Religion

I am not a poker player,
don't have the face for it . . .
or the memory.

I can gaze off in the distance though,
no matter how close it be.

Rain on leaves at night is a sacred sound.
When I am weary or I cannot find the words,
it becomes a prayer for me.

I was a runner back when commas still mattered,
and you could come back to find your prepositions
where you dropped them.

I am a walker now, knees be damned.
These are the days of second chances,
hours of nights,

rain on leaves.

Almost, Nearly, Please

What were you about to say?
I saw reluctance slope your shoulders.

I'm hoping my words
wrap around your wrist
at a pulse-point,
a miniature heart warming there.

For every expression we lose
in our ways, there are a thousand
stopped-up gestures just
under the skin.

There are words for this;
sometimes we can almost feel one
forming on the tongue,
some small good thing being born.

Funeral Improvisation

We buried our yesterday friend 
of sixty years long past,
and with him our yesterday lives.

The sun comes up, the moon goes down,
the wind turns the corner with a smile. 
Each added moment of one
together makes the present.

There is a silence found in grief:
the sun drops behind the hills,
light cools on your shoulders, 
the stillness of the night spreads out 
like a blanket under the trees. 
It teaches you the words 
you learn by speaking.

Fog Like Horses

Each bright day with wind
arrives like San Francisco in ’68.
The fog pours in like horses 
across the Golden Gate, the seals
cough down at the Wharf. 

City Lights opens its narrow stair
and Ferlinghetti is at the top 
to turn and welcome you
with his slow smile. 

And the feeling 
of reaching toward the bread 
of something solid, the wine
of something still to come, 
the sacrifice not yet required,
the circle still unbroken.

Half a Song

I am, on most days, off by an eyelash
or a foot, confusing down with up,
forgetting how it was or should
have been. I go humming half a song
by those whose music like a blade
I used to carve a version of myself.

What’s here is not always what I see,
what’s gone was never all I thought it was,
what is to come will be less than what I fear —
but even then, imagination bows 
to what is there, bone to bone, 
inch over inch.

Some days the world is closed,
an iron gate in place. One day
you reach out, push against it
anyway.

The Compass Line

Solid brass, a cold and heavy circle
in the palm. The needle crazed
and swinging like a drunk against
the shadows. It finds a point
to fix itself upon within degrees
all tacking north, a region
that is known by where it's not.

All elements descend upon the
solitary walker: light and dark,
the scudding clouds, the whistling air,
the sliding rain. It does a person well
to face into the wind, to feel the force
implacable, to lean against that shifting
wall of fury. To cling like Jacob to 
the arms of his assailant in the dark: 
'I will not let you go until you bless me."

'Be true to duty as the needle
to the pole.' So I was told
and hewed the line as best I could
against the odds. The needle swings —
roll, pitch, and yaw — until it settles
close enough to show us where to go,
where we have been — though every move
we make will set the needle dancing
once again.

So Late

The bread was bitter, but he ate it,
smiling a little to himself, bending
over it at the curb, a few crumbs
scattering for the pigeons cocking eyes
at him.

He would have dug a riverbed from
our desert to the seashore if we had
wanted to sail around the world,
or cut a wine press from the solid rock
to see what we could bring in from the fields.

If you wanted, if you listened, if you
took the time to wait, he’d speak
what he had learned from listening,
with a voice grown dark and deep,
like colored glass.

How we despised his art, the blue
lightness of his eyes, the broken reach
of his arm, the ungainly swing
of his legs, the stone block of his head
grinding slowly on his shoulders.

We wondered how he got that way,
which war he’d run away from,
and why he kept his silence when
we asked him to his face to name
who’d done this to him.

But it was strange, uncanny even,
that when you laughed and pulled his ear,
when he swung that head around just so
and turned the lightness of those eyes
upon us without speaking,

I had the urge — you will remember —
to tell him all the things I’d done
that left me feeling shot through
with remorse. But it was late, so late,
and they hustled him away “someplace nice”
they said, and laughed.

Skeleton Key

Graveyards are for wandering,
not stumbling, but the faces I wandered by
had not opened their throats for a century
or more, lips sealed, breathing softly.

The dead lay pillowed and blanketed
in beds of green between high rails of stone,
as if at night they might arise, confused,
to follow some pale light between the trees.

When I knocked on the stout church door,
expecting nothing more than echoes,
a leaded window flung wide above,
a voice leaned out, called “Catch!”

and dropped a skeleton key
into my hand. I bounded up
the staircase to the belfry,
six pealers waiting with their ropes.

Then bells swung high to split the azure air,
clappers rang like iron tongues and ropes
dropped down from God’s own hand
to lift each foot up on its toes.

The dead awoke, rolled to their sides —
the stone rails held as I walked through.
Buoyed by the bells and far from home,
beginning life, I made myself invisible.

Wish Fulfillment

Before sunrise I walk through
December’s darkness on a path
I know. Out against the wind,
a loop around the misted field,
then back into the swaying forest,
downed trees like dropped pencils,
stripped and careless and bare.

The moon is a caught kite;
I can reach it if I stretch.
I hold it above my head,
a cool disc giving no heat.

I have wanted this all my life.
Surely, I’m not the only one? See,
there are thumbprints all over it!

Li Po saw its white eye above the hills,
thought it was the bright heart of the sea.
It made him so happy he hummed songs
until the sun rose.

I give it back for the next one
and clap my hands, silver dust
drifting among the trees.

February

Where I live, winter feints and slides,
hides behind cloud cover at night,
and slips slyly away
in the morning.

In the garden, green shoots poke through
rucked and puckered earth. They are cupped
and layered against the frost; do they know
what they are doing?

The high today
was twenty degrees north of sunrise.
We grow restless, take the sun’s warmth
as an invitation to a party.

Who doesn’t like the light? I step out
on my porch, stretch like a cat.
In the pulsing blood of early spring,
I’ll miss the quick, sharp glint of winter’s eyes.