In September

Even the barn roofs, demure,
Defer in the end to the slope of the hills
They give in, as
All things lose their straight lines over time and field and season

Still, the color in September compensates for the decline—
Every autumn, the same song, and we amble on
Just one step slower than last time

We can see more clearly now, like farmers ascending a hill,
How profligate these miracles are
How spendthrift the grace, like rainwater

We shake our heads but say no words
In the awkward smile of receiving gifts
Unearned and undeserved

Suburban Woods, 1993

I once held the sensation of the suburbs every night—
Held it like a crystal ball or a wooden ship
Could feel it in my grip, as sure as fingerprints

It could not be choked out by concrete;
I breathed it, or it breathed me

In the swelling of the cicada and the sweet dense heat of summer
As humidity pushed down on us, before lust took hold of us like wild dogs,
In that Siren song before the last hunt of August was over
Was awe and wonder,
We prepared for wider halls and lockers
And yet the nights still shook with mystery, when we were still ourselves

After a dance perhaps, or after the first football game in the fall, when the air was smoked in crisped September,
The woods behind my house were wild, and I was still—in the night—a child

And though I learned how we parcel out the wild and kill some part of us with every highway
Tigers still growled, burning in those pines, and the moon still swooned with song

When we walked over the hill in our first draughts of freedom,
Like birds flailing from their nests,
We could hear the sound of power in the lines, our hearts alive like them
(Couldn’t we also hear ourselves?)
And we too ran above the houses and the hedges,
Rising as we stood in the chorus of crickets,
Stars falling on Alabama and the Cahaba shaking like a wet dog beneath the stars

Some nights, tossed by storm, turned the sky to purple
And we felt desire taunting us just beyond the tree line

The skyline, then, was a stampede of horses beyond the horizon, teeming with something we could almost taste, as we paced like dogs on tethered chains

All this entered into us, like musk
This ritual
The initiation of hope and lust and blood cut from us
At that crossroads where we had to lose ourselves, undone,
Our childhood laid down

It is lost but not gone
So that
Whenever I pass the woods, after all these years
I smell it still—in my blood and in the brook
And I pause sometimes, trying to peer far enough between the limbs,
To find that wonder once again
And think I see a tiger’s eye, burning back at me, through the black night

Calling me
To that wild still there
Still ranging inside of me
In a tangle of woods and dirt and trees

Just a Little

What I will remember, I have learned, are not simply the grand moments, like June Lake seemingly split open in a silver spray of light, at sundown
But the little eddies in time, like
Standing beside the convenience store as my friend smoked in the cold, the blue boughs of shaken oaks unfolding above me, ready for winter renewal;

They would have been giants beside the lake, but were more like tired peasants, trash swept into the leaf piles at their base, their roots turned into brooms, as they clung to the bosom of the earth

The rain had wet everything, and the smoke unfolded like fog as I surveyed the ridge line across the street, the birches nearly stripped bare beneath the steady beat of autumn rain

Save that there, above me, three of four stubborn trees still pinpointed the horizon with yellow, like some artist’s brush dipped happily to remind us that

A little goes such a very long way

A Silken Line

In the two minutes since I walked the path and turned back
An unseen spider spread a silken line across it, glistening in the early sun, entwined between a stump and a sapling’s branch

I paused, deciding best how to preserve her work—aware that the most convenient way was to walk through it, becoming ruinous to her world, with little consequence

But grateful that I saw—and grateful for unhurriedness as the sun made her sedulous way into the day—
I walked around the sapling and saw how very much alike we all are
Working to bear the weight of so much morning

How on Earth

How can everything simply be gift and given? With nothing for us to figure out or solve
No mystery to resolve save how to open our arms wider than the windows, to let the wind in?

What we’re left with is an emptiness like a throbbing thumb, and deep inside
This endless yearning to be held, which is all anything is—the longing and the way we close or open our hands

We learn like deer on ice, scrambling up into the waterfall of sunlight

So I scramble—
A way from the purchases that once kept me safe;
Held by the forest, in the sun’s pattern scattered through an uneven canopy of leaves
And the patter of last night’s rainfall, still trickling down like drum beats

Inviting us to have no shape
To fall
To think of ourselves not at all
But to rise, instead, with the earth, as into a mother’s hug
And into the same bright morning
Becoming gift itself
All our nouns becoming verbs
In the light of the white, pink morning

The Homecoming Parade

I.

It was like trying to catch dust, or leaves falling from the trees
The October light filtered through the boughs like all is ever, only peace—and could only ever be
In that pressure of mid-afternoon, prophesying night and sleep
The whole earth was ready to rest
The world was a sighing chest

We lined the streets of our little village, off the highway
As the football players, cheerleaders, homecoming court, and band paraded by, throwing beads and candy to innocent hands
And mothers gathered their children like hens, as we looked forward to Friday night:

Our ritual, our bloodless letting of sweat, our sacrifice of virgins

Everything rose up in sweet wonder—like smoke in an ashram, and the dirt with us, asking:
What is this holy longing? And what is all this truth beside it? 

II.

We heard stories of boys and cheerleaders beneath the bleachers doing unholy things, or in the woods behind the stadium, exploring forbidden lands, hand in hand

Whatever drove us to stand on those curbs, trying to catch a pack of Smarties,
We knew some mystery lurked right beside us

And still it beats, undeterred

Our bodies less able to catch anything, but our hearts, like jaguars,
Still plying the suburbs, searching for that same feeling,
Just before the starlight

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