Poets
are the keepers of longing, ache and ache for the ache of aching, take and take for the ache of taking, lose and lose in the loss of losing love and love for the love of loving want for the want of wanting wanting, long for the flower to grow from stone. Poets are the keepers of longing, guardians of desire-- suffering in smoke, they long for fire. Love Poem What happens to love, that hummingbird of desire, laden with nectar? Who sees its final landing or its noiseless fall into the forest? Or its gentle spiral glide, its slow sinking, a puff of pin feathers rising in wind? Neither scholar nor naturalist, I can offer nothing certain. But one time, love was a big white heron whose great wings awed me, enveloped me, led me to skim the supple racing waters at dusk. Now, it is standing on one skinny leg, its black eye blinking, in the dry bed of an unbending river. 2/06 Speaking three days later in the corner, where your bed had been, a gentle breeze through the half-open window, I heard you say be thankful and then because you’re a teacher, when I closed my eyes as if on a chalkboard the letters T-H-A appeared. that night an earthquake: chimney shards and gypsum dust the pictures off their hooks, and your finger pointed at me, at me. Nexus How to delineate life from death? I embrace the Zen monk’s manifesto that we manifest and are not born and therefore from that zen-full logic we do not die. How seductive that notion In the face of death, especially yours. So, you told me you would meet me at the crest of a wave, just as if committed to coming to shore, water becoming water. And I went there in sunshine, surrounded by blue to find you, bathe in you, float in your real you. But how could I know you, for sure, not being water myself? Were you the white spume spewed, or the heavy churn around my hips, the strong, jealous undertow, trying to pull me down? both of us trying, hoping not to disappoint. I want to know the nexus of the living and the dead. Maybe it is just abstraction, distraction from the truth. (2010) Now Moments of now gather like small stones in my pocket; small stones to cobble my path back home. This one, a moon stone, sheet-white, cool, in the blue-hued night, warm and soft as skin. This one, purple as a bruise, tender, dark reminder, a tool to remember how a foot off a curb or bite of steak can show us the trap door, in unconscious surrender. This one, speckled as a starry night, mosaic of words, gold and silver, and streaked with a tendon of red. And even this-- the gray one, slick as rain, that slips out of my hand, between my fingers, as I raise my hand and wave goodbye. (2010) Grief As if she is standing at a bus stop waiting in rain. Cars pass. Lights shine on dirty street water, tires hiss like laughter; even “puddle” sounds too playful. Splayed fingers rush to flatten that one corner of her coat raised gently by a poke of wind. Finally, it comes. She turns away, cannot get on, joins its riders who, though empty from their own sad journeys, have not been waiting here. Just over her hollow eye, a crescent shadow, the shape of her missing moon. (2000) |