(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.

(my first fiction accepted for publication, to be published July, 2023, by Half and One , and short-listed for the Khasi Hills Creative Prize, Jan. 2025)

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....)

 (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.
 

 (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.

 (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.

(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.

(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.

 (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.

 (Published in the August, 2022 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press).

Mock Orange

We wait in the greenest bowers 

made from borrowed water with no need to return the favors

from a world where everything changes every hour. 

The world here where Santana winds 

make mud dust, and turn the day inside out. 

             We wait for nothing. 

             Nothing is in our blood. 

In a den of thieves and strangers with no strings, 

the cosmetic replaces the cosmic, with eternity 

             as Plan B. 

 Pick up the replacements fallen from the orange sky. 

Smoke too falls out of the blue on ragged ranges and shores 

and on the valley of placeholders; instead of rain 

blossoms drop the ball. A net appears when the game 

is done. The numbing vegetation of theme and variation 

is borrowed too. A culture of sly flourishing only hungers for more 

We were tired at birth, nothing but temples, tabernacles, 

tents and gymnasiums in the transplanted eucalyptus. 

Nothing but a sketch of progress, a hint of jasmine 

in wounded summers and rosemary in the perfect autumns 

of the land with no seasons. Tired in the middle 

of what was unplanned. The body exhausted 

the-days-the-Lord-hath-made, and ran up a bill. 

No debt was recorded. No root needed the doubt 

rejoicing for air at the surface, 

in beauty immune from scarcity, 

immune from drought, 

from sleeping on the beach and under the stars. 

Tired hands only, only from too much play, a mission 

to salute the reality of no history. 

             They brought the relief 

of no history, of bones stripped and ready for lies. 

The fabulous respite of no narrative but the waves 

crashing just the way they did for the Chumash 

and will, when, choked with plastic molecules 

they roll on the empty beach when our wait is done. 

Of bones dressed to kill. We came to be killed. 

We took the drugs to make the kill count. 

And now, waiting for the score, we breathe deeply 

as the scent of oranges spends itself on our skin. 

The night opens the flower to its borrowed conclusions. 

To the sweetest imitation of fruit and its ripening. 

 The line between paradise and rot was never clear. 

We took the drugs to hide our uncertainty 

and hoped the line crossed 

was because the path of least resistance 

took us home. 

            Where we would never tire of beauty again.