The beauty of a piece of fruit--
It's keen, awkward taste-angles,
Sauciness, round and rolling with juice.
The quirky mirth of mother earth.

questions of some import

I have assumed that I want to learn.
But what if I don't want to learn this fast?


The future is pain trying to be born:
Baby alligators gnawing at my flesh.
Why am I embodying future pains?
And will I be rent
For the alligators to swim free,
Waggling their tails?

What if I could be yours?

Could we spend an eternity of todays in a sailboat of dreams
power our wishes with marshmallows and love
the fattest clouds that we herd around us
bobbing onto the seas of tomorrow?

And would that be the better part of a life lived on the water?

there aren't any
small cookies in my pocket
unless you count crumbs

What could I say to the unfolding of my heart?
The sigh of wings unfurling
Flex yet be silent, and test the breeze.

Streaming

I have been seeing the ghosts of things past
Sitting in a seat facing backwards on the train to watch the memories and milemarkers streaming out behind us, in front of me. Visions living in the spaces behind mirrors.
Have I regrets?
I am walking along a road, it has rained and the maple leaves lie damp in the gutters. Their companions rustle and sigh in the wind's caress, waiting for release. Autumn lies thick on the land, and the blonde bleached grass and mottled browns of scrub extend over the valley. The only accents are the few blazes of color in the lone holdout trees. I glimpse a river running behind a house. The water is brown with slate grey reflections from the sky, and it looks cold. Its burbling is barely audible, muffled by trees and houses, but I want to stand and hear the full roar. I have come to a fork and choose the path closest to the river, hoping it will open up onto the bank, and I start to walk parallel, craning to see in between the houses. I am approximating, always anxious to see how soon the full flow will come into sight. The farther I go along the road, the more I feel the cold and heavy feeling of committing to a path. Should I have struck across the high grass at the first sight of water, lifting my arms and scooting sideways for a closer look? The river isn't going to meet up with the road. It must curve back around. And now I am taking myself farther and farther away from the clarity I so desperately wanted. Cut off from the source. Car fumes settle around me and refuse to dissipate into the autumn wind. Everywhere boxes and parallel lines, but all I want is to cut the corners. Find the hidden torrent and be swept away.

Purr

No one would ever know what I took in the night,
the satisfaction and sleepy warm fuzzy feeling
I stole, or did it steal over me?
Can contentedness cover me the way a comforter does
so that I hum all over--
a cat that somebody has brought home.
I really like the furniture.

small stones in the river

O crepuscular half-beings--
Time and Space--
be thou appeased;
I have yet to finish my exams.

A hollow space in a stone
of surpassing beauty
and all I can do
is watch the water
knowing that I have no pockets.
The measureless grief
of dropping that one stone
to burble with a thousand other worlds
below the river
is a thought too painful,
too complete, to pass out of memory,
still too bright and heavy to hold.
Yet shadows claim me still
the lives I could have led
inside the intricately textured ripples of a tossed pebble.

Something with wings

Halloo in the frosty silence, halloo in the echoing night.
The smallest pieces of the globe are glowing shards in our hearts
The myriad reflections of a lost myth
Beyond the shadow of smoke, beyond faith,
Formless hope in the wellspring
What is the question reverberating against the walls?
A fairytale, is it made of more than glass?
Can it be bigger than the fine, fragile bird skeleton we clutch at with clumsy fingertips?
What will make it live and sing within the cages of our breasts?

Anything but wings

Here it is, the poem towards the end of the book about fireflies.
Go into the twilight.

I am the one holding the bubble wand. Fortunately (?) my power is in positively altering my environment, though I often do not directly feel the results. Let's talk about allelopathy, secreting chemicals that alter the growing environment and make it less hospitable for one's competitors. Allelopathy is an adaptive strategy. That's not what I do. I am about the business of making things slightly better in the space all around me. I focus and create bubbles, dandelion tufts, things beautiful and simple and buoyant that are dispersed on the wind to take root in some forgotten corners. I no sooner breathe than create, no sooner create than rejoice. And my greatest joy is in the motion and interaction that my loves and small attentions conceive. I create a place that is a little bit better, a little richer, than anywhere else, maybe it is the only clean patch and neat, or riotous and vibrant, but the party which is open, is open even to the people who come and take (we call them generalists) who will take what I can give and then move on. They pop the bubbles which would have died anyway, but they tread on the goldeny threads of inspiration and cosmic joy in that moment of dance between the world and the senses. They are loud and don't know what I have begun to say in the quiet. My worlds are not hidden from the street traffic, and everyone can see what is valuable in it but not why, and they pull the meaning up by the roots, dissect it to see if it had merit. A disincentive perhaps to share my world, to exhale (my being and my breath). Every body has to survive, but if I can't help but live in mutualistic association and I have no protecting symbiont the world takes care of itself by taking from me anything that I offer.

Show up at the page, appearing at this window I offer myself up as a blank mind to the tender mercies of the winds, Muses as faint in scent, as feathery to touch, as invisible, as passingly extant as all thought and inner experience flowering into some product the subtlest fluid of which it is permissible to drink and in drinking to be drunk deeply, to pour forth that fountain-- that voluble torrent of love and care, the softest words whispered to oneself and the dark ceiling in the night beyond light in the twilit chambers where filters each shadow becoming impressions on the pastel wall, as memorable as water beads running in the shower, and as intently noted even while they slide away all. Words are free and thus is their pain; to live fleeting, mutable lives in the mind, altering the landscape for the space of half an eternity--half a second. What could matter in this ever-fixed ever-changed war, where transformation is the only constant, the only choice, and the particular, the definite marks death?

I am frustrated with my own slow progress, self-referential loops that leave me myopic in the passive and descriptive, endless circular thoughts filled with commas, with hesitation. I am frustrated with the way my mind settles and clears following stones thrown to the bottom of a lake. How long it takes. I am the stone-thrower. I fight the gradual accumulation of what I already sense, and would stamp my feet to have the whole before me. Despite my tantrums I work steadily, I progress despite myself, or when I am asleep. I must keep myself in the dark, work miracles behind closed eyelids. No wonder my waking self forgoes sleep as long as or longer than it can physically be forgone, anything in rebellion, anything but what my deep self dreams of, anything but wings. Why can I not grant that boon in and for myself? I am yet keeping myself powerless. Stalemate with stale hopes on a dusty shelf, when I know that the snowglobes hold castles and patterns of the deepest shades, burgundy, royal blue, and the gold that burns. Dust is useful to me yet, and it suits my mood. Things which are glorious pretend at the tawdry. After all, from what matter sprung creation?

Awkward tusks and the tear-shaped moon

'The time has come,' the walrus said
but all the cuckoo clocks had fled.
'Never a moment's rest' cried he
and chased them all upon the sea.
'Time must behave' the walrus croons
under the sympathetic moon.
She solemnly reflects his tears
and listens to his deepest fears.
Her smiles as she looks with glee
at clocks cavorting in the sea
are no less mild than the glance
upon his tusked countenance
as, gently herding clocks, she led
the saddest walrus back to bed.