white butterflies float
and scatter
like bits of flying glass


or tiny linen handkerchiefs


along this hard-packed
path I run on.

SOLSTICE

The hawk circles high overhead.


Again and again she glides and
floats in the open sky above me
like the soul of a friend or a new/
found poem.


I call out to her raucously as I tumble
down from the mountain peak
on this day of the Winter Solstice
when darkness overcomes light.


I’m exhilarated and half-crazed, wild
with grief and hope and this unplanned
embodied bravery, this wholehearted
stumbling towards the bottom.


Yet the silent beauty of this solitary winged
creature, regal and pure in late afternoon’s
spacious coolness, the diffuse oranges and
yellows of the setting sun, these many angled
hunks of granite rock I clamber easily on,


over, around and down this happy steep
slope, and yes, these bright, newborn
surprises of Winter—tender green blades
of grass—are held within a soft haze
of marine air, a diaphanous invitation


from beyond, oozing in slowly from
the distant coast. I kneel here on muddy
ground and pray ‘yes’ and ‘thanks’
for this day and all who inhabit its shine


and shadow as I fall further and quietly,
now nearly breathless in my own animal
earthen circling, homewards toward a cup
of coffee and comforting warmth, as she


the sudden visitor, ethereal and so real,
Winter’s auburn herald, disappears
northwards into such a final immensity.

Ocean

The ocean shimmers out beyond the orange buoys.

Daylight bends back towards tomorrow.
Maybe rain will fall again one day in this town
of shopping malls and desiccated desert ground.

 And then you may return with a bracelet

of green jade on your right wrist  and
a basket woven of small surprises, salty, wet
on your smooth tanned back. A robust quiet
ripening, your favorite calling card.

Then the ocean’s play with light and wave

will make sense once more.


Then hope shall erupt and rise from the nestled shore
like the slender dancer drunk and lusty wild
at a gypsy wedding.

And then and only then the New Orleans funeral marchers shall

swagger single file down Bourbon Street on a shining day soaked
all golden like dervish saints, their music spilling over
with such sweetness, salt and swelter.

                                  Winter

There is a blizzard on the mountain.  There is no tea.

The wailing wind the only sound tonight.

An old Japanese man hefts a load of firewood on his

aching back up the steep mountainside. Fog and ice
coat the slope.

It is late. His hair is white.

There is no tea. There is a blizzard here.

Wind whines and whips the night. A lament like abandoned animals

might make takes this empty space for a crazy ride.

A bereft fright devoid of any light his only animation.

Trudging through thick pockets of cloud uphill, feet

slog and slip in sticky mud pasted across blades
of rock that destroy boots and frostbit toes
in a moment’s boyish mistake.

A patina of webbed thought covers all he sees or

hears, may touch or smell, sucks life straight out, leaves
him bent right over in the frigid air.

There is no tea. There is a blizzard here. It persists perhaps

for one hundred forsaken miles.

Alone.   He, and we, do trek on through the freezing haze,

deliverance whispers our murky fates in names we barely
know.

Yet….where shall we go,

                                           and how, for whom,
and why?


There is no tea.  There is a blizzard here.

FIRST KISS

 

The first day in your country, after I’d arrived from the summer-like weather of southern California, you showed me the hilltop monastery taken over

by the Nazis who ruined the spacious chapel filled with gleaming icons

of Christ and the saints into a horse stable of desecration; then after

the war a few years’ later the Soviets took their turn at rampage,

transformed it into a psychiatric hospital for dissidents and their political
re-calibration, their psycho-social castration, doing their best to scrub all remaining traces of god and human holiness from the stone walls.

A friendly Lithuanian nun gave us an informal tour, you thoughtfully translated her strange words as we walked among these stone-walled rooms coated with so much human joy and misery, solace and danger conjoined. Later, we ambled down the hill through stands of leafless birches and evergreens taking photos of each other in our heavy winter coats.

Afterwards we ate lunch in the cozy hotel near a lake where I joked about the old balding guy with a puny pony tail and his sour faced friend seated across from our table being Russian gangsters, they’d driven up to the place in an old gray Mercedes spewing smoke out the rear. You ordered a Chinese dish with fish and rice --I had a delicious pancake with flavorful mushrooms and gravy, a traditional meal you said.

After lunch we drove a few miles across the city to the special cemetery where your beloved uncle and grandmother are buried. You parked near the entrance and we sat silently still in your front seat on that cold day in November.

I was scared to tell you how much I’d wanted to kiss you in the hard wooden pews of the old church an hour or two before, but jet-lagged and lonely I gathered courage somehow and began to speak now about this desire to touch you, to begin to bridge this distance between us.

It didn’t go well for some minutes as you seemed startled, your blue

eyes receded further away and I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake
traveling all these hours and miles to meet after those long happy talks
on Skype.

You sat a little stunned, at the steering wheel as we watched people

with heavy coats, somber and silent, eyes on the ground, walk out
of the cemetery on that cold November day in ones and in twos. I don’t
know if I’d ever felt so alien, so strange, almost homeless there in the passenger seat of your car while my mind careened, imagining a trip
ended before it had begun.

How it then happened I still cannot exactly remember, but suddenly

out of this uncomfortable quiet your moist lips met mine and our eager

tongues found each other in an urgent hunger, strong and delicious, striking us

both like a pleasurable lightning bolt, and there parked in front of the Kaunas

cemetery on that gray day in late Autumn tucked into the front seat of your silver Volvo our lives began this lovely bewildering dance of two persons coming together at a shifting boundary of life and death, an illusory fence

really where headstones and crumbling monasteries stand rising

from a past of loss and pain and guide us like birch trees leafing
shyly in early Springtime on the Baltic into the mystery of what yet
we might become.

Common Knowledge

If real faith is knowing in our deep bones
that through empty space we are forever
free-falling, true joy is sitting silently


in a vast park on top of a picnic table
with a friend whose mother will die
from cancer also and suddenly being


surrounded by small flying seahorses.
The day is dazzling, the sky so vividly blue,
a stand of birch trees in the distance
at the edge of the greenest grass
you’ve ever seen.


There is nothing, nothing, anywhere
to fear. You wake up laughing,
happier than you’ve felt for years.

Dear Steve

I’m remembering that last poem you helped me with, the one about talking  

to a new friend on Skype being like a road trip through eastern Europe

to a glistening lake in summer, and how you found the noun ‘goodness’  I used

to stand for what had happened between herself and me, as ‘ruinous’—your

word there, not mine---and how your reaction confused me, how in response 

 

to your probes and pushing me to be more clear, I tried to tell you what this ‘goodness’ meant to me, then how I backed off from our dialogue when you persisted in finding my word as ‘ruinous’ to the poem; whether it was my

 

fragile ego or a strong sense of what I wanted to say no matter what you

the accomplished poet , you the teacher thought, probably both, I lost

the chance that night to learn how to write poetry that sings more powerfully, more humanly perhaps.

 

And now a week later you’re gone and I didn’t find the time or guts to tell you  this Steve, and maybe you were right that ‘goodness’ didn’t really convey anything real or true or useful in writing my little story, but all I can say is yes,

I was pissed off and felt let down in that difficult late night email conversation,

 

and yes, I do miss your vast generous heart, your straight-on rambunctious intelligence that shone such sensuous light onto all our lives, your commitment  

 to say it like it is to help a fledging poet say it better, your challenging me to write and re-write until it’s as clear and pristine as that good day at the imagined lake in the Baltics.

 

Yes dear Steve, you master poet in old blue jeans,

you mirthful mensch with that torn crotch in faded

dungarees, your eyes ablaze with mischief and

earthy fierce compassion,

 

I miss what I will call

your goodness, now.