise from their throats, windblown melodies for floating souls hovering on a draft of air.

On the wretched day his mother found him perched on the low stone, she snatched him up,
‘You must not sit here,’ she cried, ‘Between the living and the spectral dead!’
Hurrying home with the child in her arms, she cried aloud under an afternoon of running clouds.
Surely an innocent thing, the young child, no power on high would have noticed how he strayed,
three years old, eyes like clear blue glass, where all the world flowed in and stayed.
She rocked him and by his bedside prayed.
Her heart covenanted with all she could have known, into all depth that she could feel,
she begged the curse to pass, while anguish pierced her breast like steel.

Older than the oldest memory, inherited infirmity of forbidden borderlands where worlds collide,
in entries, in edges, where crevasses breathe and abide, deep between the worlds,
still water in the well of life pauses at pebbles dropped from time to time,
whose jagged trespass doomed bells chime.
At the child’s birth the doves had dropped green twigs, sang their low-pitched herald song,
yet time is nothing to a bird, the young heart did not beat long.
The dawn he died, beneath hay, below packed clay, between the walls of rough cool stone,
wait those who have already gone.

To tear the beat from the heart of life, the clang of worlds called in the doves
as under rough clouds wings drummed to issue out the miss-stepped soul, released as strung,
an arrow at its apogee, they came to sing a mourning song that rose to sky,
lifting feather-light, the child soul to infinity.

~ ~ ~

Tramp’l’oeil

She sat on a bench,
ear flaps pulled low against the chill.
Her head, sunk into her shoulders,
thin skulled, was always cold.
Again she tasted her last night’s
victory: hidden place to sleep,
dock house on the lake,
the main house for sale.

At sundown she tugged open
the window, climbed in pack first,
the narrow beam from her
flashlight scanned the room:
a sink and a couch.

Got away with it!
The stab of jubilation
floods her brain.
Granola bars,
a half liter of water
and aspirin,
best is her hand towel
and bar of soap,
she feels again the rash stir of glee.

Undressing, sleeping bag
spread on the couch, washing
in cold water, underwear
to dry across a chair,
Quick, the light off!
Wriggling down into the bag,
she shivers until warmed.

There, there, she whispers,
‘All is well, all shall be well,
all manner of things are well.’
Julian’s old chant her
well worn, summons sleep.

Safe for now, and tomorrow
was easy,
the childhood art perfected,
had grown into her bones:
waking with a start
at the first light of dawn.

~ ~ ~

Eigengrau

We need this word,
for the wheelchair
veteran near the doorway
of the retirement
home, not his place,
not home.
For the woman with the
cardboard sign
for the empty
cup near the
man asleep
on the sidewalk
where the sun
streams across
his legs
a blessing dire
and solely his.
For the day
that greets us
as we hear the coin
clink of helplessness
when even light
moves tentative,
then
shrinks back.

~ ~ ~

Diablerie

French,
even in concept,
the rolled
half-swallowed ‘r’,
freewheeling
sexuality
topless beaches
slim eaters
of croissants
tiny espressos
to express
the negligence
of makeup,
the negligees
of silk
subdued
manicures,
wine for lunch
with naps in rooms,
blinds drawn
for yellow lit
leg spread
ambiance,
too high up the
rococo facade
of the old stone
appartement
for passersby
to hear
ecstasy and skill –
you can’t be French
just because you will.

~ ~ ~

For These Elements Alone Exist

From these elements come all things that were and are and will be;
men and women, and beasts and birds…even the long-lived gods
who are highest in honor. For these elements alone exist,
but by running through one another they become different;
to such a degree does mixing change them.- Empedocles

I thought to die for love,
but love
was a washing out
of all expectation
and death, which came,
was my lover’s.

He vanished
while I held his hand,
and I grew grey
and old, and dim.

This was the mixing
of the gods,
who love to see
what patchwork makes
of the shreds of living,
A quilt to cover
cold limbs.

I buried my lover wrapped
in squares of old flannel
sewn to remnants
of wedding gown.
Satin up against
rubbed cotton,

The smooth of joy
and the warm embrace,
one takes the other,
said the gods, and
they cry, ‘Done!’

~ ~ ~

In Certain Ways

In certain curtained ways,
I do
require my love,
homage of you.

That your lips
my earth should kiss
Gothic portal to bliss,

Tunnel-like, loving is,
as roots
perform the tree.

Roots and rooting thus
comes towering the trunk,
columnar.

High spangled leaves
thrust to sky,
this is how
and this is why,

Fruit falls inward, by and by.

~ ~ ~

The Urge to Travel Sails Away

Tethered to the vine, the future winds
from the dooryard
where lilacs bloomed
around the world and back again

Here the well-used dwell
in pastel rooms.
Sometimes as the evening burns
red and low, they recollect
the long strides of young men,
thick haired and golden I
n the undertow.

Some days he pulls up his socks,
gets on with it, and rakes the yard.
some days the wind blows leaves
across the flower beds
and the frost comes hard.

~ ~ ~

The Speed of Light

What happened to change
her mind that night watching stars
sitting on the hood of
his old car, sturdy, ugly car
with bench seats,

What happened to change
her mind as he said: ‘See the Seven
Sisters, most people only see six,’
was something in the stars,
sparking in her inner eye
when her hand happened to graze
his hard thigh two light inches
from hers

What happened to change
her mind about the boy with glasses
who owned a telescope,
was how the chill of that
spring night was overrun by fire
under the old army blanket
when he kissed her.

~ ~ ~

Tincture

We remain tainted with the marriage of our mothers and fathers,
their mothers and fathers, back into the Eden fog,
When Adam went round the bend of a leafy place, and found naked, Eve,
wet from the river, in her apple-round glory.

She whispered, seeing him ducking behind a bush, God, he is adorable!
To no one, but the fish and creeping things wont to listen, for a lone woman
spitting apple seeds.
There grew a veritable orchard alongside that river.
She would have fed her children under those saplings, sons, a daughter
she might teach the art of splicing branches, propagating fruit.

One tree stood with gold apples on the left, red on the right, and at the top,
branched with tart, green, hard to reach, apples.
They were the exact color of that slithery creature who kept track of the undergrowth,
flicking verdigris through curled leaves, twining himself beryl-bright,
around red, fallen, fruit.
It was a picture, and Cunning, the viper, was not blind to the effect:
red shiny fruit wrapped with breathing green.

All four of them loved color, it was a passion, a fad. The yellow Alamanda blossoms
under lucent blue, silvery grey-green fishes, maroon shadow under lotus leaves.
There, pink-throated, a single lily floated, vibrating in cool evening air.
A lily trembling in anticipation of heavy footsteps in the garden.

The lotus a blossom most like breath, may consummate in one swift gasp,
ornament, with the beauty-seeking eye of the Lord.
Observe, as He scans the mighty reach of His hand, turns to the tripartite tree,
and plucks the middle branch.

Unripe fruit pruned, He leaves an empty space.
See Him in the half-light,
carrying a bouquet of bobbing green orbs,
ascending shimmering paths strewn with leaves.

While in lingering fingers of gold the sun bends
down the fiery emerald garden, and Eve stands barely breathing, visible between the leaves,
bare breasted, holding in each hand an apple, one red, one gold.

~ ~ ~

Dancing Naked

He judged her frantic, she demurred,
it was corybantic, the wild dance of worlds collapsing.
What he divined to be frenetic was, obviously, genetic,
the entire tribe stamped mud to dust.
It was a must, he could not see, but she,
she, saw it all from afar, the water rippling in the jar,
the earth slippage coming after, the dust falling from the rafters,

They all ran, escaping cracked earth, it was demise
and yet re-birth, for those clinging to roots at the cliff,
shoes lost into the abyss, who found the climb back to the top
as all around the grinding stopped.
The world was blue as if in mist, the sun pierced through,
a rough-armed kiss, they lay panting, saved, on dirt and shale,
as overhead the clouds, white and opaque, peaceful sailed.
He saw then that he loved a force, a vortex with birth,
woman, part of earth, dances in a changed world
and as all things break apart, all things reflect the dancing
of one naked girl.

~ ~ ~

The Art of Falling Slowly

Stay at home moms resort, on slow afternoons,
while toddlers sleep, to mysticism with its haloed hopes.

The glitter of growing things can benumb the mind,
the care, hourly, minute by minute, reams the heart.

And then the child awakes, makes the day with smiles,
you laugh to see his delight.

‘Try not to to fall too fast,’ the Mother says to her son in Winnie the Pooh,
For falling, if you must fall, falling, if you need to fall,

Falling, if have no way down but face first, should be done inch by inch
particle of air by particle of air, should be done like rays from the sun,

Those slippery neutrinos who know us better than all the ways we touch,
who know that we are space,

Who have evidence that we are lightweights, yet tangible to the infinitesimal.
Learn how the child falls, And gets up, unhurt,

Yet your day bides with vigilance, your arms ready and waiting,
to soften the ever downward blow.

~ ~ ~

The Gift

On the way home from the medical center,
He insists on driving though I can see
he’s in pain, the surgery not healed,
but he wants to drive.

We stop to buy gas.
I will pump it, I say, No, no,
he gets out to man the pump himself.
I see him in the side view mirror,
thin, his shoulders hunched bone.

With this small mirror view to the rear
all I had been holding up
falls. Dread drops into my heart,
he is pretending, for me and for himself,
the play-acting of a lifetime.

He goes inside the station
to buy water, and when he’s gone
I crumple into despair.
It is then I notice a thin man
sitting on the concrete curb
knees to his chest,
he catches my eye through the window.

He gazes at me calmly, eyes alight,
and it is as if I were somewhere else,
I can not look away.
He nods, and though he is yards distant,
I hear him whisper,
It will be alright, alright, he says,
then gets up and walks away.
Too startled to breathe, I feel a warm breeze,
and who knows why, it lifts me,
seems something solid to lean upon.

When my husband returns,
carrying a bottle of water
I smile and say,
It is great to be going home.
His green eyes shone.

~ ~ ~

Needy Love

Of course change is fundamental
to chameleon life. Brown for a moment,
he knows how to live in the moment,
brown greening slowly, a better instant,
landing on a leaf.

Leaves do something to him,
he would have said
it was needy love in every cell.

Cold had come to Florida.
We had a heated floor under tile
in the bath and the chameleon was there,
brown as ever and in a hurry.
Fear in his spine, he raced across
alarming heated ground, then stopped.

Revelation came to lizard.
He stilled, as if to think:
wait, this is summer under foot.
what he meant was, this was
heaven, warm surprise.

The chameleon has his inkling,
ground creepers learn fast
that down is everything they ever
wanted to call home,
gravity’s flee from leaf, what always awaits.

Cold wind in season
sends us all to an inside place;
the lizard followed chance,
some hidden order, to uncanny warmth,

We who lament an earth not enough,
full of our handmade discontent,
we too will stand greening with
some instant’s summer rising.

All he loved and knew
was not all there could be.
Thereafter, lizard grew many colored
at will, but never was the same.

~ ~ ~

First Grade Science

They watched the tadpole transfrogify,
amazed. What world is this?
Wing, pinnacle of fin,
the dropped feather of a wren, and sin.

Berries fall to feed snakes
and snapping turtles live in lakes
to drag the ducklings, all in a row,
down to amphibian undertow.

The mother duck doesn’t know,
the unfathomed fate from below;
the drake preens and pretends
but too, he knows even less.

Birdhouses hung high are no defense
from predators that come by sky.
The bluebird house opening
fits just fine the head of a crow.

Hungry humans, at the shopping mart,
place smooth brown eggs into the cart.
Protein, scaffolding for mind and flesh
renders prey sacrificial, life enmeshed.

Survival is foreordained,
to be turbulent and red-stained,
and the life of the child
must always be the fundamental part
of her recondite, inscrutable heart.

~ ~ ~

Lady of the Street Children

Grandma wore a dress of red
she had handholds in her head,
they helped locate the legal
and the blind.

Being led by her lights
into the lower life
she battled the constancy
of uneven odds.

Grandma was a winner
having skipped the ditch, still leading,
in the beggars confluence
she had pearls of price to give.

Hidden behind her baggy dress,
the tickets to tomorrow
lay like wisdom apples
on her silver winding heart.

Grandma was gentle with the best
never bitter with the rest,
and stooped to arrest, along the concrete
corridors, the dying of the young.

This for the sake of life, for spring’s
determined stand, breaking up
the hard pan of deprivation,
for the children of its hand.

She cradles harrowed heads,
pours sunlight into fevered minds
her gentle daylight spreads inclined
to the bent, pock-marked and denied.

Those who crouch passed by crowds
and commerce, deemed of little worth,
to these she manifests
the irrepressibility of new birth.

Grandma, crimson clad, indomitable,
plies the shifting street’s cursed
where despair and longing
quake the underside of earth.

~ ~ ~

To Homespun Women Now Dead

They fed me and I paid,
smiling at the cashier,
a woman I could regard.
The waitress I tipped.

We three, women free,
golden in prosperity
this, a country set aside, sleek,
shining like the hair of the Madonna.

I do not bear
my Grandmothers’ names.
Whose blood blessed
this ground
for me?

~ ~ ~

Ukraine and Eternity

At the Poetry Conference a month before
They told the Ukrainian poet
that she should not write of the times,
but the eternities, admonishing her
that esteemed poets from Russia
had looked above the trials of history
and made beautiful poetry.

Her husband calls from the front, she can hear
the fake calmness in his voice.
Her cousins deported to camps in Russia
send no word.
Three weeks later the trucks come,
unexpected, their town not in the path of war.

The three-year old cried for her blanket,
they pushed them into the transports
the six year old wet herself,
and kept trying to hide the stains running down her pants
she had dropped the jacket her mother wanted
most for her to keep, it lay in the mud
behind them.

Look, her mother told her, I have Gummies for you,
her fingers brought out two, See, one red
and one green.
The child kept them tight in her hand, staring
straight ahead, she was very still.
It was not cold, yet the Mother’s upper body shook
and her stomach turned

They were shoved close together, no one spoke.
The six month old across was placed on the floor
between his sister’s feet. He kept trying to crawl
toward the back of the truck
his small hands covered in mud
his sister wiped it from his cheeks with her scarf.
She recognized the girl,
thin, brown-haired, about eleven.
Everyone was relieved when he fell asleep
on a plastic poncho spread under the seat

The yard where they unloaded had gravel roads
in 4 directions, metal huts and wire.
She hoped she could find a bathroom soon,
the littlest woke and cried, the six year old sat down on the road
and her mother cold not lift her

The older woman from down the street hoisted the girl to her hip
for a moment she thought the neighbor would speak,
she always had been so full of greetings,
but she closed her eyes and shook her head.

They took the girl inside the hut and lay her
on a cot, her mother took off her flannel outer shirt and dressed the girl,
stuffing the soiled pants and underwear near her backpack.
She lay down beside the child, her arm under the tangled head.
The three year old sat upright near the cot
watching the others filing through the door
it was quiet except for the squeaking wooden floor
and distant yells, the sound of tires on gravel.

~ ~ ~

The War

Not seen as war,
the word
not
carrying the scream
of abandonment.

Small stains
on linoleum floor
 a school room,
under the desk
where the grandmother
practiced cowering
for planes that
might over
in that coldest war

Whose chill
can never match
the abyss
in which unwary
nine-year-olds
keep falling,
the war
on small girls
and boys.
Where nuclear explosive
winds howl
through
the hearts
left behind, beyond
bearing.

~ ~ ~

Rope Swing

YouTube has video directions
for hanging a rope swing
without climbing the tree,
no ladder, but ingenuity.

The scene, somewhere in America
where black walnut trees
arch over grass,
a chicken coop in the backyard.

The camera moved with the man’s
breath, this is how, he said,
a sheepshank knot, three colors
of rope, a high branch and a blue sky,

Now all you need is summer
and a memory of soaring
a can-do man, a weight attached,
and an over arching throw.

The rope must encircle the limb
doubled, the knot must grow
tighter with each pull
and the tree, pliable and elastic

Must be strong, resilient,
like the citizen who does
knots, rope swings, and freedom
in his own backyard, where you may find

Man the toolmaker, father
of the back and forth through air,
the swing, at his castle that shelters
the children of the king.

~ ~ ~

Used Book

The one who worked with her hands
who had no real speech,
kept silent, watching the slope of time.

That day she stumbled into the library
with a scarf on her head,
in a gray sweater buttoned up
against chill.

She did not want to be noticed,
as the blank space in her head
drove her to the shelves,
to poetry.

She slid the book to her lap
hunched in the chair in the back
and read the lyrics of grief, an
empty doorway and a maple leaf.

Following the black marks on white page
minutely, until at the end of the book,
she found that she could breathe. My
heart leaps up when it beholds…

She put it down. The world is strange
as a heart is strange.
The door, barely passable,
she slipped through.

Opened, the book lay on the chair
where she left it, a thinner book
than when she picked it up,
softened cover, the pages used,
at the last minute, the word came down.

~ ~ ~

The Lion’s Share

He said, ‘Any question about flowers
babies or cleaning,
I expect you to know the answer.’

This, after I said he must know
how long to idle the engine
after the battery was dead.

We live inside our stereotypes
with personal caveats,
in this seventh decade, warm
in contentment.
I ignore him, he ignores me,
and we wake up happy to be alive.

The sun slants southward in this
winter of the known and the partially
guessed – which we discuss,
all cards upon the table,
as slow requiems play in the background
and within our mutual hearing.

I give him the lion’s share;
he cherishes the freewheeling
of my inner heart.

~ ~ ~

The Tale of the Wild Swans

All that is woven is suspect to the linear heart,
reeds twisted in the hand to curl,
wound into baskets, plait and whorl,

Carried in a woman’s arms, what is looked for
but berries stolen from the birds,
windfall apples, fungi from the forest floor?

A white feather dropped, knees on moss,
cheek and hand streaked with soil,
an ear to birth’s recurrent loss,

What can this portend of intricate shifts,
pinnate destiny, where constriction’s
tangled labyrinth balances with gifts?

Woven strands, a braid swirled,
a shirt of nettles, mute laced in and out
with the thin scarred fingers of a girl,

For what thing but a wing for an arm,
for brothers made to fly, curse bound,
with only a sister’s love to break the charm,

Earth beneath the bone, was for them the body’s ease
all they wanted now to love,
the sandy road, the over-arching shade of trees

The gentle bank where men lie prone
with a flit of birds among the briers, rising to a blue
they knew as flight for the hollow boned

The longing for earth under spiraled dome
warm mist rising, the blood’s weft and woof,
twining close-knit inside the bone,

Fair trade for swan winged flight,
this human heart at home,
under weave and turn of day and night,
the land, the road, the hand on stone.

~ ~ ~

Falling Upward

My Ninety year old Mother and I
study physics on video.
Her mind, my mind, reaches into the
medium through all those neutrinos,
for knowledge, an emerald tablet
for the taking.

We tune out the the static of beginnings,
to see what man now thinks most true.
Most probable, most desired,
surmising as we do,
that truth wavers like underwater piers,
in a slant depending on the light.

Two explorers on the edge
of the couch
we seek new land,
to find, just as we foresaw,
a future worth the candle.

Mothers inside matrix,
protective as we are,
we scan the horizon of our near star.
Our children’s destiny must have safe anchor,
and we find it, in the physics of expansion.

The universe in the provinces
of small earths, planetary backwaters,
cradles the human mind,
til it blooms outward
and grows galactic.

Ouranous, is expansion, our final home;
spinning in luminous dark,
tended by invisible matter,
we create care, dark and fertile.

We who were so long mistresses
of the keep,
keepers of baby teeth,
locks of hair,
love notes from the past.
They fall to dust, as dust spirals
downward in the gravity of mass

It is the Keeping On,
where we make our stand
here, on eroding stone,
falling around the curve of spacetime
with its proclivities for inwardness
spiral shapes, and continuance.

In the distant future our descendants,
enlarged in mind, will see everything,
the future and the past.

They will look back and see us,
the primordial ones,
who falling up,
become the Mothers of all.

One lazy summer afternoon,
long after the dying stars
are born again,
they will look back to see you,
Mother of millions,
Sarah to all yet unborn.

They will see you, and love you
as I love you,
blue-eyed ancient one.

Not one spark will be lost! Not one
effort wasted.
The fledgling spirit, nurtured carefully
will rise, limitless and unbound,
which had once long ago,
safe harbor in your heart.

~ ~ ~

Parings

She lights the fire in the hearth easily
these months, this potent act
has become automatic.

Today, when nothing at all happened,
she celebrates with a bathing.
The tub dragged to the hearth,
and the water heats on the wood stove.
She lays out her favorite things,
the favorite things today,
for today is the only day
she ever thinks of anymore.

The soft gown she dried on the fence,
picking off the small red maple leaves that fell
too early,
the clean white towel,
the bar of soap.

Apple parings fall from her fingers to the stones
while blackbirds prate in the branches.
They don’t aim any wisdom at her;
but they know enough to wait for her to go
before they swoop to peck the reddened peels.

She likes the birds well enough
even black and useless. It would not do
to see bright-colored wings in this
stone-colored land.

She has learned captive-like,
to love the treble space,
thin recompense for her truculent heart.

~ ~ ~

Ouroborus

We watch to catch and eat.
Feeding cookie crumbs to the black snake
At the kitchen door, are you surprised to see he
Feeds?

Childhood has frights, fears,
Middle life is purveyor of sturdy disbelief,
The horizon becomes a distant line, it is simple.
Old age gathers in,
Where the falling land touches rising air,
Old age peers and sees a great unknown land-
A ledge, and possibly, monsters.

~ ~ ~

The Falling Star of Ancient Spring

Spring was late that year
when the dinosaurs perished

The long winter bode portents
to mammals who extended tunnels

With an oracular sense
inherent in mammalian brains

As it was, digging deep became
salvation.

The edible roots hung on
to sweetness as they dried

Rich with calories;
the small body needs so little,

Growing brains grew wise to see
the light at the end of the tunnel.

~ ~ ~

The Parted Water

We chronicle best when ruled by doubt,
the history we write, flies high,
with a grubby string
tied to the handmade kite.

It swoops close to the tangling branch
and saves itself, along with us,
with careful, questioning glance.
What was, or only seems to have been.

How far out can you swim,
Heavy with conception
Like aggregate pebbles
weighing you down?

What you thought were verities
were waves upon the sand
washing ad infinitum,
ripples from the hand of man.

We are the judge anointed,
Of all that we can see
a country, a mountain or a hill,
the appointed boundary .

At last, weary of partitioning,
on the lea side of mind,
strip off everything, stand bare,
scrub your skin, cut off your hair,

Sleek now, and ripple-less,
slide transformed into the sea.

~ ~ ~

Left of Bearing

Leave house
leave home
leave flesh
leave bone

leave fear
most of all

leave sense
leave restraint
leave idea
leave complaint

leave comparison
most of all

Leave seeing
leave crying
leave breathing
leave dying

Leave all
most of all,

And take heart.

~ ~ ~

Back to Back

We cheated death each morning
and fell at early dark,
back and forth it was our groove
climb and slide.

Crackerjack we became,
light gave back everything
we never had before, never knew we wanted,
in coffee, and a kiss.

Warriors both, met late, we made
a pact to zen this fight.
Pried the goose whole and hale,
out of the bottle, by diktat.

We owned a recklessness,
gathered up, held close.
Verily, the battlefield told us plain,
there was nothing left to lose.

You shy, grew hard,
I, fighter, divined suppleness,
a fine strategy, to flourish double jointed
for your hand.

~ ~ ~

Garland

When you are old you question
the spiraling around death.
It seems trite to fall around
the thinning circle,
the known star path.

Wizened means
you stand up to whining,
getting real with death,
spurning drama, not wanting
applause.

Wizened is quiet, unassuming.
The mouse that prowls
your baseboards at midnight,
knows you’re there,
that you don’t have time for traps,
peanut butter bait,
and dying by early light.

You don’t have time
for trumpets
and angels on the run
for weird flying vehicles
and sky fire.

You have to get up by dew
and walk the paths to early
opening buds, daisies
for garlands
the size of headbands
to leave on your neighbors’
gates.

~ ~ ~

Chrysalis

Our bodies mock us
lying flesh folding

over upon itself, creasing,
leaving veins.

We, who lived in extremity
have retreated deep inside

Burrowed against
a landscape chilled.

This winter of the body
melts into no spring

Dark grows
the gnarled trunk.

Nymph ingrown we wait
for a releafing

In some realm
beyond the turning star.

We heed the frail
furled wing.

~ ~ ~

Passage of the Burgundy Rose

The mind grown rampant, stringy,
has overtaken
the rose garden of the body,
tenacious, fated with ascendancy
it overrides neat borderlands,
advance guard into the wilderness,
claws and crawls its way
to verdant memories of forests.

There in green the queen of fancy,
sits in state, crisply diademed,
outrageous, purple starred, galactic-leavened,
in curving possibilities of light.

~ ~ ~

Perfection

“…but that’s a good thing. Imperfections are essential for the existence of stars and even life itself…”                                         –bigthink.com

It seems the idea of perfection
belongs to man after all
a postulate imposed
on God,

The strongest evidence
shows asymmetry
out among the trillion trillion
stars

And down here under
blue tinted atmosphere
you and I fit right in,
or me,

That is, speaking for
myself, in my experience, you
still seem to be
perfection,
embodied.

~ ~ ~

The Day-Life’s Kiss

Napping at noon with drowsy eyes
I blink and think I almost view
a truth that wafts away half seen
the meaning of the present dream

I reach for it, my fingers come up mist
fog settles where the mouth has missed
the words hover as if hesitant
to leave a trace – they have no face

Gold lies on the earth,
the result of time over heat,
and truth is vouchsafed the one
who wakes through dreams
and dreams through wakes.

The crack between the worlds sparks shut.
I raise a victory fist, mine all this!
Even in parting and half-missed
I came, I lived, I claimed
the day-life’s longed-for kiss.

~ ~ ~

Attenuated

She cut a string
of paper dolls,
unfolded
in a row,
white paper,
faceless
as the snow.
Faceless all
and yet not
lackluster.
One
touches
his mate
with a finger
one pinches
his neighbor’s
cheek.
A third has hair
that won’t lie
down,
right at the
crown.
There is a fairy tale
going on,
a peasant stole
a goose
from his neighbor,
wanting
golden eggs.
They all stick
together now
marching
in a chain
But lest we think
all that glitters,
is gold:
the standard
changed.
Look,
the hand,
of the last
paper-doll
languidly,
at countermand,
unclasps.

~ ~ ~ fini ~ ~ ~