Category Archives: Poems

74 – More Etc. Edited to Mogwai’s Central Belters

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In the Yard, Everywhere a Garden, Frisco
The rustle of the aspen leaves like strings of soft wooden beads gently pushed aside by a hand.
Swallows soaring swirling acrobatics tracing the world’s most complex roller coaster clear into the blue, chittering happily and madly because they are swallows and it is theirs, and theirs alone (but this they do not know: that it is also mine).
A hummingbird’s thrum as it zips there (where?) dashing lines in a picture book, now stopping—hovering stationary—motionless but for the soft blur of wings, in front of a purple flower its slender saber-like bill inserted like a bank card into the slot of an atm. Then, ZIP! from my watchful eye, the flower crystalline still.
And the sun filtering through clouds sweetly and warm, an exquisite hand, fingers wriggling, reaching through soap bubbles for something. The touch of my only lover on my skin.

On the tall green grasses
Water droplets
The mountain peaks
Obscured by rain clouds

A young boy
The pebbly shore
He picks one up
_________

At Lake Dillon Marina. On a large boulder along the shore. The sky perfectly blue. Indescribably blue (indescribably perfect). The sky indescribable at any time. It’s more like an emotion than a physical thing, the sky.
The clouds punctuate long rambling sentences that are meaningless, wholly without sense. They’re beautiful and white. As monumental as the mountains, though they be so much more ethereal, insubstantial, always shifting, changing, bits vanishing like an old flag torn to tatters by the relentless wind. Of course, the mountains do too, just slower. So much slower, like the eternity it takes to find someone you love, and then they’re gone.
It’s been ages since I’ve sat like this, down by the water, just observing. Some time ago in Annapolis. Months ago. The breeze a mere whisper today—a comforting pat on the back by a missed friend. More ripples in the lake than unaccountable footsteps in the world. Infinite and everlasting. The sky contained within, but only a part. One could sit out here forever.

The End (not to be confused with the Birdhouse skate video)
Walking by Royal (in so much as one can walk by a mountain). I’m thinking about how my time here has nearly come to an end, and how this all seems like a dream, how all life seems like a dream, and that I’m nothing more than a wisp of smoke, an amalgam of gas and ashes that has somehow been bound together into a corporeal body, and that it makes no sense, but that trying to make sense of existence is like digging a hole in the desert hoping to strike water. That the beauty and the strangeness and awful magnificence and senselessness are to be loved and cherished and enjoyed (or not, if you so choose!). That it matters not if this is all just a dream and every leaf I touch and mountain I climb are mere tricks of these senses (those senses themselves being tricks, too), that their apparent solidity is nothing but an illusion, and my own solidity as well. I laugh! Because it is the air let out of the balloon, and it flies around the room making that silly noise. It is a revelation. But also the genesis of a dream or a reality (is there truly a difference?) that begins anew every moment of every uncountable moment which is this one singular moment that is and forever will be.

How does one draw a line for eternity, yet never move the pen?

72 – Etc.

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Observations, thoughts, etc. with line breaks.

Sunset, Nevada
hazy citrus sky swimming in a champagne cloud.
the painted pale blue mountains: a curtain of curling waves.
the setting sun a flaming disc of death.
the hot steel of the railroad tracks burning beneath,
and glinting like a diamond-edged knife.
the earth is harsh, dry, orange and arsoned.
the sun is a killer.
black asphalt cuts through it all: an arrow into the horizon.

Colorado, South to North
the stillness of the train cars beneath the ageless mountains
the white clouds looking down like gods
casting shadows the size of cities
almost dwarfing the mountains, cliffs, and bluffs
which are this West’s forests
these huge, vertical masses pointed skyward
but growing smaller by the ages unlike the trees which press ever higher
and the people whose numbers grow greater
but, yet, like these mountains and cliffs
their wisdom erodes

Dreaming in Taos
i crawl from my tent
and upward peer brightly—there is the moon
and overhead the trees
shaking silver in its light
shooting stars skip like stones across the sky
like fingernail clippings flung from a god
into this landscape illuminated night
and the small tree beside me, a companion
lying down black in the grass
sleep comes gradually

Sitting and Writing, A Dove

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There was
A White-tipped Dove
Hooting before I walked inside
To get this pad
To get this pen
And now
I’ve returned to my spot
On the little wooden steps
That lead nowhere
Among the tall, green grass
Which the morning sun shines through so well
Next to the old Cottonwood
Adventurous, onyx-black ants venturing
Up and down
Climbing into and out
Of canyons in its gnarled, crevassed bark
And the dove is silent.

Instead, the screech and chatter of magpies
And the rapid, staccato hammering of a Lawrence’s Woodpecker
On the old tree behind me
It’s tallest limbs naked, dry, bare
Prodding at the sky like an historical monument
One without a plaque, without a name
Without much significance at all
Largely unknown but to those
Who know to look.

And the soft “churr” of crickets
Nearly imperceptible in the background
The background which we move upon
That an arm, a leg
A gesture
Thrusts up from
It is the background against which all our monuments
All the daily minutiae manifests itself
Expresses itself in relief
If one sits still long enough the dove may return
To softly whistle her call amongst
The cacophony of the day.

48

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Friday, 05/06

Oklahoma observations
thus far: flat
level, even; hills (east of Tulsa):
rolling, undulating,
up, then down, then up, then down,
rolling long and rolling slow like a rolling ocean swell
from one horizon—
that may simultaneously look so small
(just a piece of thread caught and held in the wind)
yet so immense it is,
and ever, and ever, and ever out of reach,
—to another,
ripples on a pond from a thrown stone

Trees speckle the plains that in places are swollen and bulging,
writ in harmony with the landscape they tie together
like various notes on a musical score—a soundless melody;
Scissor-tailed flycatchers and eastern kingbirds perched on wires and fences,
alert and fluttering off at my approach along the road;
Cows sprinkle the landscape all across
like poppy seeds on a bagel, or fleas on a dog’s pelt;
And the roads—long and black like cauterized wounds threading their way through

Wasn’t intending this to be a “poem,” but I like it more than just a list, and it provided me with some entertainment—the editing.

44

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It is so nice to be in a place.
Simply, to walk
Leisurely.
To look at the greenery,
And to
Hear it innnn the winddddd.

To wonder
How it came to be here, and
Why it is shaped so.

To watch
Sun and shadow pitter-patter
In the grass, playing a game:
Each chase the other around.

The birds’ song
Interrupted only by silence.
And that is no interruption at all,
But the space between the sound and dream.

Where am I?
Where is this place?

Here. Only here
The miracle of Being may be observed
Anywhere
And Anywhere may be everywhere.
And within Everywhere is a Somewhere.
And Somewhere may be anywhere.
And within any Where is a Here.

33

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Camping at my first church since I was in North Carolina.

Many miles today. Miles through bleak suburbs choked with strip malls, empty parking lots, bad traffic, bad shoulders, familiarity and despair. Miles through farmland; wide, open spaces; countless cows grazing the lush, green pastures that are everywhere speckled with flowers—purple, waxy-yellow, and chalky-white—like a million smiling faces, and, when the wind blows, a million waving hands like those from the friendly drivers who pass me opposite; the wire fences; copses of trees; the grey clouds bunched, bulging, heavy with rain that never falls, stretching on forever all day. Miles, though fewer, through the cityscape of Selma, her streets and buildings saturated in civil rights history; boarded up houses; nice, clean, proud houses with neat landscaped yards; empty buildings; broken windows; no doors; amicableness; amiableness; junk cars; the criss-cross of railroad tracks; the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the blood flowed one day like the river runs beneath it; marvelous architecture; and damn good ribs. I also saw a banner, on it the word HOPE. More and more large towns and small cities I see today are full of hope, and desire change. Call it “the people.” They are the hope. The people are the ones, the only ones, who have the capability to turn around a city’s fortunes, and they must turn it around, because if not, then what does this word, “hope” mean, what is it for, and what does it represent? It is like a false idol which one worships, makes offerings to on every first and third Sunday, and second and fourth Wednesday. It is a place where the people might get together to sprinkle water, light incense, and talk. Talk, talk, talk; and talk is just masturbation. There is a sprinkling of seed, sure, but no fertile ground for it to settle, fertilize and grow. It brings forth no fruit, bears no children. It merely feels pleasant for a short while. It is a drug. And an addictive one at that because it requires a minimum of effort and no commitment. It is a mouth that talks, yet has no voice.

Where there are people there is hope. But where there are people there is, too, complacency.
 

 
A bug shimmers under my light, wings and carapace glinting. It flies ever so lightly, so gently, into the mesh door of my tent — bounces away into the dark. God, what magic this world contains. Magic on the minutest scale. It is not necessary that there be large explosions and a shower of sparks, though that is fine too. There is magic right under our noses. The real magic is in the looking.

My Georgian World

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Georgia winds.
Oh! Georgia winds.

Oh, to be a cow
up there on that hill
Stolid, strong and stout.
Immovable.

Or, to be,
a lank, slender blade of grass,
tall and supple,
bendable and flexible.

Or, maybe a tree,
roots deep in the earth,
Wide, wide branches spread so, waving
Madly,
gladly,
in the wind.

To be something other than a cyclist
Who yet must contain
all those qualities—of the cow, grass & tree—
Within a single skin,

A framework of nerve, muscle, bone and blood.