at a poetry workshop when

one squashed teardrop
streams her face

then falls
underneath
the floor

where hands of light
from a clock called
  
grief is a river

gleam all night

Drifting back

Eyes closed

Body still

To where
This whole
Thing started

(I know not how)

You’re carried forth

A newborn star
Mystery’s thrill

Into future’s web

This eternal now

   The Walk

Knowing her is a slow cautious

walk, a grasping then a stagger 
up a tenement stairwell

in dim light,

where smell of patchouli sifts

still air and scrawls of graffiti

are engraved everywhere.

Each step arduous, harder

than the last, uncertain

if these cold stones can

hold the weight of my desire,

the freight of untamed worry,

my need.

Finally, breath heaving mind spinning

        I find her faded door:

a paint splotched wall at which I stare

and stare, bolted tight inside and out,

I ask you my hidden witnesses---

was she ever even here?

Do not squander

these blossoms

quivering in

afternoon light

but gaze down often

onto this path

of blazing color

strewn before you

with thankful eyes

with simple heart.

   Waiting In Vain

Steam rolls off the first cup

of black coffee as women’s

voices rise from next door,

then in a moment, evaporate.

I’m waiting for my muse,

she’s tardy, AWOL for days,

on another bender perhaps,

or at best lazing in a field

of desiccated summer grasses

and 50 year-old palm trees

stunted and sparse, lousy

minimalist art at canyon bottom;

she’s dozing now, dazed in the heat

beyond reach of this pen, this vacated

page, this man’s bland mind, pondering

meandering onwards 
as the chipped cup cools,

begins its further dwindling.

Another Soft Landing

something shifts

in the cool bed

as early light wafts

through window smudge.

quiet overtakes herds

of wild garbage trucks 

and hoofed horned creatures

of his wayward imagination

in the alley back of the building

as he begins to budge

and a clipper ship drifts

from sleep’s foreign horizon

to enter calmer waters

of this shallow harbor.

one by one,

his warm feet step

without thinking

or looking back

onto shore's floor

towards the tiny kitchen

and coffee.

Sunglasses meet
morning fog

to obscure

blue skies,

still, sight soars
towards unseen

space

from bleary

open eyes....

wearing sunglasses

morning's fog
obscures blue
skies

while sight soars
towards the great
unseen

from your weary
trusting eyes....

echoes crash
off memory's cliffs
within
our body's breathing

wearing sunglasses
in fog
your vision
clears

I Give You A Poem That Starts With Cliché

We all die. And whether I drop

Down to the asphalt like a shooting

Star, one moment here the next not,

Or fade in a soft coasting towards

The great below, a rheostat of life

Dialing into darkness beneath breath,

Or perhaps disappear like a melted bank

Of tired ice and rock

Slogging into April puddles,

Today running a hot trail near home, the satisfying crunch of gravel and dirt

Underfoot, and then suddenly through sweat-drenched eyes

Seven jacarandas revealed and shimmering in a motley row,

Wild life smiling for no reason 

Underneath springtime shawls of purple snow.

  How Evolution Might Work    

    

Can you hand your feet over to an untrodden road,

wander and wonder, meander beyond

your grandparents’ immigrant lives?

Can you allow intoxication to enter your life

in rain-sifted moonlight glazing your face

on that spacious trail ahead where a silver

stream roars unceasingly, pours over granite

and sandstone as July’s sun sings high above?

Your bronze skin warmed by this path and by strangers

with dogs, backpacks and tents upon whom you gaze

softly, sometimes befriend;

warmed too by your triumphs and day’s hidden dangers,

the copious blunders you’ve agreed somehow to shoulder,

this burden of tiredness followed by shimmering mornings

when you breathe easy and slow, when you’re heartened

by dark coffee in a blue tin cup, a stand of birch trees

in breezes swaying, two squirrels that levitate up

a thick Douglas fir.

Air tingles and sparkles as you shout out a tune found

in your dreams, then bloom into daylight stumbling

and flailing, soberly cavorting along this stone river twisting.

The world’s become your tavern where nothing’s wasted

nor cloistered, and you a drunk thanking his ancestors,

even making friends with old failures and angers, aging

towards mercy, towards stillness, giving and growing.

You’re a sunburnt monk of evolving surprises, a mad

Bacchus dancing in thirst-slaking moonshine, savoring

every slip-up, each step and each stagger,

every well tasted sip of Life’s river flowing.

Holding On

After the storm

subsides a pungency

of sage arising.

A cold steering wheel

grips my aching thoughts

and hands.

All the self-control required

to drive tonight

on that salted solitary road

when your missing voice

and silvery hair, warm

hand in mine, remembered

taste and scent

across these many months

and miles

still such sadness holds.

         transparencies

carried by life lightly we become

transparent as a glass of cool water

illumined in sunshine, a child’s

giggling lifted by an evening breeze

from the house next door,

butterfly wings soaring

through backyard bushes,

or the way the convicted killer

discovers mercy gazing  

towards his victim’s spouse
before he leaves this earth.

       Heart of Sacrifice

They say Jesus became Christ

when he squandered himself

completely, dying into

a living miracle of creative surrender.

Heart cracked so wide open in love,

like a rabbit crushed suddenly

by a marauding 18-wheeler

outside a juke box rest stop

somewhere in Nevada

where chaotic airborne sagebrush

and toxic dust storms of greed,

fear and craving clog

our lungs

our vision

our life

but can’t stop our astonished

wounded faces

from yearning

and searching

everywhere for him

and the true heart

of his teaching.

And how, like a meandering

river woven from blue sky,

empty desert and galaxies

of kindness,

he makes everything

sacred.

                       Lonely Planet

I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it.

As close as that pint of ice cream here right now in the freezer, the kitchen

15 feet away. Instantly, she’d felt like home.

No, her third floor walk-up apartment in a strange yet strangely familiar

part of the planet on a chilled November day felt like home.

The small kitchen overlooking a church and field, the warm bath after the long flight

and an hour driving to her town through drizzle past bare trees, then trout with beetroot

soup, cherry wine and homemade chocolate cake for our first dinner, how tall and pretty

she was in person at the bleak Eastern European airport that reminded me of a rust-belt

bus station. We hugged and I thought “I’m glad I came.”

Here in Loreta’s small home, comfort and belonging were redolent of family holidays

when dad remained calm, even friendly, unusually tender.

Weeks later, buying the card for her downtown, I felt awkward and numb, standing in line

with laughing school children buying afternoon snacks, old women purchasing chicken

and onions for supper. Then the long walk over the blue bridge past the funicular and up

the steep hill one last time; placing the card on the kitchen table, later on a couple of drinks

our final night while she sat across the table and watched patiently. No, more like she tolerated

my wish to have a beer at a neighborhood bar I’d read about in the 'Lonely Planet' guidebook 
to Lithuania.

Two weeks’ later my new underwear and socks bought for the trip, forgotten 
that final dark morning in a dresser drawer next to the new bed that we never 
slept in together, arrived in a brown envelope at my mailbox, a small candle and note 
tucked within, something about keeping the light.

I dished up a big bowl of gelato, not sure I kept the candle.

    At 70

this August morning,

two manhole covers

oil-stained and tarnished,

but in reality,

second and third base

shining in the middle

of Bryce Street,

where this moment

now and six decades

ago

I am free--

head down, legs

pumping past

Chris Turner’s house

on a mid-summer day,

flying towards home again.

                             For Jevan

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns..” - Homer

                       The boy’s bat cracks!

percussive snap of smooth ash, mitts thunk, hands clap,

heads lift up, white dot orbits deep, sails and leaps

onto green, kids perched on dugout bench once lulled to sleep

stand and scream, a dozen banshees adrift in wild dream

as batter sprints counter-clockwise base to base, dust blurs

fans’ sight, sweat streaks across face, dulled cleats bite infield dirt, 
his hat now tossed, cap’s flown off as rounding third he touches 
bag tight, almost out of breath, on his mind one last peak to climb 
with head down runs so fast despite hurt shins slides chest first 
onto home plate:

                                       ‘SAFE!!’

                                    dad’s proud

                (fans stand!) team shouts, high fives,

                       man alive! ecstatic grins everyone.

Diane

getting to know you

is pure delight,

i see now

how stars feel

emanating light.

 Bringing water to

   a thirsty melaleuca

     after coffee, early 

       

       Sunday morning’s

        easy pleasure 

          in full sunshine.

                        Noir

It’s early, yet the day’s dwindled into pieces.

Night came fast, sucked all the light from flowers in the park.

Green is gone for now, replaced by light’s orphans who know

no windows.

These sidewalks straight as Kansas with misspelled ancestors’ scrawled

across stained concrete in Polish, Navajo, Finnish and Romanian.

As the slivered moon escapes its lair, he can’t stop thinking of her,

her thick brown hair, the skin on her arms, the way she sat under the tree,

liquid amber he believes.

Even gas stations won’t take this pocket of counterfeit coins under their acres

of neon glare, that sputtering cloud of insects, those sodden leaves.

Parking the car with its empty tank on a street aching in the quiet, he re-ties

his shoe laces and sets out into the black. It’s dank as a steam bath.

A drizzle turns to rain, descent of holy water from a foreign home dumping

cold under unforgiving sky.

This gray dome, blind and deaf to all he’s been afraid to ask. A cracked

cell phone forsaken on the curb.

Out Of This World Breakfast Plot

a cat opens into light

like the day pawing

at the window.

takes around the house

a furtive look, a visual

see-sawing.

then from the kitchen

where no one cooks

while no one’s watching,

aims her clawing

at the luscious planet Venus

to begin a quick

and vicious nibbling

of earth’s bodacious neighbor.

or so I think she’s thinking.

     Communion

First the rowdy adolescents
hit the sky--
three butterflies

spin, dive, and soar
in sudden flutters of ivory and orange.

Just below
their field of play
maturity holds sway.

Four diaphanous wings
touch stillness on a stem

as tantric partners

swoon, glisten

and sway,

the entire translucent day.

And now I’m bravely dancing

with what’s been missing,

bringing your absence close

enough to kiss,

yet, in some ways, through what's
been eclipsed, our ship still drifts

and I am at bay.

                                           Non-Sense

“It seemed good, the clotted darkness that came everyday.” John Ashberry

‘and what was, or shall we say is, so undeniably good about the coagulated black smudge on the teapot thrung or perhaps flung on the peat moss of the Scotsman’s forested backyard smidgen of space’, I queried the stumbled poet down on his bad knees, eroded hips and worse luck, as we lumbered into the Ashberrian spout

of far-fetched verse and what’s worse, thought we knew what was being said,

within reason, of course….

“the pillars of ante-bellum mansions

were all treasonous and tumbling

while the distended stomachs and cracked lips

of horrid writers rumbled and grumbled through undigested

shivers, those confused slivers of mid-winter night,

that torrid darkness devoid of any light…”

                  Will You Be Ravished?

‘Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There’—Carl Whitaker

Can you step out of your cage of busyness—

that self-inflicted habitual scourge---

and relinquish for an hour the rules

of social engagement and consensual behavior  

so that you might saunter, stroll, or better yet meander

to a nearby woods, empty lot, city park, seashore,

or wandering stream where if fortune smiles and you

are quiet long enough you may be ravished by that fallen leaf

shimmering like copper in the sun, these tangled vines,

that sudden dragonfly, this luminous cloud and that skittering rabbit?

Will you allow yourself the nourishment you truly need and crave?

Will you let this more-than-human world have its wild way with you?

         A Question of Listening

Can you hear at the heart of our lives

a ROAR incessant and blue, a tulip

of sound blooming wildly true, a voice insistent

as a Sunday church picnic of crazy desire,

tearing and sundering these borders and views

of life's squandered fires by the many tamed

and asleep who murmur and mutter in normalcy’s name

while ignoring the scourge of this one earth’s demise

as they kneel erect in row after row of fresh-polished

desolate pews?