Saturday, January 31, 2009

SNOW GEM STREAM

This paper, blank and white as conception,
wants the snow of your thoughts to saunter dizzy through
empty sky-mind onto the street of the page and not melt,
but freeze on winter lawns of Microsoft Word for the necessary months
of nothing until springtime tolls its joyful nineteen bells and is clearly
solidly heard in the pristine night time alleys and afternoon cul-de-sacs
of your priceless baseball diamond sparkle and sound.

Frozen ideas turn and ease in the warm hearth of conversation,
liquefy, become water and flow,
transparent and pure as streams in high mountains.

Small dogs bark often and freely, leather mitts fragrant,
smelling of mink oil rubbed in good for seasons of play, snap
and thump sensuously in response to hard ball and fist, toddlers
squeal at their big brothers stranded on second,
there is now no need for anyone in the White House,
Congress or Pentagon to work or pontificate today.

In the green bleachers and workplace lunchrooms
talk of quietude connects, creates what matters,

listening.

Evening opens and falls
soft as a rose,
everything gleams
like seed of pearl
on a woman’s skin,
glistening.

Friday, January 30, 2009

A Time of New Medicine

I went somewhere last night
in deep sleep….
for the first time perhaps.
It was a bit unusual
in some vague way
and even trees
could not tell me
the place’s name.

I liked it there and wish
it were easier to
know it now,
to see it again
clear and plain.

There may have been a foreign language
spoken by the denizens of the place,
and then again this may just
be my imagination.

You see there’s been a lot going on
this week: my daughter is in the hospital
due to a serious, frightening bout
with a perforated appendix
and this has made things strange,
oddly vivid like a strong film
spoken in another tongue with blurred
subtitles.

I’m now back at home two hours away
from her trying to get work done
and it’s hard not to be at her side.
I had planned to return to the hospital and her
on Sunday but I think it’s Saturday after all
for I miss her and need to be present making
certain the care given by nurses and aides and
doctors is the best for my little girl.

She is the most important
person, the vital real
sun of everything in my life.
She is luminous to me, she gleams
in her slow fragile recovery.
I glow, I weep in my protective love for her.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Fear of the Year of the Ox

Year of the Ox

When life hints at less
instead of ‘more’
‘more’ and ‘more’,
as our failing cars bring us
not to the gem shops of yore,
can we still for some
moments the rough rivers
of thought
to discern where and when
we will work, earn
and yearn for
what’s left in store?

Monday, January 26, 2009

first dream of year of the ox

The swollen sea receives
a tide of bulldozed boulders
crashing down this cliff.
The house is cold
this morning.
Coffee with cream
in big cups
and this writing
heats the belly
and heart
right up.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

BOYHOOD'S CAVE

Gone are the days of magic and mayhem
when rounding the bases and summery eves
held sway.

There's a cave door tight bouldered
at the head of a green field,
Come with me there
at midnight's deep hour
to enter the earth
slowly with purpose.

Grip the sharp pick-axe
left by Rumi the poet,
grab its ash handle,
feel the heft.
Swing it strong
downwards, pierce
the dirt floor
where tourmaline nuggets
gleam in the dark.

Towel the hot sweat from your brow
as deeper you dig,
gaze up through black air
at intricate patterns
of boxwork embossed
over centuries
as minerals lace
the high ceiling,
each drop of water
building a home.

Breathe in the still feeling,
the structuring old fluids,
as Indian spirits whisper
their lives.

Carry your history
with the grace of brave ancestors,
now ready to move upwards,
slowly re-enter daytime
in sure footsteps of silence.

Blink your two eyes,
adjust to a shine of gold light,
now back on the playfield
and comfort of front porches,
smile wistfully and sweetly,
many memories evoked.

Hear your chums' laughter,
the sharp cracking of bats,
as horsehide baseballs gallop
then plunge into the perfume
of rosebeds,
disappear in bright instants
like stars shooting through heavens.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Voice Mail

Everything’s exhausted here,
the birch leaves drip
in limp Autumn’s last
inning of heat
and your car, that old
weary heap of scrap
won’t start.
The store up the hill
and your list on the sill
will have to wait.

The Datsun's as
brokedown
stubborn as you
at your best
or worst,
one tank of leaded
gas won't get us
any thrills
(I’ve had my fill)
and it’s a fact that
I really can’t
discern the difference
between these states.

Really.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Welcoming, Opening

mindfulness of the breath,
a single leaf of the tallest
sycamore falling easy
onto earth today.

awareness of feeling,
a sensing with curiosity
the leaf’s texture
in time
between two
fingers
alive in light.

presence in the body,
a locating what is real
in the simple physicality
of this moment,
found again
and again
and again.

entering the temple of being,
a gentle shift
allowing each
tree leaf
feeling body
breath thought
an attentive
spacious
home
of quiet
accepting
care.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Crossroad of Kenosis

Be extravagant and empty!
At break of dawn’s cold call,
relinquish your every craving,
squander the secure camel
for a card game,
let the smallest prayerful
clinging be left broken
back on clumped, scorched sand
at your neurotic forsaken camp.


Rest,
reflect,
consider
on the long, climbing,
companionless
walk through acres of crisp stalks
and thick unwoven vines,
circle the clean wreck
tangled mirror gleaming
against a single
Sycamore trunk and linger,
look straight into your one
true face:

Quick!
Act kenotic.
Carelessly, courageously
take
the unknown inside
your dark
uncovered home,
where the guest,
this scintillating,
close friend of chaos
and confusion,
may become quiet
unchosen balm,
coherent and composed,
in this flowing completion,
all is strangely calm.

Friday, January 16, 2009

SONG OF PURE THANKS

Give thanks to the early morning whoosh
of freeway cars and cups of coffee,
black steaming, strong tasting
on the lively receptive tongue.

Give thanks to the gleaming ground
of firm wooden floors
and the verdant earth, green and holding
each precious, sentient being.

Give thanks to the chirps and squawks
of birds aflight and the busy rumbling of alley trucks,
as their fertile sounds reach our open ears,
signaling: “new day”! “new day”! “new day”!

Give thanks to the several senses,
such deft messengers on thresholds,
delivering surprises and smiles
day in and day out.

Give thanks to poetry, the bridge
of language and to the wet
cave-worlds of rich deep dreaming
where people are made more whole.

Give thanks to the crisp air of space,
playground of circling hawk, Cessna plane
and kite fliers of blue sky Saturdays,
all soaring free and grand
in their own buoyant breezy time.

Give thanks to a room full of such good friends
from many decades and places,
these men and women who grace our lives
our hearts on meandering paths
in these delicious, turning years.

Give thanks to the glee and laughter of playful children,
whose bright smudged faces and leaping souls
fulfill future’s large promise in full.

Give thanks to animals great and small
of varied voices and habitats, pleasures and gifts,
who share the vivid world of instinctive nature
and rainbow of color with all.


Give thanks to mother mountain and father ocean
who drape our souls, our skin and bodies
in love’s shielding, enduring fountain.

Give thanks out loud for time’s great drumbeat
in whose sacred sound and percussive pulse
ancestral music resounds and comforts,
transforming all, in each blessed season
lifting further and higher!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

SubMission Accomplished

Xanadu it’s not, this perverted
station of the cross ghosted
white with slaughtered innocents
by the Roman alma mater
of Christian soldiers,
marauders hot with Muslim
blood on prayerful vile hands,
hordes who ram and roam
like brain dead soul/
less hoodlums
roughshod over
peeled strips of viscera,
guts spilled forth on earth
ripped and raped,
raped and ripped again,
and shards of incense burned
and blessed
to hide the iron smell
of the dying’s rusted blood
from the trembling’s living hell.

The Vatican’s stately treasure dome,
bloated afloat with castrated pontiffs,
decreed these ends indeed,
scheming in a sour sea
of sunken arrogance, sends its blasphemous
knighted bastards to kill and maim
in the hallowed name of Christ,
one more execrable barbaric
excursion of blackest dankest night
into clawed stripped skin
of stinking carrion,
unscabbed craters of craggy
babbling horrors, piled insane
screaming scrabble to unname
this shattered slender
strip of battered arid ground,
blood-baptized forever more,
the wholly wounded Holy Land.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Soil

some mornings plod so slow,
at least on the fields and sod
of my green and emptied mind--
that thought and image
lie fallow on the dew
of dark redolent dirt,
mostly unknown
unformed,
such exquisite
quiet
behind.

LET'S

let’s surmise love’s best flavor hasn’t been tasted,
that Pyrenees’ peaks are snow covered beauties,
and when she fell soft as Spring rain
back into this green fragrant meadow,
it’s proof accidents on purpose
somehow do happen.

Basque hermits on hillsides in evening do chant
songs written in hot blood of unknown grandfathers,
they look onto wide rivers swollen with surprise,
as smoke curls like sky writing telling them stories,
pierces old grammars beyond far mountain tops,
discerning the message written above,
slowly the men and fat sheep begin breaking camp.

the volcans of Mexico repeat my last name,
threaten physical death, may drive me insane,
yet their clarion call seduced me again
no matter what else, I must break all my chains.

is a returning lover a dormant eruption
of dangerously great unburied yearning,
clenched heat hidden
deep under pressure,
and shall I watch for first signs
of earth’s voice waking
and pray that her crater
quiescently holds
as I gaze here strong
and direct
to learn and master
these red flaming origins of fire?

the men of Spain teach me in silence--
a guitar speaks softly like melt water flowing,
their tales of waiting and sweetness of music
within long night’s immense starry fold,
recall that not only volcanoes
awaken the soul and true self
from sleep’s darkened
encapsulating stupor.


Humble words of earth’s drift
and skylight’s quiet
teach and remind so very well
of no need for more angst,
earth-shattering
adrenaline hours,
when above us so high
in fields of silence,
free of all raging
and stark mountain building,
peace and contentment
are writ ours’ to know now,
feel all fully
and open-armed,
behold,
wow!

Curled Smoke

darkness blankets
the alley outside,
one earthen bowl
of bananas
dozes inside,
six curved yellow sleepers
spoon on the table
and join at the tip,
face and retrace
my soft lidded
eyes,
piano-playing
like curled smoke
in the cave of
the next room
captures may mind,

you nap
on the stub
of a sofa,
whisper a sigh…..

Saturdays in the City

Art screams its strident regrets
and belts out street corner
be-bop high hopes on Saturdays
like a fat jukebox stocked
with shiny quarters,
when kids from the east side
rip canvas sheets from ship’s sails,
and boats on the polluted Hudson--
hapless rusty beautiful boxes
of faded color and watery romance
forget to float for only a moment,
sink or swim time for certain,
and maybe neither you nor I
makes it home before darkness settles
for a modest dinner of hot dogs,
sauerkraut and beer
and our ritualized mellifluous
6 o’clock news,
we two dazed,
stimulated celebrants
amongst skyscrapers,
subway stops and infinitely
appearing and disappearing
talismans of city life
in fields of abstract play,
happily burrowing in these,
our warm and meandering,
honeyed urban days.

PORTLAND SUNDAYS

the tinkling piano keys
remind me of home.
the dining room at four
when Sunday afternoons
smelled happy and good.
my mom in her apron,
smile braving
her freckled face,
gave me, her oldest
boy child,
a calm nourished
place.

the piano keys tinkle
and toast in fireplace
warmth,
pot roast floats homeward
on a gravy slathered sea,
grease potatoes bloom
with onion, garlic
and bay leaf,
hot berry pie sings out
our sweetest dessert,
as February sunshine fades
in winter’s broad arms,
music dissolves
gently in time,
six eager faces soften
while we sit down
famished together
at this long wooden
table,
these Lautz
family members
at this blessed
moment,
a kooky
grateful
crew,
guts growling
in anticipation
of taste bud
titillation.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Circuitous Peugeot Apology

wincing and rambling
on top of, along
spiraling freeway’s rock
strewn shoulder,
we crawl in cars
like sheep dazed
mashed dizzy,
all wooly in throngs of congestion,
glancing your way now, you look a little older,
we might mince our words stuck in such traffic,
prancing in France like this I feel slightly bolder:
altho’ we all admittedly in our mildness refrained
(no question),
as the twin daughters of cowardice and denial
dampened courage like rain,
if truth be disclosed,
we should have told you
he’d expired on the table,
while plentiful strong staff,
able like a fortress,
helplessly surrounded
his great puffed up
pink swollen
bulk of a body,
the whole damn townsfolk,
(even skinny spinster school marm named Mabel)
knew of his tragic
theatric dissolution,
his premature evacuation
became a foregone conclusion,
his completely forgettable
undeniable demise,
a rarefied kind of quasi-resolution,
his dramatic upending
I saw with open eyes
days prior to you darling,
and yes no doubt
let’s no longer pretend,
that was clearly unfair,
inconsiderate to send
you off on an errand
while he breathed
and heaved hard
his last sputtering
sigh.

Where and how we might journey
from here in bad weather,
in our quaint silver Peugeot
with your untimely grief
and my flagon of guilt,
well, whether the south
coast of old Spain
or Idaho’s golden hills,
at this very second
as we swerve on s-curves,
it isn’t so clear dear
if I’ve ample nerve
to comfort you through
the circles concentric
ahead,
pray tell me how
to help regain
your muscle,
our verve.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Now Shaking, Now Crying

We should be weeping and wailing
for the many dead and dying,
the wounded and crushed,
people pounded in Gaza
for two weeks of hell,
their dear children on fire,
grandfathers gone mute,
soul weary with sorrow,
and I watch the news,
from my brown floral chair,
sit still unbelieving,
now shaking, now crying.

We should rail and rant
against Israeli attackers
and the American apologists
who march in lock step
wherever they’re taken
by stale guilt and groupthink,
lobbyists who lord over
Congress of scant courage
and weapons dealers poisoned
by greed’s bad serum,
the scum and scourge
of toxic chicanery.

It’s so goddamn mistaken
to delude ourselves further
that horrific acts
of pure retribution,
preemptive warfare,
raw hateful violence,
or antiseptic killing
dissociated from reality,
thus dangerously
chilling,
of dividing always in two,
can ever hope to offer
the tender bud
of new healing
into this insane
situation.

We should imprison at once
armament sellers of no conscience,
these merchants of death
who kill strangers by proxy,
who supply the fearful
the vengeful
with the blood curdling means
to maim and to drain
the world and its people
of its promise and innocence,
its youth and its elders,
its plainspoken simple
and goodhearted ones.

I moan tonight for the shards of pain,
some sadly bought
with our dirty dollars,
inflicted by the numb patriots
of addiction
and their two-headed chimera
of false strength and control
onto refugees caged and unseen,
frightened, bewildered,
enraged as well,
who like their human counterparts
imprisoned in fear
across arbitrary borders
and of a different religion
only wish to stroll easy
in safety and in peace,
to village market
for green olives,
good bread
and dried fruit,
a bunch of fresh
bright flowers
to place in cool
sweet water
inside a bright oval vase,
yes, it shines like sunlight
on a small kitchen table
where the mischievous son
gone to hospital today
often painted and ate,
teased friends,
sat smiling,
laughed loudly,
spilled his milk
and played.

Although the madness
seems eternal,
unstoppable infernal,
we must not ignore it
but with skill
and compassion
deplore what
we all do to demonize
those others unlike us.
I pray and implore you,
let’s talk,
learn to listen,
give up guns
yield missiles
cease attacking,
link our arms together,
as feet start to share
the same forward track,
imagine people
with different language,
songs and life stories,
belief systems diverse,
as sisters and brothers
neighbors and cousins
who all must walk on,
after our first
struggling
full breaths
and wild
lusty births,
this beautiful
fragile
rich soil,
love’s resource
and true depth,
the one
spacious and precious,
our dear mother
earth.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Beginner's Mind, Beginning

the gray milky day
seeping through
these somber
slowly waking
streets,
this lost internet
connection
frustrating my
self-centered
intention for
creative
communication,
anticipation
of seven clients
to be heard
and seen
with care
in the next
eight or nine
hours of a Friday,
and no idea really
of what to write
this morning,
leads me
plodding on
to one
and only one
pristine,
perhaps un/
avoidable,
conclusion:

(sorry, to construct
something specific
would only foster
delusion)

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Tzintsunsan

the Aztec village of Tzintsunsan
sits on the edge of a lake
where time slows
to an afternoon hum
as the colorful vibrations
of hummingbirds
throughout history
sing out vividly
of men fishing
in wooden boats
for food,
murderous conquest
by foreign marauders
and beautiful babies
born of brown Indian
mothers, swaddled
in straw,
asleep on small beds
made from dried reeds
grown in mud
underneath
the living
water.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

My Favorite Scene from Altman's 'Three Women'

the red coca-cola truck lumbers
in silence across the desert
at noon's most torrid hour,
shimmering waves of heat
rise magnetically off its bright body
in patterns from elemental physics
through still empty air,
our thoughts
our senses
our skins
are mesmerized
completely,
as a mundane crimson van
bearing only one
single brand
of bottled soda
becomes fully
transformed
in its own
mysterious
effervescence:
ascendant,
celestial,
hopeful.

GAS PASSER

I passed gas once
on a long stretch
of Texan asphalt,
my truck's almost empty
tank wincing
as the Shell, or was it
Texaco?, sign faded
into the creosote
like so much wind
from cabbage or broccoli
or thick crust cheese pizza
without those
little lactase tablets
tucked into my
shipwrecked belly
under this stranded
cowpoke’s bulging belt.

Sacrifice

they say Christ squandered himself
completely, a living miracle
of creative surrender,
heart cracked so wide open in love
like a rabbit thunked and crushed
by a marauding unfeeling 10 wheeler
outside a juke box rest stop
somewhere in Nevada,

chaotic airborne sagebrush
and thick toxic dust storms
clogging our lungs
our vision
can’t block our amazed
uplooking wounded faces
from gaping beseechingly
everywhere for him,

how he makes
EVERYTHING sacred.

Monday, January 5, 2009

I Want

I want language to leap
from my lips,
a rocket of love caressing
and crossing enemy lines,

I want words to hold
bare truth
and straight talk
with you
and you
and yes,
even you---
dawn’s rosy pool
of evaporating dew
lapping up apple blossom’s
pinkish,
openly
reaching
beseeching
arms.

Human language
is the tenderness
of fruit trees
silently waiting
for the sharp
sweet pang,
the pitched high wail
of destiny’s child
birthed into being today
in the gorgeously
slanting,
dew-dropping
sunshine
of May……

OLD TIME RELIGION

I don't know
for certain if
there is a God
or god or goddess,
or pantheon,
if you will,
of skyward
or earthbound
divinities,
but I do know when
time and space
are savored
open-heartedly
and slow
in this stew
of experience
we call the Real,
it doesn't matter
to me what's
ultimate
or not,
besides last
night's rain
and today's
blue dome
overhead
and those kids'
from the neighborhood
gleeful squeals
of life
wildly
announcing
itself in play
and sweet
entrancing song
on the park's
moist
and
glistening,
green
green
green
grass.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

A Family Move

those bastards stole
more than a day or two
of your childhood's
sweetest life
in their lassitude,
self-concern….
and monstrous
addiction to strife.

what was once filled with a motley
chaotic parade of Schwinn
and JC Higgins' bikes,
snowballs tossed at busses
and joyful friends with food
(rice krispies coated with parmesan
and caramel sundaes to build a world on),
laugh--tracked tv sets playfully
droning on at night,
became turgid and thickened gray
with stifling fog obiquitous
and heavy on the heart
like a psychiatric ward
laden dark with sorrow
and untranslatable scripts
of stellazine
after an 8.0 earthquake
finally subsides its pounding,
leaving especially the young
wandering numb and mute,
seeing through serrated
cataracts of fear,
more lonesome than songs
can say in words,
walking the sterile earth
strewn with walls broken
down into crazy puzzle pieces,
booze infused shards of glass
from 'Family' liquor stores,
overturned abandoned palm trees,
stand alone phone booths
collapsed onto the streets---
oh, these streets of silent trauma
which string out
straight and so inert
like cracked desert dirt
stretched sad and dumb
and desolate,
going nowhere
after the world
exploded
in front of your tired feet.

it's all become so distant
from what could be called
magic,
god damn littered
with ruined hopes
and goals,
your little brother's life
gone tragic,
horribly incomplete.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Dream Reversal

there's a difference in me now.

the dreams have all but stopped.
although I miss these cinematic treks,
Himalayan hikes among snowbound
plundered poems, nighttime now
sleeps alone,
with no pictures, stories
nor blundered roaming
to entertain or join
my resting body
in the halting dark.

the days have changed too.
it's as if the dreams
have been deposited
inside thin beams of light
under the oleander
and liquid amber leaves
turned orange and gold
amidst sandwiches,
returned phone calls
and filling right to the top
with Arco gas down the street
once or twice a week
(I'm glad it's gotten cheap).

there's a way down now
since I've been awake
that feels like up
more of the time
no matter
what route I take.
I'm happy about that.

the future ahead feels so too,
it's shimmering
like a lake.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

TAINTED QUERY

Why do I think
so easy of loss,
feel cold empty
gray as the North Sea,
lack the pink illusion
of love, the green
sturdy tree
of true hope,
recall bruised lonely
blue months
and moments
of sorrow, drink
considerable endings’
thin bitter milk
with no color?

Mother, if you’re here
answer me please,
now at the base
of the stair,
speak through your tears,
your lostness,
your salt.
I ask you
to hold dear
in your chapped
freckled hands
my sad
anxiously yearning
heart.

For I’m a small
tender boy
trapped inside
crusted black
contours of pain,
crouched down
in a capsule
of burnt shriveled
skin within
your parental
command.

January 1, 2009

Traveling into 2009

When the unique crimson strength
of wanderlust and the thick colored
palette of curious friends
are painted on the very same canvas
and time of our lives
by an angel or two
whose descent onto our soft
pillowed heads
at three or four in the dark of morn
did surely occur,
just as showers
of rain fall often
on the wet
glistening
streets of Seattle,

we do have much
to thankfully shout
and smile in mischief
about,
as this miracle train rolls along
through verdant Andalusian fields
and deep into new year’s delights,
transparent dust rising fast and high
into vast cerulean sky
and the most golden gleaming
palace of lights we’ve seen
or yet ever felt
in these,
our tumbling
and stumbling,
triumphal days
to date!


January 1, 2009