The Broken Tree

you are out on Bear Mountain
like a pilgrim
with an empty quiver --
you’re hunting nothing
but pines and manzanitas
walking on logging roads
whose pitch, crown
and water berms
of gravel and clay
stumble your feet –
you needed to breathe
the trees today

you look up
to hurried clouds
of a storm coming soon
and so you’ll stumble home

you know
there is an uncanny tree --
a tree you named --
on the other side
of this mountain

you’ll pass by the tree --
a redwood that stands
among others of its kind
all straight as telephone poles --
tall redwoods piercing the sky
with limbs as thin as spears
to snap in storms
and stab a man
to briskly make a widow

although you are man
with a husband,
he’d be bereft too
should winds launch
these lovely spears at you

the pilgrim’s way
has just the right risk

*
this tree you’ve named bends
unlike the others --
huge branches bred
to stretch the air
and run parallel to earth --
branches thick as a trunk

the strange arms spread
to stretch against
the common nature
against the usual world
as though to welcome
both inverted wayfarers
and hungry grey squirrels

a candelabra of spongy bark --
an icon of oddity
sparking with its inordinate form
a fire of queer beauty

you found her years ago --
and only because
you lifted your head
did you see her damaged
crown of craggy snares --
a lightning strike many years ago
fired strange harm at her --
an arrow of flames
lopped off her top
and forged the odd defacements
that widened arms to welcome
you to her world

you congratulated yourself
for noticing, for lifting your head --
you take more credit than due you
and ponder how a poem
could tell this broken story
and doing so
could open
your own disproportions
even as you journey
to Canterbury, Santiago,
Bodh Gaya or your own mailbox
filled with bills

widows weeds
and screens
that scorch your wisdom
wait at home
after rain, this rain
and this road to her

*
the path of letting go
falls under the broken tree
and here the quiver of the nameless
tugs on your shoulder
and still you call
her Sophia, thinking

you were Adam
allowed
to name it all,
to make the sounds
and rhymes
to sing her song

she’s there downslope now
and you walk to her
in a high wind of hope
then hear a drought-dry madrone
crash and crack close by

there’s danger in these trees

a rumble of hard rain
makes you stop --
you tire of toting
this bag of emptiness

you touch her three times
and, courageously, you ask her
to tell the thunder
to pull you
out of yourself
into the trees
and beyond --
you ache to go beyond

a few wet birds scurry and hop
at her feet where
they sing storm warnings
in the raining air

*
the quest narrows
without arrows

rainwater washes
your brow, your own salt
stings your eyes
yet you cannot turn
from her now
you sense
she senses you and gives you sense

you call her by her name
you believe it is her name
though it comes from the Bible,
movies, and the holy spirits
that aim your feet against the road

it’s like you’ve named each other
it’s like you toss atoms back
and forth to levy and load
time and space into your pack --
to make a possible
life with thick arms too --
arms spread wide
to hold all harm
as sacred proof
of how truth shatters
just enough to join the tree
and you, and whoever
hears a name uttered
in storms you cannot hide

it’s like you are ready
you are ready for what’s next
three touches on her rough wet skin
and you tell her

“let me say your name
and change my life”

From Mud Emerging

an early rain
and dazed skyful
of November sun
draws a white cover
from the black dirt
in the nearby hills

you walk there and celebrate
the seasons’ edges
where mycelia have woken
to see you

their roots connect
the unbroken will
in the underground –
here there is no place
that does not want to wake you

on these humdrum trails
you walk to root out your chicanery
and take steps to stop
the myriad screens
that make you -
that first cause
multiple versions of you,
the fake you of your daily mechanisms
and quibbling algorithms
that clip you in

walking meditation
where fungi, not the lotus,
remind you

*
off the marked trail
on a small track
to the steep cliff
where the raw light falls
to the darkness
at the bottom
of Baldwin Creek draw

there where dark prayers
and old marches
leave breadcrumbs
the size of your fallen body

no one would find you here
the real you, the tangible ash

the lie in your grasp
tramples the grass
at the chasm, on this edge
of your wilder nature –
falling, falling
you grip
the local rock

the coastal mudstone
crumbles as the path
comes to a crag

*
these small trails
are mysteries
and dead ends
leading to a leap
in the frantic freefall

the main trails:
thoughts begin
small trails:
thoughts end

you pay attention to beginnings
more than cessation
it is embarrassment,
isn’t it? the very peril
of what you think
of what you are measured to be

in the end
the dark winks
to take contrivance
to the edge
and push it off

Seeds

you’ve bushwacked now
up to a sawtooth ridge
near Bear Creek Spire

in a crevasse
in this crag of granite
two old junipers cling to the rock

they flatten their trunks
to join
in a small pocket of dirt

trunks like big barrels
have grown from a fissure
as wide as a wrist

ragged branches
hold dark green fans
up to the Sierra sun

*

a trunk will narrow
as much as it needs to live --
no limit is the answer to the question you did not ask

your body does not differ
and clings to rock as well --
from bone your fruits form

two trees reach out from your spine
from these old seeds in a small dark fracture --
you are shown how to survive in high places

the narrow seeds from shifting stars
implant in bones every day
to make a way from slender clay

to a sun of limits, known and unknown
though you have not loved others as yourself
you have not shifted with your whole heart

no matter, forgiven and forged by this granite bone
in this blinding blue mountain’s day
you confront the face of weathered stone

where the spine’s marrow seeds join
for a brief green breath, a true breath
that in this light reveals how narrow life can turn

seeds will not waste your dirt or sky --
they find cracks in your façade
wide enough to grow your narrow little life

that widens with the mercy
of juniper and rock
found in hidden heights

Saturday, April 12, 2025

A prose poem published by Stone of Madness Press, Issue 29. April, 2025.

Letters to Women from a Deceased Gay Man

Climbing the ruins at Monte Alban in the rain. Ducking in a cave where we met a random child hawking a fake clay horse and you point out, well, the clay, our source and end, is not fake. Standing together outside the Queen of Missions after a family wedding looking out through the pepper tree branches to the wide bay, tides rising on a south swell. Your agreeable opening, dry and friendly, to take me inside you. “Good ball” you say afterwards and I am astonished you think this lie is any kind of shelter, but it is your kindness that wraps me. Lying on the beach in August willing and cautious to answer your questions as you point to other women walking past and ask if they are or are not as heavy as you. Your eulogy at my funeral after you died too soon. In the sculpture garden after the Grammatology seminar the severed saints asking for your telephone number. Seeing the harrowing beauty of your grandchildren; seeing your beauty rise, brightening all the corners and screens as your love for them unfolds and surprises. Living in your sadness as you died before having a grandchild. Holding each other on a broken cot while Mahler’s 3^rd perfused the beach shack under the jacaranda and tar.

Your bailing me out of jail.

Your making sure I didn’t get fired.

Camping in a field in the Rhône valley after hitchhiking to a medieval farm when we were picked up by an old man in a rusted Citroën who was annoyed at our partial French. Letting our dogs run wild with each other. Your dog jumping on the table to eat rhubarb pie. Our dog’s favorite chew toy you left her, and then left us shortly after. Forever shortly after. Your not coming home because you slept with a doctor. Your telling me. My hearing it. My playing Death and the Flower endlessly, subversively. Your mother calling my mother asking for the watch back. My ignoring time. My giving you a rabbit’s foot for Christmas and declaring eternal fealty and the rabbit just dead, perhaps not eternal at all. We agreeing to a time out. Riding horseback through piñon pines to DH Lawrence’s grave as my horse farted like mountain thunder and my heart was held up and back in your rose-strewn panteón. Your singing Every Grain of Sand at my funeral because you are still alive. Listening about your surrender to a Hollywood producer in front of his fireplace on Mullholland and he never called you back even as your gold necklace shimmered in perfected light. Meeting your husband, meeting your husband, hearing about your husband shot in his Porsche in Sequoia National Park trying to buy kilos, then meeting your husband, meeting your husband, attending your husband’s funeral after a lifetime of civic service and professional status. Hiding in your guest room after my eviction. You never had a husband. You owned Alhambra. You never needed a husband to buy a town. You never needed a husband to own a company. You never needed a husband until you did and then he died taking a nap on your perfect sofa. My outliving you and just as cause gives birth to effect so my funeral quickly disposes of my solitary remains while love is eternal and that’s not good news. You walking across a bar band’s sunset set by the inevitable beach as you danced your cancer away on one leg, glistening against death to its own relief – you scared it away. My holding your purse as you moved on to the stuffy ballroom on the second floor of the sobaco on Whittier Blvd. Your standing in front of the crazed movie star at my mother’s funeral; your stance the strength that kept her from touching and kept me alive long enough to write this love letter. Your stories of tennis and Bobby Short at the Carlyle and the deep fall into racism that life’s pace and a poem’s clutter crowds out with too little of too much memory. Love outlasting us. Juan Gabriel singing Se me olvidó otra vez as I watched you dance with him, with him, with him, while we put “no expiration” on another love we shared and shared and shared and outlasted. Your taking me to visit your son in rehab. Your visiting me in rehab. More than once. No, I mean more than one rehab. My hubris at being 5150’d, also in Alhambra. My hubris wrapped in your love, like bubble paper, like pastry, like a sarcophagus. Your keeping track of my beloved husband after my death but you died too soon. My love immolating all it touches, and in such a fire our bodies join as one Pristine Cause and the fire takes us away from memory, away from the Dark Powers eating our lives, and revives the New Age of our youth when we traveled and danced and did not worry about what we were doing wrong. Death is a dance. Death is a dance. Dead Can Dance. Kiss me on the bus. It piques my interest. Oh how you held me. Oh how we danced. And none of you will live long enough to walk with my husband to the top of Rocky Ridge to toss my ashes off into Pacific tides that dance before us and after us and frame the infinite collapse of love in all its forms, all its days, all its words seeking equanimity in a world that only falls, only falls, only falls in love.