subtext

Just another flower reflected in this pool,
I wonder whether what I see is what I know.

Of course this eye through which this vision
comes to me is more than the corporeal lens

gazing so obsessively across the surface sheen
of this darkly-wooded pond I am complicit with.

Too Simple? Too Platonic? My roots are entertwined
with all the various flora surrounding me.

So yes, I am who I am and what I see,
and what I see is determined solely by me;

yet, from this mulch we grow and return
so all that I am is as much as you,

each of us just a reflection and refraction of the other,
just another flower bent over the surface of the pool.

(July 2010)

Utterance

The words slip
from my lips
as if they actually mean
something
of import;

yet

everyone daily speaks
and each dreams
the world we live,
so why do I
feel so privileged?

Parenthood

So much anger and resentment,
so much attention to perceived slights,

so much importance attached to extremes
of adolescent self-absorption,

so much of what we do is determined
by an other, as if we can maintain a whole

outside of ourselves: the universe expands
into a space without prior existence.

Say It Three Times And It Is So

and so I repeat myself
and myself I repeat so
I repeat so and myself

myself so and I repeat
and I so repeat myself
myself I repeat and so

so I myself and repeat
repeat and myself so I
myself and I so repeat

(July 2010)

My hands ache along the fingers, no strength
To grasp the rock face even to maintain
My position, much less move to the next
Fissure, the next slight breach in the mass which
Looms above me in perpetuity.

I am so tired of even the pretense:
The daily happy chatter over lunch,
The concerned anguish around work travails;
Not that love does not surpass all of this,
Yet I wonder some days if there’s not more.

Desire drives me into a discontent
With the days offering, disguising true
Happiness behind the glamour and shine
Of the spectacle, the omnipresent
Crush of the other’s clichéd narrative.

Not that my sad tale is any better,
Albeit a more familiar story
To me than the ones which rub against mine;
But even so, I fear the textured rock
Between the cracks in the conversations

That flow in a seemingly endless rush;
Beneath the whisper of my voice talking
Telling myself again not to let go,
To let the blood soften the fractured rock
Beneath the tips of my aching fingers.

(July 2010)

Hanging so cold
in the late spring stars,
the moon is a haiku tonight.

(Summer 2010)

Striding home for lunch at sixteen
a line of poetry repeating in my head;
the brisk November sky had nothing
on the power of the word unfolding
in my life at that precise instant.

All I wanted to do was be home with pen
and paper to write it down, just get it.
The brown grass of the neighbor’s yard
took forever to cross; then the street,
it’s fresh coat of tar and asphalt became
a Mississippi barring an undiscovered
world from my nascent explorations.

Dad, not yet diagnosed, sat smoking
in the driveway. “Fine, fine,”
I muttered in reply, waving off
his promise of lunch waiting inside.

And what was the line that drove me
with such harried import from school
across vacant lots, past my father
with such adolescent disregard?

That I cannot tell you thirty six years later:
for nothing, not even a phrase remains
from that line from that day, nothing;
nothing but the urgent walk home
through the brisk-blue November air.

(June 2010)

The dazzle of morning light dances
across the surf of the pulsating bay.
Enthralled, yet blinded, by the beauty
of it all, we stand stunned listening
to the staccato gossip of the gulls
and the incessant tumble of the waves.
Until all that we are and desire
dissolves in the ephemeral effluent
that flows quiet freely in the everyday
chatter of friends, like DNA fragments
combining and recombining in endless strands
of meaning manifesting momentarily
second by second across this sacred life,
this surface shimmer, we call home.

(May 2010)

like a ballerina en point
a turn of my head
divides the circle

in a second hand’s staccato arc
to scope out the destination
before the body follows

like daniel boone
through the cumberland gap
mentally surveying the landscape

the breach if you will
in the comfortable thought
the continual march of the horizon

(November 2006)

The swirl and unfurl of the past
follows no pattern, except now.
The future lies less entangled with
meanings than with hope’s dreams.
I hold these multifoliate strands
weaving my patterns on a wind.

(December 26, 1995

I worry each detail; yet,
these are no Martin Luther King Dreams
articulated to thousands milling
around Lincoln like galactic spirals.
But ones that ferment, rumble
from below like a bronco
new to the saddle twisting
away as I lie almost asleep.
The alarm waits to ring, the
bedsheet winds about me, Laocoon
wrestling stone snakes.
Conversations I have had turn
into ones I have not;
friends and strangers become incubi
or succubi. Seductive wet kisses
entangle my next waking greeting.
These dreams grow through the night,
to turn their roots into my day,
mushroom’s pale flesh.
Like worms in a spaniel’s heart
they clot my speech–have I
told this story before? Have I
seen this person in another form?
Like waking in an unfamiliar room
these dreams entangle me
making it hard to see like Descartes
past the melting candle to
the circular cogito ergo sum , to
the dream that stands clear,
the dream that has no morning.

(summer 1990)

How do we come to know:
the routines of the day,
the patterns of spring to spring,
the similarities amid chaos?
The mirrors in the kaleidoscope
give shape to random flotsam.

We think we discern more
in our reflections of the world;
the future’s fixed unfolding
in a furtive flight of birds.

I speak to you in my own way;
our words shape themselves
against the shape of themselves:
consensual, in anticipation of a kiss.

(May 2010)

did it just occur
this thinking

and when

did it come
as a shock
a sharp wince of pain
upon leaving the cave

howling with the realization
scarred by the experience

or

like wittgenstein
slowly across the whole

there it was

daylight

and such a warm sun

should have come here long ago

Who believes?

the awareness
like sandpaper across the iris
blinds before any revelation
is exposed – –

and even at that

delusion washes all
a cold salve to placate
a passive domesticity.

And what of it?

the tired rantings of the self-righteous,

“You should be experiencing
excruciating pain!”

But I’m not.

Like the cat curled, purring
on the end of the couch – –

I am presently content – –

despite all – –

I am

happy to be

no more

than what I am

(August 2001-April 2003)

events in a field like light
from a star bending about the sun
each affecting the other in infinite exchange
a bee drifts with lackadaisical precision
linking flower to flower before heading home
across an open meadow covered with dew

the sun the flower the bee you me
bending toward each other collapsing
in a field radiant with life

in a field radiant with life
bending toward each other collapsing
the sun the flower the bee you me

it’s all so succinctly repetitious
another day, like the orbiting moon
its tidal force pulling on the sea
(no thought or will to dissent
the current catches all like a net)
then releases to wash freely along the shore

water light time you me flows
quick slip twirl and fall
slow meander to merge with all

water through water air through air
events in a field suffused with light
separate yet bending toward each other
like the sun hurling toward a point
a somewhere beyond the center which holds
nothing but all in a twirl we turn toward
like a bee in a meadow covered with dew

(August 2001-April 2003)