Out in the Great Indifference

Out in the great indifference of night and the dark forest and the pine cones bristled against each other,

In the velvet black which would take your soul quick as cutting grass, and neither hear nor move should you make a sound

Beneath the uncaring stars and the unknowing waters lapping against the lake, which would drown you without malice, and never lift a wave to raise you

There, in the darkest jetties, between branches, little eyes peep out

Creatures who would defend their homes with beaks or claws, with caws and grunted screams to shatter the sky with ferocity, before sitting down, assured of peace, to lick their paws

As a necessary matter, they know the business of survival, and yet

Deep in the night, in hidden dens, excited, they offer their bodies and their hearts—
They cuddle and make cozy

Not at all unlike you and me
Who now walk these woods respectfully, making sure we don't get lost, like miners through a cave, we make our way, your hand-in-mine

We dangle in the dark, and you squeeze each other to say, “It’s all okay”

Death is inevitable,
But we walk aware only of the air,
Knowing that no thing can ever be indifferent,
And that such illusions will be changed, in the holy instant yet to be

The Wren

No wonder our ancestors worshipped the sun
Numinous both bodies, here and there, of gas and flesh and bone
Of hope, so that
In light, we recognized our home

It scatters now like grains of sand across a glassy dome,
Shattering in shades of pink so that nothing seems to move;
Is held in thrall, all

But the sky every moment is changing, if we can slow our breath down to look,
Transcending the fear of seeing

Does the wren in her nest turn now and worship?
Do the trees offer obeisance?

I am, somehow, here,
Writing symbols into words
And behind them,
Worlds raise their hands generously to accept what no words could ever capture
No poet enter,
Only standing at the threshold, pen dropping with the open jaw, in awe, we watch our words scatter like sand, and grace makes of them some shade of pink and orange, to greet the day at hand

How can I, breathing, tasting, touching, seeing,
Not see how everything rises like a murmuration of starlings?
Every single thing intelligent, the breathful and breathless,
Speaking that all things are fully forming, here and somewhere near us
And the wren is its perfection—
As with everything the sunlight touches

Grief Has a Bottom

It remains the hardest trust to exhale into:
That grief has a bottom, and that we will find it,
Like touching the mud of the river after jumping

My child clinched and clung to the rock, mustering courage, fighting the quaking of his fingers, willing desperate toes to the edge, then pulling back
Until, without warning, like the sudden rush of a flock of ravens driven skyward in a holy instant,
He jumped, and rising from the stone surface, shaking in the sun, he fell and disappeared
Then rose, laughing with the intake of air, his body still terrified, his being alive

Just so
We fathom the measureless below
In the dark where no light goes

Like Brown Glass Bottles

They threw out bottles of brown glass into the grass,
Which smell now of dust and dirt, earth and grime, cold as December to the touch,
Near frozen as the ground, above which the late geese sound out their plaintive honking, on skies torn open like a sack of grain, its thrift-bare clouds white and barren

Blown and crafted and then left, forgotten, their purpose served
They come to us now with no message inside, having sailed no ocean, and yet
There is aliveness in their curves, hinting towards breath

Largely bereft of design, worn down, their letters torn away by sand and grit, buried in squelching mud, all these decades later—they rise
For you and I to find, surprised in the cold, pure morning  

I have seen the same in antique stores, restored,
And like any true old thing, they bring a curious sort of singing;
It is a strange beauty to know we will not last, and that simple objects will surpass us

And because they hum with stories that can only be guessed at, I play the game:
I wonder whose lives these vessels served, and whose hands held them
Whose need preserved them until their bodies, sapped of strength, sat down to weep or sleep,
Then lay down and rose no more
So that those who came after, seeing only trash, tossed them out

Now we hold such objects close, though I wonder how far the cycle goes:
Will my own children shrug and toss them out?
Artifacts of a past life, forgotten?

Or will they hold them because I once held them and so also felt their cold curve at my fingertips?
Will they bless the hands that held them, and birthed them?
And perhaps place the brown glass on a mantel to remind them that some shaped things, like hope itself, defy all deaths

There is no message in the bottles but they are their own epistles, self-contained and speaking
Witnessing that not all things break
And that some truth rises up against death itself—even in demise promising a duration

We are like bottles in the earth, pressed down, with some hope inside—some truth which—though buried, drowned, or smashed—
Simply will not die
And rising, cold death deny

Of All the Deaths Which We Endure

Of all the great deaths we endure, chopped down as we are like autumn flowers,
The death of death itself remains untouched by any—
The hardest meadow to pass through

The devourer devoured
The mouse that eats the wildflower
Capturing the hawk—
Such is the death of scarcity
Stark as any blood-letting
As the circle is interrupted

The hardest thing we do is say yes, with open arms, and let the morning take us
Letting all our bones be held
In the bright pink morning,
With nothing left to cover us

To Stand

And what will you do when you sit in the silence?
In the quiet which once you so assiduously avoided
In the stillness you withdrew from like an octopus extracting tentacles, reflexive,
Such that you had no notion it was avoidance at all?

A squirrel scrambling for purchase on the next bright leaf, heart beating—
So your life has been

So, what will you do when the soul calls forth quiet and will abide no more distraction, dissatisfied with all that glitters being so far from gold?

When you are called to lift and hold your head because some great breath rises to catch you like a kite, pushing all falsity aside
As a great birth opens, and you are on the cresting morning, with the sun
And you must find the obsidian soul of you, or die

At first, I imagine, you will bow, perhaps grovel even—grinding your face into the gravel
But you will find no one delighting in your destitution, and no angel crying out for your penance

At last, after no more bowing, won’t you simply learn to stand?
And perhaps you’ll weep at your unsortedness, unworthy to receive the land given to you endlessly, its wet strand streaming in the bright spear of morning

Grace then will make you rise, with a gift you strain to support—
Your head lifted, and crowned

Your aspect and yours eyes tilted up, into the sun
After such long comfort taken
In looking down

Blood in the Shower

My wife would tell me and I would say "Ok" in the same way I might tell the bug man he's free to come on Tuesday, or respond to my daughter's request to play a different song

It has meant, only, that there will be a break in certain intimacies and that, while I may see her naked, we will be constrained

A small price to pay for life, and nothing to be done about it, anyway

But now, after dense years made softer by the erosions that loss, like rain, brings—
Not only flowers but rivulets and streams—
I have learned to sit straighter and to see the shape of things

So now it means that the entire world is bleeding, and God
Still dripping wet with cold, is stripped, a spear in his side

And God's womb, too, is ripped open, with all things, in communion

All bleeding, and

We are free to bleed, too,
And hold each other's hand and nod
Partaking in the life that only death can bring
Like trees waiting for leaves
Like field mouse waiting
For the bright, kind spring

Funeral, Old San Juan

It was strange to have a funeral stumble into our vacation, interrupting our laughter
We were the interlopers, of course, but the audacity to be reminded
That bodies still grow cold so far from home
Made us pause, suddenly silent in the great burning heat

The cobblestones bore the weight well, and some tourists paused
A young man held up his hand
As a coffin was lifted as a pyre to remind the skies and all
There is no place to run to;
All things fall

But then, after the drums led the mourning band down the street, at the sedulous pace of grief
The crowd around us started again—
Like a forest come to life after an eclipse, shaking off the dark
And I grabbed your hand, wondering what we might have for dessert
And what delights awaited us in such a green and sparkling land

Costco, Sunday, 145 pm

So many have come from church, that’s clear enough—
A black man in a nice blue suit, for one
His wide tie splitting his shirt like the Red Sea

I imagine he spent the morning speaking in tongues,
But the holy still need to eat, so we wade together through the flow of Baptists in their polyester, like wading through reeds, avoiding the remarkable uniformity of their pot-bellies and goatees

There are certainly worse fates than settling into middle life with the good book by the bedside and swimming occasionally with other streams of saints, all here to save a buck,
In the prophetic wisdom of bulk shopping to mark a holy Sabbath

But among the throng I find a woman—no saint, perhaps—in her pajamas,
And the only one among us all who looks quite happy:
She stands before a Halloween display of ghouls and ghosts, but it is
The effigy of a skeleton, demonized with red flashing lights for eyes, issuing a dark and brooding "trick or treat" out of a mis-timed metal mouth, its scythe as sharp as plastic will allow,
Which captures her delight

She stands smiling, a happy glint of red reflected in her eyes
At the crossroads of cliché and capitalism and the parodied imaginings of dark things come to life, which show us that we are actually alive
And that miracles abound on every side

The world of scrimping sainthood swirls around her
But she is profligate in her generosity—she not only looks but sees
As people push their carts around her, angling for the next free sample
Deciding what exactly to buy and how quickly they can return
To their happy, holy lives

A Blessing: May the God of Love First Get to You

May the God of love first get to you
Before the God of shame or wrath
May you know only the name of goodness and be cajoled by no dark spirits, masquerading as divinity
Prioritizing certainty, as they do, to justify all they sacrifice

And yet,
Since these, our human frames, remain so easily unmoved save by fear’s cold fingers
When you have been made afraid—that you will not be known and held, and that all the earth spins endlessly out of control, sending you to death
When, in short, you believe the world could never be benevolent—
May you, in the very core of you, feel the vine that entwines the heart of things, rising up to meet you, like a wind to sail a ship,
May you feel the Spirit’s breath, hell-bent on firing the work of God in you, and consuming every lie like chaff

May you feel a power in you, and know it, through and through, as God
Until you become immersed in this truth: you have always been held, from birth to now
And need no longer look up or about for God, out there
Since God rises like the spring, within

May you rehearse every memory—
Every bent leaf of spring
Every first scent of smoke in September
Every December cold that stoked in you the fires of aliveness
Which taught you the path long before you knew you were being tutored

And then, as God does, may you hold other trembling hands, to guide their way
Knowing what’s laid down in love always rises
And that death is a only short mystery with fraying wings

Even If

No matter what may come for us, nor how the winds conspire, or the days and spires and skies be cruel

There is always the pleasure of adjusting the lie of the croissant on the plate, or of slightly sliding the sticky bun just so, to make more ample a display of things

And there remains the quiet, nimble joy of a quick, deep breath, staring at the woods across the road, which the robin knows—
Which we could know also, just so

And then, at evening, the uneven scrying of the crickets, in the dark, when we lie awake—opening our ears and hearts to hear them, though they’ve been singing all night long

To hear them in the great “right here”

To listen and hear with lips only whetted for quiet, and no need to reply

Even in the dark, we will find some small, untarnished pleasure
To holds us near
And cling to as a treasure

Packages of Possibility

My father was about packaging possibilities and having them shipped to our doorstep, so that when I came home, at the dawn of the age of the internet, there were often three or four or more boxes waiting to be broken open, so that what was inside could fill the holes inside us

They came in their own packages—the items inside—and were often left there, in a sort of consumer’s purgatory: CDs unopened on a shelf, still in their shrink wrap, novels yet to be cracked, boardgames and books destined to sit sadly, never to be read or played

It taught me, by resonance with my own hollows, that souls really want only emptiness                         
And that to be deceived by what only seems is a clinging grease not so easily removed

The lessons piled up, literally:

It is not what you have but what you use, and wants are never-ending

It’s what you’re present for that you can enjoy,
That brings you home

It's space that creates the widest lane for a soul to walk on unencumbered, seeing the lilies and the birds and the grass which labors not at all but is always crowned, always bowing down in its own green reverence, and never packaged—
Grass which meets its yellow death only to prove there is comfort, even in the grave, resurrected as it is by endless birdsong, to begin again

And you must find the part of you that revolts against fantasy and gags on any glut and finds itself free in the kind constraints of reality, which once seems so cowardly and cruel

All love, it seems, is constrained,
Just as we want, for all our wandering, a home with just one other soul, to look death in the eyes and smile, with hands spread wide, empty
Ready for the emptying of the sky

As we open like balcony doors to the fresh morning

As the wind drops at sunrise, to stir an empty room

The Point of a Fedora

The point of this fedora is not that it remain pristine nor come to its afterlife unscathed,
But that it be dirtied and splayed and frayed at every edge
In testament to how well the light played upon it, and the rain which deigned to fall upon it

Slowly, reality teaches me:
I will wear this hat for hiking, and when the feather breaks free
(Since all things break and cease to be),
It will be an epistle to the land, and to the law that we keep nothing
Except the air we breathed and the ground we chose to stand on
And the hearts that beat next to ours, as we looked on at the bright, pink morning
And the moon rising unrivaled above the bare branches,
Our breath freezing above warm bodies, fully in the moment's gift,
As we climbed the tall woods
As we hiked the humble mountain
And knew that emptiness which becomes full with the weight of all things
Somehow carried within us so easily
Like the green in spring

The Old Stone Bridge

The painting is titled 'River Under an Old Stone Bridge'
And I wondered when the old structure was new, and if someone said,
"Let's go see the new bridge," and then stood and marveled at it all through the afternoon

And when did it become old, exactly?
What passed from mind—what memories, what youth, what bodies—
So that there came the first instance when no one remembered when it was built or could pay testament to its long and stolid history?

When did it pass from "Oh, wow" to artifact—
A literal span of taken-for granted granite
An indelible fact, old as time, to be relied on as just as faithful

Slowly, we all become less aware of wonders
And move at speeds sufficient for the forgetting of things and would forget, even, the first need to drive out over expanses, and to fill breaches—
To make the paths that make our way

But it was once fresh granite, carved by strong, lean hands, hard muscles straining, all through the summer sun, into September, before the weather turned

It was once a marvel, and men and women with their children stood on the banks and shook their heads in pride and smiled, grateful they would no longer have to cross downstream, near the ford which was impassable most of the spring

With sight, all banality ceases to be, and all things rise in wonder, to be seen
All things ascend, waiting for eyes that will appraise rightly, 
And will trod on reality with grateful feet
With steps which can’t help but sing

A Symbol in Steel

We walked across the frozen ground in February, to face what we must face
We could erase nothing, of course, and naming meant embracing

We would not doom ourselves to die alive
We would face it, and all our fear, and hope to thrive, but felt the truth:

That all courage is a death and a departure,
And as we walked to tell them that we could not accept their offer but would instead sail our little bark, through the cliffs, through the dark, and hope for brighter sails ahead, a steel hoop on the vacant halyard clanged against the flagpole, in the heartless wind

It struck ruthlessly, as if to strike our exposed fingers, heeding no call to silence, transcending the trees and the sound of any other thing

A reminder that some things do not bow down, and
A promise, clarion
That some convictions must rise above what others say makes sense

That our inner knowing mustn't be betrayed
Before the grave

Past the Age of Sending Letters

It was so much waiting, it forced you into unhurriedness
Your body might arch against it, straining to will the wait away, but the day stood unblinking, uncaring, and so you were patient
There was no other way

I was born just soon enough to be graced with the frustrations of that age—the Age of Letters,
Before we all ushered her, with relief, out the back door, feeling ourselves triumphant:
Goodbye and no more you—You age of rain-or-sun-stained stamps and postcards

I remember sending one missive and stamping my feet two full weeks, then three, then more;
It was soul crushing, a trial for the self, a tribulation which angels looked down on, wagging celestial heads

My hands shook as they reached through the creaking chords of the mailbox,
To be dejected, rejected
But it made you take the pace of things as you sighed, looking to the leaves, unperturbed as they blinked against the sky 

Despite no relief and lips cracking even before the long walk back up the sunbaked driveway, the heartless clouds still crawled by,
And all sightless things seemed suddenly to have endless eyes, with none deigning to drop down one sympathetic glance

So you bucked up
You ruminated and let the grief of aliveness course through you, and you threw rocks at the neighbor's fence

When you were old enough, you learned to cuss, which helped a bit, and you might practice shooting birds at the absent mailman, ten minutes late, for some soul to blame (which makes a loss less painful)

You'd brave the driveway even through the rain, for that one drop of wetness that would soothe a soul
"I'm thinking of you," the note might say
"Camp is good, but I can't wait to see a movie with you when I get back. I can't wait."

But she could wait, actually, because we all did, walking and never running through the long gauntlet of desire at the heart of addled humanity

Now
In this age well past letters, the soul must be shaped in different ways, as we all look into our palms with crystal balls connected to any and every answer
We need not send any letter or brave the shaking hands of a phone call
We can hide behind quick texts, abbreviated so as to give nothing at all away
And look up, worshipping the satellites which seem to save us

Still, I wonder—
What happens in an age when no one has to wait?
How will new souls take shape
In this brave and frightful age?

What the Ravens Know

The ravens know, and the crows—they rise and go, as frenzied mists,
With talons clinched like fists around a fallen berry or a stolen egg
They steal but never beg
They fly but without fear
And then, as if they’ve heard some song through their flapping wings,
A few among them stop to pause upon a fence post, in strange repose
And a communion that none can name or know

All animals—and angels, I suppose—partake in this solitary parlay
This delay of seeming pointlessness;
They do not think it odd to take a closing glare
To survey the land behind and stare, as if they grieve to go

They look back with conciliation, nearly sighing with acceptance—
Of what I do not know—
And then, just as suddenly, they take wing again
As if a bell has rung
As if the train has come
As if some date needs be kept

Maybe it is their sense of loss, like us,
Who see what was only in the looking back, and what true gold there was to grasp,
Among all the shimmers that invited us—

We who did not know the treasures held right there in our hungry hands
Until we had, at last, to up and go
Into the throes of the inevitable

But surely
We, too, can choose to stand head held high and still before the final bend begins
And Nature will not begrudge us, like them,
A final looking back, as sorrow and regret rise to be beat back
By wings spread in heedless hope, unrestrained,
And a heart that knows the way to go
Into a future not bereft of its own bright gold

Suddenly Awash in Sorrow

Suddenly awash in sorrow
So quickly grimed with dirt and muck, to find that
Grief has ransacked certainty
Has made all the things upon which I built my life, so stolidly,
Suddenly, only impossibility—
Pillaging every easy promise, and a future in which I could trust to know anything

And yet still, this morning
The sunlight was so sweet
And I think I actually saw the trees—
Stood and saw their branches and their buds
As they moved leafless in a cool, quiet breeze
Helping to scatter the cold mists of March

The Bear

I remember still the thrill as the long snout took shape beneath my quaking fingers, which strained to lay things straight 

The wet nose was only partially captured in clumsy charcoal, but a suggestion of light through a bit of page left white—addition by absence—made me feel what Rembrandt must have: utter delight
The shivering wonder of shaping reality enough that some other could see it and know its name—
"Oh, nice bear," they might say,
And I would grin despite every impulse already burgeoning within me, to play things cool and quiet

Letting the world know nothing—
Isn’t this what we call growing up?

To the eyes, too, I added small flecks of white, as our instructor had showed us, and brought everything to light (if not quite to life)
Amazed at what one small glint can do

Standing back, I could not see the bruin’s odd shape—
That his visage was like play dough left to sag too long under its own weight,
A clay vase thrown with lumbering hands
A face that could hardly stand another child's scrutiny

But love, they say, is blind, and
I felt the absence of sight and of distance from anything—a part of everything, I was, suddenly—as if I had drawn a portal and absorbed myself into all time and space, through an act of true creation

Beneath the bear, I signed my name
But left absent the words I was too old to say
I only felt them, keenly, in every ounce of my burgeoning frame:
"I made this"

So I inked the practiced cursive with steady focus belied by nonchalance
A thin line of lip pursed with hidden pretense on my unrevealing face

I stood signing, standing between two worlds
Seeking new ways to draw the future forward
With clear and steady strokes

Packaging the Paintings

Imagine packing and crating the artist's paintings,
Playing the corner edges just slightly, without tweaking the frames, so that they can be shipped across oceans in air-tight cases,

Hazarding their way across salt and ice and the great undulating drifts, a case enclosed in steel and ship
To be opened on a far shore, by immigrant hands grateful for work,
And then sent on by coach and train, across the plains

When they arrive, images of white marble ruins jut from a green garden, under azure skies
And a cobalt storm races down an unnamed coast, above a fishing boat, while
A mountainside teems with wildflowers and a deer looks up, beneath an Alpine hill

Each is to hang above a mantle in a well-appointed house, so that, for a moment,
Those who see the scene have a glimmer of ecstasy—
Their longing stirred up so fiercely that they have to look away

Still,
Soon enough they will all look too quickly, and then not at all
Someday, they will see nothing, as if the painting—by strange alchemy—has become only a wall, and the frame no more than a shape to take up space
So that the place within that wants to stake a claim (in a gracious garden, in a boat, or on mountain slope)
Will not feel anything too deeply, nor be disturbed by too much wanderlust

Soon enough they will see no pigment at all
Will see, only, a filled-space, and no need to further decorate
But their children:
They will come into the study on a cold afternoon when warm, orange light pours profligately through the window,
And they will wonder if such things can be, mouths agape

They will ask if the artist actually saw or created raw, out of pure mind,  
Marveling that such climes might exist,
Calculating what it will take to break their tethered mooring lines and fly to find them
Promising in themselves to never compromise

Imagine encasing such longings in a crate
Imagine discovering that we ourselves are the ship, with paintings full of longing ready to emerge like paint from an artist's tube
Imagine all this packed so deeply inside us
Waiting to be revealed