The Widower’s Confession

I guess I was so starved for human affection that, 
I confess,
I let the barista's eyes hold me in a long caress

It was nothing, of course, as we stood there dressed 
In the polite niceties of daily intercourse, 
My throat hoarse for a whisper to be heard
Because, of course, there’s a part of every soul that wants to be deceived and doesn’t mind a line
“I’m fine” works swell for kindling a connection
And so I’ll pretend that we’re connected
Becoming the mark in my own long con

Sometimes a simple “please" or “thank you” can make me feel a part of something bigger 
It’s meager fare, but enough to remember the delight of sparks, without risking fire
So strange is desire: we avoid the thing we want

I heard a sex worker on the radio saying that sex has very little to do with it
It’s about people feeling they have a place, and that they are cared for, 
It’s an emotional connection, she said
I startled inside me as I hurtled down the highway, saying, “It’s fake!”
You can’t pay for such things, after all 

But, them again, some part of the heart knows and doesn’t care that the feeling costs a wad of green 
It just wants someone to stare,
Because that’s how very hungry we are:
Lungs screaming for air 
Ground so bone-thirsty-dry, we lap up water and cry for more

All this I reflected on as I sat in the dentist chair and the breasts of the dental tech brushed against me and I moved away while everything within me thrilled at the rush of a human being, greater than my guilt
I felt the need for blood and skin and understood why people go free-wheeling in violence
Or have a moment where they throw off their mask and go sailing head over heels into the winds of a great fire 
Burning out as a meteor on the sky in the great conflagration of their life
Because, my friends,
We all need to feel alive 

Old Men in the Coffee Shop

I admire the old men who have mastered the delicate art
Of conversations that don’t smart or spark too much bile—
The work of masters, really, 
A Mona Lisa smile in monologues that move sure and slow, without mincing up the mind nor touching the heart with acid,
But not flaccid, either, strong and solid their laments
Flowing in and out like rhymes and couplets, in time with their sips and the whining grinding of beans just behind them, as customers don polite smiles, bright on every side
And each man speaks his peace and says his lines, to define the darkness of the world 

It takes a specific talent, honed through years, to sit still between mouthfuls of bagel—
not over a latte, mind you (God forbid), but coffee good and black and hearty, to put hair on your back, 
In lament and stoicism they sip and spit, yet always they protect the hidden heart, where despite all their protestations, still are stored unspent tears they have yet scorched away 

Today, 
They talked of meningitis and a friend who had it
He recovered, but by God the hate with which they spat at it
“A terrible thing”, and fists pounded the table, like gavels, their graveled voices rising
As they always do, discussing war or this or that damn thing

They’ve earned it, this anger tightly held, through hard years, 
Survivors hard-shelled on dark beaches, whose secrets they’ll never tell 
Now ascended to their rightful benches 
Judges, passing righteous sentence on all the painful world 

I don’t begrudge them it 
You wrestle enough bears, you should have your due, sipping coffee and decrying hard truth, 
Your heart safe atop a bench of stone, where it can rest, and calm the bones
Frayed by the wisdom of so many storm-swept days

After all,
Sometimes all any of us can do is shake a fist at the sky and turn back, hoping good company can defy encroaching shadows,
And enjoying with what will you can the good dark drink of mother earth, you hope against hope for some new birth 
Trusting that what lies beyond will, like a scythe, cut from you all the longing you had to despise
And throw you, at last, into the skies

 Perhaps heaven, will be, in a way, a great golden sea of coffee shop 
Where old friends meet and, at long last, have their cry 
And say still, “Even for all that, ay,
Wasn’t there beauty under every sky?” 

Cursing in the Temple

They did not see me as they passed through the trees, down hill and trail

I sat beneath a spreading tree, on a fallen pine rail, above the dale, a hundred feet up, eating fruit  
And they were quiet, so I said nothing and even stilled the crunching of my apple 
So they could pass by like a deer, heedless of any prying eyes, minding the aura of the untouched all around us

But I felt a small pang of guilt, too, thinking that, should they see me surveying them, they would think my
hiding was spying 
And perhaps I was lying by laying by, breaking some unwritten hiker's code, but I simply could not bear to break the quiet
Or the peace that comes among wild things

Suddenly, one of them—the woman—kicked a rock which bounced off a log and back at her
And she yelled a curse word, laughing

It hung so strangely on the morning air, that profanity, glorious in its gory piercing of serenity 
As it echoed down the trail and against the rock wall a hundred yards across from us

Like farting in a temple, it was
Profane ink spilled on white sheets
But
The morning just lapped it up, 
As a mother wipes up spilled milk 
So effortless it absorbed it all, overpowering in its intensity, then gently 
Restoring the sound of footfalls and, after a few moments, the crunching of my apple among the song of leaves and birds singing soft through stalks of trees

So Eden is restored not with banging cymbals but the simple mirth of quiet
Like loudness never was on this bright earth

All the while, morning billowed like a great blue ocean all about us
In the temple of the endless world 
As the morning whispered that nothing can defile it
And the mountain nodded with a knowing smile 

The Morning Does Not Despise

The cold morning does not despise the burning ember
As hikers linger, still long asleep, within its shade
Nor does it look askance as the aspens tremble
Or roll its eyes at the laboring magpie
"Get up, get up," it softly cries, 
As the black crow rises
And the fog surmises its demise, with perfect peace

But the real trick is that 
The forest does not despise the spring fire which burns it to its base,
Every branch scored and scorned and stripped of mirth 
The birch and fir will fly, but first must go to earth
With that faith that fire, surely, will give new birth
And the morning, once again, gather all her children in

A Liturgy for the Morning

This morning I cleaned up the cards that we left out on the couch
After you routed me in Go Fish and I yelled “ouch” in mock pain as you collected the last three sets, prolonging your reign as champion

This has become my morning liturgy
Of praise, reminding me of all good things, as the sun comes up, 
You pull me away from tea, to say
Our Father, 
Our Mother,
Four kings,
Four queens
And this is a good order for starting things

Prayer changes with the seasons and this time is fleeting like a little fox
(Just yesterday you told me you’d like to walk to school alone, and so it goes)
But I am praying now this Psalm of you, in the only moment I can hold, like any—the one just here and now
Beholding you, and how
Full of miracle you are
You of the little hands and face and the laugh of grace
Whenever you steal my final ace

Oh thank God, the Faithful, for thumbs to hold these cards 
And to lose to you, as you learn how smart you are
And thank God the warm sun cutting through the dusty miracles of morning
Of which I am one

And above all, you, my dear
A doxology of promise
A prayer inviting me to remember that love is always loss, the pain of hope and longing and that we only choose between griefs:
Of regret and sacrifice 
And that only one, in the end, is loss

I will count that cost

As sets of aces fall, and jacks and eights
At this gate of you,
Through which God’s face shines, each new day
Letting bright, good mercies through

The Poetry Reading

I’d have never thought my neighbor, Mr. Pate, would read poetry
What with his red truck and shotguns and the duck hunting 
But his aged voice quaked as he read Wordsworth and Burns
Shutting a volume at one point, continuing on from memory,
His eyes closed, as his voice rose

I only came to be there in his dusty living room, which smelled of mothballs and alcohol— 
His wife deceased but her memory honored in how neat he kept the place—
Because my mom asked me to stop by on my winter break, and I had enough sense of holiness, upon seeing his collection of poetry and prose, to ask about his favorite poem 
And when invited back, when work was through, how could I say no?

So it was at sunset that I came and we read, like scions of some lost age, wandering blind in digital Babylon
And I knew his words and the poems he chose were a summing up of what was still unsaid within himself 
As he poured himself a rum and coke and his voice broke
And I pursed my lips as we all must in the awkwardness of holiness  

While I did not take his hand, I placed one of my own on his shoulder 
As the night burned down the space between this world and the next
And we could almost smell the other side
On an evening when men, like warriors gathering the dead, 
Stood in the words of poets, looking to the skies, and cried
Before steeling ourselves, once again, for morning light 

Serra Retreat II

I also sat in the chapel watching a flight of birds on the hillside across the canyon, abiding, thinking whatever birds think at 11 am on a Friday morning, when the priest came by, in the stillness of the after-service, to blow out the candles

This too was a poetry, a flight of birds, as he bent his body and summoned a breath of wind to smite the flame, and walked out, as if he had not just tamed a dragon

A body
This temporary arrangement marshaled to do things, deeds great and small, burning with sensations
Miracles there are on every side, and even blowing out a candle can be an act of love, 
The smallest things take wings when done with presence, here and now

When he left, the room was too much quiet and I was grateful for the faint hum of cars beyond the hill on the highway as the great world curved up around me, on every side
Hemming me in, as God and love and life always do, until we cry uncle 
And suddenly, it was too much miracle, 
The parting of a sea in me
And God, mercifully, let me drift back into my unseeing ways
And the daze which keeps me consolable 

God, too, hides his presence, after all
Lest we be smote like a great flame
Or scattered like sparrows across the sky
So He allows us remain in whatever amount of miracle 
We are willing to abide

And like birds 
We are
Watching and waiting, 
Preparing ourselves to fly

As We Strain to Lift His Arms

We read in school the story of the hands of Hur 
He who with Aaron of the oil-drenched beard, lifted Moses’ arms, as battle stirred

Metaphor or history falls beside the point
Sometimes a tale is true as poetry,

But I simply did not know nor could I fathom then 
And still, I can hardly comprehend
It’s God’s own arms we all hold up
Heaving, heaving on the everlasting arms

We who groan in prayer and sorrow, looking up,
To stars whose cries are burning eyes far too far from Him to lend their help 
Or the succoring kiss of friendship
So we are all He has  

As we learn, again, that God is always crucified and 
Is hanging now ragged as a war-torn heart
God Himself the battle and the battle’s end
As we all, with battered hands, strain to lift His arms 

To Be Caught Between Desires

My daughter nearly wept as I stepped out the door 
Unsure whether she should stay or come with me 
And I was only going down the street, to do an errand 
But she could not decide—to come with me or stay inside, with mom

I remember being torn by such desires
When, to young hearts, such choices seem the stuff of destiny, of kings and queens and squires

O, you are fully alive, my child, and still in that holy space before we embrace a lesser flame, tapering down our heart’s long burning wick, to cure its lovesick ways
To be alive and feel as you do, hard struck by the world’s strange beauty, your soul blown open by the wind 
To take and taste your tears and not despise a one of them

I hope you learn this trick (I want to teach you it and learn it new myself),
For I can remember, my love, what it’s like to have your heart so confused, 
Balanced on the spires of competing desires, each earnestly entreating you, 
You, soft and pure and open, befuddled by the need to refuse any pure thing
You, learning what it is to choose, and confused by life's sharp sting

The truth is, I hope you will keep weeping, in courses more broad and more mature, in keeping with your age,
That you become a sage of feeling
Always retaining and maintaining your grand capacity to feel, 
Even as you learn to steel yourself against harsh winds, that still you’ll let stiff breezes in 

That you take in every scrape of the world and the joy of every bee and butterfly 
This is my prayer for you, my child, 
As you become a high-wire walk over green gardens, and streets where the passerby looks up at you, so high above the ground and never looking down 
The clouds white in your eyes, their light shining as the other side draws ever closer in their view 
Your hazel irises still wet but shining
Above a wise and happy smile

The Philosopher’s Commute

At six, I finished the philosopher's book 
By the beach as fishermen bobbed their lines and hooks, some dinner to catch and cook
Some food to find
From the quickly darkening sea

He has it all figured out, does he
From a shining tower, whose lofty shade makes a lovely bower
But he, too, must put his book away at end of day
And close his briefcase, shutting the door with a heave and a sigh
As the moon rides high

Then he folds himself into his car and enters the fray on the freeway, 
As evening breaks the back of day
And brake lights become beacons all the way, saying, "All in fits and starts," my friend 

And at pavement’s end, the truth is: 
None from these harried hordes cares a lick what he has to say
As he goes home, has a drink, and sees on the evening news 
The way people still treat each other
Despite the highest notions 
Of life and love 

He becomes then, once again, one of us, 
An angel felled from above 
The bourbon babbling on the back of his throat
As he floats just above the waves
As he bobs on the water of a great, dark ocean

Chernobyl

I watched a miniseries on Chernobyl
That terrifying tragedy which reminds us that death is many-faced and deathless  
And that, as if this world needed more terrors, it finds new ways to mask its visage, invisible to us as atoms

What I will remember most is the young woman just in harm’s way on the highway, 
Unknowing, when ignorance is no bliss, 
While what rains down is the darkest kiss

She stands beside a broken bike, her beau tugging at the engine, as any of us might in hazy spring heat—
Leaning on a wall, to save her feet 
A cigarette dangling from her fingers
The angle of it the protracted protest 
Of a bored woman not at all enjoying the delays in this impatient world

I imagined, then, what would’ve happened if they found out that radiation was falling all about
I see them scramble in a mad dash through the green spring
To safety
Running if they might to outstrip the wind itself 
To hold onto dear and precious life, catching breath 

All so
They could resume, somewhere, that languorous sighing 
The inhaling of smoke
And the boredom of fixing all the broken things
Arguing beneath a tired headboard 
Waiting for some great thing to happen

On a Normal Tuesday

On a normal Tuesday morning, around ten,
Clouds of fog, dirt-tinged, drift in,
Down, along, and across the ridge
Filling the farm bottom with trails of streaming white, 
The gleaming of a sacred light
To bridge the dirt and sky 

In town, a bell rings
And the great storm of earth and sky keeps rolling, threshing like a mill, through its seasons, something too subtle to espy 
Throwing words into the sky, unknowing
Our blind prophet, this earth, ever speaking 
That tide and stars most reliably mark time
And so, too, the migration of the geese
The felling of a scythe 
The occasional dipping down of sky, in mist and fog 

We could be working instead of heaving away from shore, across the bridge in your battered truck
To find some place to stand and fish and hope for luck 
And my God, the world is always just like this, waiting for someone to step back and take it in 
As trucks park and ripe fruit is unloaded in the market
Red and yellow and green
The world so full of such bright things

Meanwhile,
We land like Martians on happy soil, unloading our tackle boxes,
As we watch the fog pour through the trees
Knowing we need, sometimes, to be covered

Just so, on this Tuesday
Surrounded by so much miracle that it hurts our soul and makes us turn away and, like monks, keep our silence
Our hearts blinded with the pain of too much seeing 
As bluebirds sing
And the morning owl takes wing

Wabi-Sabi

When I am done with this porch 
I will leave the broom sitting vigilantly over beams so freshly swept
A cleanness kept 
A tornado ready always to strike at Wichita, 
Looming mercilessly to threaten all 
With cleanness 

The broom hangs as a prayer of welcome, accepting that all things change
Everything changes and nothing stays the same
And we will never be done sweeping 
We will always be in the business of cleaning and pushing at the chaos of life and love and loss
It is our lot
And glad or grungy we can plot it

In the past, I would put the broom away, for to say 
“This job is through”
But now I gladly shake the hand of imperfection
And leave incompletion dangling
Hanging like an unfinished note
A shave-and-a-haircut but two-bits has left town 
With the cousins and the family goat

And in all this incompletion, I have learned to find the voice of God
Who shines so brightly through jagged edges and on broken hooks
And the just bent pages of holy books, fallen from their shelves 
Though, “Blasphemy" some old self says, for the Holy One is all complete 
“But don’t you know?” I say
God shows best in places out of place
And Jacob walked with an ungainly gait 

The Japanese have made an art of celebrating the imperfect—the worn down in good use, the broken and repaired
A vase, say, sealed back to life with golden paste
So the broom hangs like gold glue over the porch, promising to repair the world 
And we are all, of course, not only the sweepers but the boards
And the vases, held together by something healing that, if we will let it, reflects light up from holy places 

That is the task: create order out of chaos knowing chaos will take backs its place
Dust will fall, and dust you’ll chase 
But do it with a smile and a grateful face,
Do all this, 
And call it grace

Marilyn

When I see photos of Marilyn Monroe, 
And knowing how she flew from this bright world to black and white, and fell below it,
Immortalized 
I guess she must have realized, beneath that smile that will never die, how to disappear inside herself
The new Houdini, ravishingly dressed 
Ever vanished beneath pouted lips and swimsuits picked to accentuate her chest

She could turn off whatever self she was, the girl next door,
And become the thing they all adored
But the continual calculus took some doing— 
Stuffing your soul down always does,
Or pushing it into the sky, as disembodied from her famous body, 
She flies on soft breezes, while Sinatra smiles 
And the Kennedys admire this fair land of opportunity

She surveys from above what she’s become
Norma Jean, far from home
Like Noah’s dove, looking for some space to own

But when all the flesh you squeeze and pinch does nothing to conceal the longing 
Which, untouched, becomes a poison, 
Her body, a prison 
A magnet to hold the gaze of so many unseeing men 
There’s only endless roaming, then 

Unless someone holds you with their eyes, there’s no delight in the most supple arms or hands that ply for desperate permission, imploring you
And you know now that charm’s a liar 
And that the loving look is rare 
Except in a good man who’s willing to high-wire through the air
And wade through the haze of so much unreality, which has come to surround and hound you 
Nor can it be found in the grandstands of admirers who want one thing, but not to unhand you

So the soul grows insane from all the stares that never see 
After all, riches are a blinding thing
And breasts, too, and a face that launched a thousand ships and burned down the topless
towers of unthinking men who, in their conflagration, pulled to sand and ash the very beauty they crowded ‘round
Pulled it down and watched it crash

What follows is no mystery—
When your true self is not the you they want to kiss 
You start slipping from your moorings, you turn to mist
We can’t stomach fantasy when the deep soul demands reality

It’s no wonder (and can be no judgment)
That a pill or bottle becomes the thing you think will save you
When you’ve been bandied about and the lot you sold your soul to build upon comes up short
Leaving us to say “goodbye” and “how sad”, as if we had no part in the plot

We’ll simply remember how her smile made us feel
And seemed to promise sun-drenched fields
As we give thanks for grace and begin looking for some new face
To take her place
And save us 
With dreams of a long and warm embrace

Huntington Gardens

The old man who tends the gardens has such deep regret
I know because of how he holds the hoe and his head and because he would not look at me as I said “hello"
Though my daughter did get him to crack a smile

Some old men are like boats that settle into the ocean’s swell, even if the swell is sorrow, for miles 
And somehow I know that hoeing these rows is his penance (though his sin I’ll never know)
As he earns enough to sit with cold beer on his warm porch and watch the sun go down, before treading back to these demanding plods of dirt, like divas which will sing for you but, should you forsake them, will let themselves go

I do not know if his redemption lies in the simple furrows
But over many seasons they do make a sort of poetry which is sent out into the world like hope
We watch it grow

And I hope he knows
That picking weeds is a way of setting our world right again
And his posture a fixture of faithfulness which shows us all how to be in the work of any good thing
By simply leaning in, again and again, until the end 

This winter is clad in cold colors, gray and brown
And no one will make a startled sound until the rose bushes blush
And we all fawn for the beauty, as the birds sing

I hope then, as the crowds stamp these grounds,
That the sad man will lean his weight on his tall tools and stop and sigh 
And, if he’s lucky, smile, 
Underneath a warm, blue sky 

God's Own Poems, Like Sparrows in the World

The rhythm of these little birds—sparrows, I think, or finches
Lands like God’s poetry on the branches

They are nervous, these birds, like unsettled fingers, 
Startled, perhaps, by the beauty of the bright world

But then they fly in uncomprehending grace, quickly heedless of any beauty or the forested space of green which leans in to befriend their tiny frames 

Since each beat of the wing is driven by hunger, they have no time or thought or feeling for anything other
than beating wings and the daily hunt to quench the sting 
(How things change depending on our perspective and our place)

Like all living things, they are driven forward first by the beauty, then by the hunger of the world 
With inscrutable, searching eyes, they pine, they dive 
But still, beauty can divert their eyes, and surprise them

Just as poems must be sent out, like Noah’s dove,
To take in the world from above
And keep things in perspective
Some bright, right thing to find
So God’s own self is always sent hungry into the world
Like a poem, a word, a dove

Since God needs to take wing and remember
What dirt and dust taste like
And the joy of alighting on supple springtime branches
As hunger, for a sunlit moment, recedes, and we hover—with God and the spring-bound birds—above the fray 

White Pink Morning

I believe, as I read the poet this morning, that the bluebird and the white pink morning of which she sings (both the poet and the bluebird) were specific things
Or moments, at least

But removed as I am from her pen and memory, the specific things I cannot see 
Which ends up far better for me: 
Sitting on my couch, for just a moment I am lifted through my mind to every place ever graced by a pink
morning
To Albuquerque, perhaps, or Maine 

I cannot see all the names, shrouded as they are in secrets
As if around us some reality is waiting to come crashing down on top of us
Beautifully, like the heaving of a waterfall, which will not reveal all 
Still, we feel its water certainly inside us

But maybe, too, she had no place in view when she wrote those words
Maybe there was no white pink morning and no bluebird and just an inner eye seeing and beating with the hidden heart of the world

I do not know
But I feel we are heading downstream together, still
To a bright pink morning 
As long as we don’t get bogged down with too many things 
Or even with our own healing
When the bright blue world and its pink mornings are an endless springtime balm 
So willing to hold and sooth and calm us all
As we rise like the sun, not quite sure where we are
As the long day of knowing finally dawns

Today's Metaphor is Rain

Maybe that cloud is today’s metaphor for God
Always rising as it is, over the eastern ridge, but somehow never drawing near,
And fanned at its penumbra with burnt smoke 
Fire and clouds and God, all hot with the taste of forest and always changing shape

I’m sure I see the face of some Grace in the shapeless longing to cool the scorched earth with sweet spring rain, though 
As we lay in our tent, struck by the rumble and ruckus of the thunder
In a dark night with no moon to illuminate the steps of any living thing
We waited beneath the tarp for the flicking fingers to begin
And we just went on waiting, until sleep carried us away 

The raindrops never graced us with their presence
And we woke to a dry patch of grass, though, 
Across the meadow, the stream was thicker and more alive with spring
And we tasted second-hand the gift, as grateful bands of animals came and drank
Which became its own picture of mercy, and grand in its way
Though we had wanted water to wet our own hands 
To steady and stay us for the day 

Leaving us the strange shape of how things stand, as we make our way through the thicket of forest
Rain, like mercy, comes in such strange fits and starts
Amid the thirst of so much hungry land
And the hot patches of thirsty ground
Where beauty’s all around 
But the fullness is falling just further down, along the range
As a dark cloud rises, just one ridgeline away 

What God Wants (Pear Cycle III)

What God wanted for all those medieval kings and peasants and all peoples of the earth
Was the ripeness of a perfect pear 
Or a tomato redolent in red 
Or an apple whose good skin when cracked was temptation unto besetting sin 
So close to holy love is carnal lust, when it cloys our deepest sense

But you and I just ate better than any medieval king, my love
Or Senator of ancient Rome
With wine unmarked by bitter earth 
And fruit unfettered by assaulting herbs

And as sure as moon pulls at the earth, you’re my sea of deepest mirth
My far away journey, my return to home
Your lips, your laugh, your smile, your breasts,
You kiss of God’s bright love, 
You crown my head which is always shaking in wonder
Because
This ecstasy before us could be chalky dust:
If you don’t have love, the food of gods is not enough

But
Sitting across from you, how high the moon shines down
And how deep the swallow dives into our cups
As we sit so close to what God’s own self wants 
And is always giving endlessly 

Love 
Whose alchemy turns the gifts of earth 
To gold, of so much dust and dirt

Before I Go, to All the Books I've Read

I believe on the day I die all the books I’ve read will rise 
To thank me, and I them
We’ll shake hands in a long line, and spend a quiet time wide-eyed, with lips pursed to hold down all that is inside us
And before some of them I’ll pause, a sad and knowing smile on my face, and I’ll touch their spine, 
For some, that will be enough, but to others I’ll whisper something just loud enough for them alone to hear
They’ll laugh and cry in that sacred mix of powerlessness and love and letting go
And each will hand to me a stem of fruit in different shapes
Pears and apples, oranges and grapes
Before I come down to the ocean water and the waves which will take me home

I will try to screw my tears down then, but if they come, so be it
Then I’ll nod my head and look up the beach
And perhaps, a unicorn or stag will appear, breaking up the sand as it runs towards it freedom—and it may all be real, for by then I’ll be seeing clear through to the other side

But before I go, of course, I’ll walk the fruit back to that fabled tree and place it on the branches
The tree will receive it, suckling it back onto its breast to hang there 
Until someone soon after me plucks it and drink its juice down to their young roots

Then, I’ll swim into those clear cold waters, my breath leaving me, and all the words and worlds will fade behind, as I come to the place beyond them, 
Where there is only sight and sound and once again, like a babe new born in the bright blue world, all is light 
To this place where all the books—when they stumbled into truth—were pointing us:
This place so full of You 
With ears now opened and the song of my eyes quiet, filled and full,
With all I never knew