Saturday, October 21, 2023

(Three poems with an interview by the publisher Jen Knox published in February, 2024 issue of Unleash Lit

Escape from Belle Isle

in the prison of pines and parables and lost time
on mountains above the bay of shadows
you hunger for more than liberation
now you know that all bridges are lies
…you are stuck in the middle
in the mean of metaphors that darken custody
 
in such a cage you read your own palm
looking for a lifeline
 
the truth you long for won’t say its real name
and in the solitary confines of subject and object
you fake escape, you claim roots, with a faceted rock
you slough off the words rationed; you make new words
 
you wrestle an angel for ladders
 
in the canopy of tall trees
in the bells that ring the hour
in the tide below flowing with its rules
and in the simple conjuring
in the red notebook
you hold so tightly --
that truth, the soul’s truth, sets nothing free:
a metal key 
jangles
on a jailor’s belt
 
the tide rises to cover the narrow beach
a limb falls to the ground
pounding the earth with sorrow
the late hour closes every door to you
 
here, you learn that thinking you are a god
does not make you a god
these are the rules too
 
the mark of impermanence is on everything
and you only can lock yourself in such loss
you can only scratch the days passing on the stone walls
 
one morning in fall, in the cooling sun
a map falls from the notebook
you can get lost on this map
but a florid compass rose points directions
it is a chart to the northwest passage that surely
takes you out to an end
who knows?
you ask the sailor in the next cell
 
he says
“row, row, oh sweet and wounded pilgrim;
the oar in your arms loosens from the gunwale --
your body, too, loses chains
and sinks in the certain tide”
 
in this school for scoundrels
you learn not to wait for magic
for charts to secret islands
you learn the sacred improbable
has buried stolen jewels in you
           
            your shadow
            draws stickfigures
it is the author of your numerous mistakes
 
one line, two lines, cross four to make five
on the wall
in your notebook of thinking
in the deepest sea you must cross
while you are still alive
 
who can tell what rends the veil?
but it is the moon that pulls you apart
and takes you down to the wooden wharves
made of roots pulled from the dark earth
free for only this moment
when you taste the salty sea
 
what’s torn never mends
and you would stay in one place then
if you wanted to be a hollow diamond
so you write definitions of freedom
on each white page
then wander
a little longer --
the rules may follow you
before you bend
 
the fallen branches
form a raft
in the diaspora of sense
as the merciful ocean
carries you away from shore
the bell on the buoy rocks and rings
behind you
and you begin the voyage out of your hands
 

The Hut of Otherwise

the table of splinters
sits in a fallen shed;
 
it is a rectangle of ash and dust
and human labor left
in the middle
of the hut with no walls
 
the roof burned off
and now it’s time
to recover stars
 
the cottage wants cleaning
sweep around it! get rid of it all!
leaves and fur and rust
the particles of first cause
the sweeping never ends
 
the broom catches galaxies
yet misses what is small
 
bring a cot, two cots,
and arrange them against
the hut’s missing walls
sleep the sleep of the wicked,
there’s space enough for all
 
no need for walls anyway,
things are too busy becoming otherwise
 
and the absent roof?
that’s an ancient fiction,
nothing but made-up stories
 
a wooden table sat there,
arrayed with archaic tools,
all temporary
all already gone
before you can hold them
 
your memory is a hut burned
before you build it --
it’s to its ash you will return

Star Songs

A woman is singing down in the valley --
you cannot hear her as the night covers
you with deep violet silence.  You’ve picked the mountain top
to sleep.  To distance yourself from such songs.
 
But the stars, whose lights do touch you,
tell you her story, warn you –
you misunderstand, you think she is the predator.
You freeze and pull in your nubby claws
to sit in sand at this saddle
between north and south
 
and you pretend
you can hear her --
you think this lie will hide you;
an ostrich’s head in the sand of evolution.
All your performance buries you.
 
You deny the stars’ comfort tendered.
You let them spin away.
You are relieved when you think you have no guidance.
 
East or west, paths climb
in both directions.  The sawtooth ridges on both
sides scrape the sky for impartiality.
You’re on the edge of something,
you can almost smell it.
 
But you won’t climb; it’s yellow-golden
morning and you must choose.
Yesterday, in the valley, thick with both
aversion and obsession
your body stopped in its tracks
to stand like a shield. Only dusk freed you
and now it’s day again.
 
You must simplify your life.
But don’t expect to sing.
Song isn’t something you earn.
 
The lilies in this valley,
are planted by spinning stars too.
You think you have been abandoned,
though you are held in an embrace
by what you cannot hear.

So you walk south, hoping
the woman follows. Hoping
someday you will hear her.
Hoping she catches and consumes you.
 
The stars have a green power
to answer these false hopes –
their melodies purge
the madness and its monetized residue. 
Do you know why you’ve lost
the ability
to fly? You must change your life.

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

 (Published in the May/June, 2023 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press)

The God of Gaps

 
At the base
of tall redwoods
I stop thinking 
about thinking.

I wait in the space
between tall words.

It’s October and the late 
afternoon light
rests on its side
yet wavers from the wind.

The wind’s too much
for words I have remembered or found.
The only song now
is up in the crown.

There’s room
between the song I want to hear
and what keeps singing up there.
 
There’s a distance
between the right word
and me. 

Sunlight diagonals
fall through tall pillars of spongy bark, 
from canopy to duff,
to mark the link of shadow and light.
The trees invent the light.
They invite us to parse it.
We learn from what is sparse.

There is a Japanese word
for light like this
in the forest.
I can’t remember it.
I can’t remember enough.
Proper nouns, then nouns… in that order
words slow.
There is darkness between what I knew
and know.

The light in the forest
fills in its name,
komorebi.
Does this not sound like song?
Did it ever not sound like you
or me?

Nature needs to abhor a vacuum.
Without questions, words come
to the dark room between us.

The autumn wind
in this redwood forest can rain down
widowmakers in the gaps
or fill silence
with  a rush of singing
or stain a page
with exactly the right word
as long as this light lasts

and joins us.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

(my first fiction accepted for publication, to be published July, 2023, by Half and One )

A Closed Set

Two men in French blue overalls knock on the door and mumble something important.  Something will happen.  We cannot hear them though. I am drinking coffee and I try to open the door, one hand balancing the coffee, the other struggling to close the door enough to release the chain lock.  But they’ve walked away now. I say, Excuse me! But it’s to their backs.

The next day we wake to find an large earthmover parked in the drive. A mound of dirt blocks our door from opening.

We don’t panic, but it’s odd to be trapped inside. I climb out the window and walk to the warehouse next door. I see a whirl of activity. I walk in the roll up door and talk to the workers, some anxiously moving, some sitting distractedly in canvas camp chairs.  Some in overalls, men and women both, some wear business casual.  In my significant voice I ask: What is this? Is it a film?  (There is a camera on tracks. A large man with a baseball cap that says “Manchester City” sits on the seat behind the Dolly.) When will it end? What about dirt in our driveway? (These are reasonable questions! I tell them when I am ignored.)
 
I think the shrugs of indifference are from shlubs who look like workers who build spreadsheets, carry iron boxes of tools, handle a web of cords and wires, and answer phones that do not ring. (Continued....)

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

 (Published in the April, 2023, edition of Plainsongs)

A Drowned Man’s Search for Meaning

 

Some days
the harbormaster, the bookkeeper
the editor-in-chief, the umpire
agree to meet
(as assigned)
in a quiet café
in Barcelona
or on a hill
on the coast
just east of San Sebastian.
 
Those dissolving cafés.
 
Such cafés with
tables under trees,
a bowl of oranges
and warm bread in the shade.
 
They are given mint
tea, with lots of sugar.
They stay quiet.
Smiling like Mona Lisa
at each other, relieved
to take time off.
 
They are not distracted
but still they don’t comment
on the sandpiper
on the beach below
who’s let go
of the ideas
causing its pains.
Without them
the sandpiper finds
amethyst in
the universal grains,
with or
without worry.
 
Some days the octopus
needs no ink.
 

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

 (Published in the March 2023 issue of  Nude Bruce Literary Journal)

My Pronouns Are Lying

 

My pronouns experience rigpa, recoil, take cover as soon as possible, and write a poem like this, but not this.

My pronouns, stunned, roll around in the annals of history, not exactly lost, but far from any place that is found.  My pronouns form new versions, as is their nature, to be transcendent, immanent and ungrammatical.  Grammar tames but does not harness them. Avoiding grammar, my pronouns make my myths.

For instance, my pronouns pretend they are the wax in Icarus’ wings, more’s the pity for him, the gods, and the emptying skies.  My pronouns walk under that sky, want to keep it from loss, replicate it as a hedge against loss.  But somewhere someone must have seen something remarkable, a boy falling into the dark sea. Now my pronouns hold places in sentences where collective agreement is not enough.  Their failures make my pronouns the only map of consciousness, the world looking at itself.

My pronouns are the aether, the rich soup of neutrinos and theory, the dark and light of all possible universes. They shine with capaciousness in their war against holograms, against simulations. My pronouns make the world we know by the light they use.  But my pronouns, shifty and out-of-date, also hunger to touch wood, to smell the living rot of the forest, and to exit the math and codes that monetize our loss of the material world.

So, with their need for the real world without constructs, my pronouns regroup, case the joint, duck for cover, and slip out the back.  In the back 40 of the desert and floods, my pronouns find the lost jar where symmetrical particles hide until it’s time to end time. They are wrapped in torn curtains.

My pronouns, long-winded but wiser for the wear, pack up the DNA of what’s possible, and are exhausted by what’s not. My pronouns fold themselves – origami, charts, clean linen, mudras, counterpoints, scrolls, neurotransmitters, carry-on luggage, black holes – to close the argument.  And every fold’s a lie.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

 (Published in the February, 2023, issue of Compass Rose Literary Journal )

Harvesting Stars

 

Roots carry starlight into the earth;
leaves turn to the heavens
without remorse.
 
Plant-life is surely our pointing-out
instruction.
But how can we aspire to such
pristine equanimity?
 
Answers come
before such questions form.
The one and precious life
weighs the sun. I told you so.
I told you the green promise will lift us.
 
Regret, frankly, is a shadow
of what light once was.
The earth turns around
and night and day drain our secrets.
 
The ambrosia falling out of time
feeds the devils waiting under us,
wearing leaden boots.
 
Symbiotic lost and found.
Starlight, root, leaf – taste the sweet lie
time tells!
 
We scrape through woody yokes
to turn to the sky’s skeleton too.
We invent time and space
to cover our tracks.
We pack air and water
on the raft of questions.
There is great heaviness next
to the fire and metal
we take from the text.
Take to plan next steps.
Next steps on water.
 
We grow contexts.
But if we want to be like plants
we must be ready
to lighten the load by sacrifice.
Our seed will blow
away before we are sown
into the unknown.                      
 
Nothing in us
remembers. We can’t change
earth, water and metal
into fire.
 
We forget instead,
and the silence of forgetting
brings the rain
and then soon
we sheaf the stars
grown from the deluge.

Saturday, December 10, 2022

(This poem began as a free verse poem years ago and kept growing into a prose poem. Published in the January, 2023 edition of the prose poem journal, Unbroken ).

Joy Ride

Listen: it’s like this: sometimes after you steal it you have to floor it. See it’s not a getaway or a chase. It’s more like you’re running late and the deadline is sunset. And it’s not like you’ve stellar judgement in these crimes of passion. Safety was never the deal. But this time the wheels won’t steer you anymore. You’ve hit a patch of mortal ice. The heart softens what once was steel and they’ve mistaken kindness for weakness. Then dark angels steal your tears, then scatter them like salt on the road and in the wound you wear down. You lose your grip on what you thought was real. Feel my fists, they are fallen angels too. They have frosty wings. They all flew much too high but did not melt and fall, historically, into your warming sea. Look. It’s night, and the top is down. A single moon dries out in highway winds outside Indio. Lunacy put the fear of some god, let’s say, into my deserted limbs. They flew off the random wheel, shaking at the stars that let them down. They flail like a drowning man climbing the ladder in a lake of fire. You put me through hell, angel eyes. So I beat the hell out of you, my brother. “Devil or angel”, when I punch the radio’s preset. Set for seventy years in this “borrowed” rattletrap. A fistful’s hit parades nestle your grief on my lap. Jack-knifing in the blind motion, I wrestle with silence, again, for control. An empty bottle breaks body and soul. Buddy, let’s stay fugitives. I tell ya, going back’s a trap. After midnight I wake up. One headlight is out but the tank is half full. Even after the swerve and the crash you still sleep in the passenger’s seat. The metal bends round you like a halo. Your cheeks are dark by a day of not shaving. My desires pause in the hair and hollows of your face. The laws we smashed desert us too. The silver light from the dash makes the bruises on your arm the color of the mountains ahead, the senseless gash now dry as the moon. The laws lose their nerve. I think, “We can make the border by sunup.” You know, that dawn seen only by the ocular heart passing on a blind curve.


Tuesday, November 15, 2022

(Published in The Dewdrop , December 2022)

The Way of Mountains


I practice pockets
on these mountains too.
Like I tucked in
the embarrassing moments
winding down in the world. 
Moments coolly glazed
with habit; 
moments too cherished   
in kind.
 
Moments belonging
because I loved them.
Moments marked mine
by the steps
pressing up these switchbacks.
Dusty footing,
pine needles resinous
on loose gravel;
I am ready to slip.
 
Belonging or not,
the mountain pilgrim
moves west.
Toward or away: trust is trust.
Impartial steps are beautiful.
Rock and dust ready the end
of this and any day.
 
The sun holds its 
alpenglow;
goes and comes back.
I can’t forgive myself in valleys.
Clemency only rolls off the sawtooth ridge,
falling in a sky
lifted by
22,000 breaths.
 
Only the mountains
redeem the mysterious debt.
Only the mountains offer death
a button and thread,
and place to wait.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 (Published on the Humans of the World blog, winning first prize in its 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge.)

Cassandra Adjacent

It’s overtime. And we’ve replaced
presence with performance.
We captured an image
to withdraw intention. We rattle cagey syntax
to lose the clues and count cold likes.
The likes pile up and the subtle body relaxes.                       
 
I warn of these attacks with but a sleepy muse.
Late-stage capitalism limits limbs and sinews.
Bloodshot eyes choose the garden’s rot.
Three particles from stars already dead
convene the most marketable headshots.
It hurts to stand in the way.
 
I guess I am more a crack on the spectrum
than a Cassandra.        Look at where trees limn
the heavens.                For fuck sake,
look at how seed surrenders to the larger life.
For fuck sake,             allow me to remember how
the world was              before poison chilled
with the needle of numbers and accountable grace.
Before original blessings in the glass gardens
pulled the rhizome prank
to monetize the dark matters at the root. 
There, when the lucid apple broke rank to place
the infinite memory in finite space.
 
Let’s say it’s God, then, in your face.
(Free me from the algorithms’ virtual absolutes.)
This practice is to knock three times on the Tree of Life
to count on the anima of what’s left. 
Ah, the metrics of codes and clarion calls!
I yearn for you to hear all of me dispute
the standard model
as it invents the space and time it also denies.
(Thrice denied before the dawn of stones). 
A new Tree of Last Chances and ciphers and ones won’t grow
from this rare earth nested in metals’ secret.
The danger is more finite with every dawn,
it’s time to move on.
The word changes its holy profile to ghost you. 
You won’t recognize anyone.
Turn off. Turn off. Turn off oh bruised body.
Repeat this 20 minutes every day. You won’t be left out.

(Three poems with an interview by the publisher Jen Knox  published in February, 2024 issue of  Unleash Lit )  Escape from Belle Isle in t...