A Settling Mist

Outside -

a settling mist

falls so familiar

and so fair.

It is an imperceptible

blanket of content

morning rapture and

warm glow release

that holds me in

this place as if

melted in my own

bed at home - with 

Glinda; the boys

moving slowly

in their rooms

to greet the day.

It is here -

with a book

of simple words

and a cup of

coffee - I am

able to bring that 

outside air and 

bliss inside myself

to grow.

It is a full surround

gift of words and

notions -

slowly

trickling over the

rocks of mystery

and manner that

pulsate out from

the timeless beyond

and back.

This day

holds no special

claim on the life

that moves within

this sack of cells;

it is the scintillating

strand of poetry

that impresses itself

in me and back -

always back -

through time to

all their hearts 

and pens.  It is not

just Bly, and Hass,

Shihab-Nye, Snyder,

and Stafford

that glow; it is Frost

and Whitman, Shelley,

and Satho, Basho, 

and Issa - the

whole damned lineage

of word craft sorters

and impression laced

builders that shatter my

isolation with light.

Light creeps in slowly

and replaces my me

with a they that falls 

lusciously over the

rocks of time and

sings a melody of

infinite meaning and

a camaraderie of

of all that unites

us beyond our skin.

I Think I Have Found

I think I have found

the me that is left

after the endless,

countless abrasions

of the suffering and

mirth of this life

is a smoothened

out old piece of what

was brought here

in the first place.

The ashes and the
cinders have not
flown away.

It is the me that loves

as much to walk

and read and write

and cook and make love

and sit and sit and sit

as had been here all along.

It is the one

by the fountain reading

the classics, it is

the one with head hung

backward over the rocks

listening into the cavity

of the roaring stream.

He has been here

but is now all the

better for having learned

that these simple likes

are more than that;

these ambling attractions and

desires of the human heart

I hold and nurture

deep in this chest

are laconic and lapidary

koans of existence carved

out in the aeons of my

days. They are more than whim

and fancy; they sing out

as implacable standards of

my me. Sing this song,

my soul, sing that

reaching in and finding

a gem of delight can

proffer more riches than

caravans of cash.  Sing, my

heart, that glee and bliss

have found more wealth in you

than all could imagine. What is

left at the end of the day

of sadness is a sense a little

more keen, a heart a little

more refined toward its true wont

and wealth beyond measure –

joy. Simple glinting charm comes

only after we see the depths of

its lack. Grand elongations of

hospitality and grace are only

shadows left in their own

sensed absence. Sing, that when

a man sees it all carried away

he finds then a stillness that

betrays its true worth.

For this, for all this,

I sing at what I think

I have found, a place

among myself

a seat within my me.

Here resides in each souls’

center a mountain pass

of freedom and a canyon

of wonder and grand design.

For, everything belongs;

even that which we only speak

of in absence by abrasion.

Shadows on the river

walls of constant change

and removal.

That which is no longer here

sits stalwart beside all we

still behold.

Everything belongs and leaves

its smoothening wear and gives us

to know that it is all in there –

quarks eternally nestled

by the quasars of empty mind.

In it all,

I think I have found

my me.

Hubble's Quasar PKS 2349

Swan

Paddled under on the
broken leg of a swan,
I feel your love
deep in my lake.

Hearts entwine and
flop over with the rising
and the falling of the tides.

Muds stir and plants roll
in the murky waters of
my heart, moving to the
rhythm of that broken leg.

And when she comes proudly
from that lake, she stretches her
wing way back, and in its silent
brokenness,
that wing stares
at you, with her eyes and shows
all the wanting and needing behind
that pride. She is in some pain;
some
pain from just sitting.

Her white is stark
against the water.

Serenity now turns with
her in a small tilt of
the neck. She marks my
eyes with a new gaze.
She knows she must leave
and she does.

Into the water,
our tails raised to
the skies, we look,
searching desperately
for the next thing
that will become a part
of us, and then leave again.

High Rocks

The earth is
held together
up here with
cedar roots,
with hickory roots
and the constant hope
of no rain.

The red-shale soil
loves to wash
itself,
down
to the ravine below
becoming silt for the Tohickon Creek -
the Deer-bone Creek.

The dirt is
made up here
with the slipping
and the sliding of rock;
on rock;
stone against stone
and rain on earth.

The pounding and the force
makes dirt of the stone.

Creeping along in
the fingers of the rain
the dirt is grabbed,
the dirt is pushed
along the roots that cling
tightly to life
and to the vertical growth.

The earth is
held together up here,
by cedar roots,
by hickory roots,
and the constant hope
of no rain.

Sad Oak

I have stood here

for decades, for centuries.

I have felt that river wrap

her arms around my roots,

around this dirt

and then recoil - curving

and cutting in straight and

crooked lines.

I have watched her children

come and go.  I have watched

the First People - the Lenapi -

plant fish from her banks and feed

off the wild berries that push up

on her shores.  I have watched

the General and his men push

off from her edges and travel

by night to surprise their own

countrymen - foreigners all of them.

I have watched the farmers take

silt from her banks to till into

their crops, learning the craft

of fish planting from the naked ones.

I have watched the new ones

dump hot colored liquid into

her blood and make her cringe -

giving up her harvest of fish.  I

have watched these new ones

tame her and prod her with

concrete and asphalt, thinking

they could persuade her from

the rising she does with such pleasure

and rhythm.  I have watched

as the people have forgotten to

make offerings to her - asking

her blessing; forgetting to enter

her with love and abandon.

The turkeys, they have pulled back.

The deer have all but stopped coming.

The naked ones are gone altogether.

What will happen to her?

Of late, she does not smile

when I throw my acorns to her and

drop my leaves on her.  She used to

laugh when I tickled her with my

colored and dying hair.  Now she is silent

and I fear for what will come next.

My roots - my own roots - who have

clung so simply to the dirt that is

her banks, have soured.  Pieces of

me die as I drink her poisoned draught.

I am dying from her, from the one

who has been my life, my sweetness,

my health.  I am dying from her waters.

That she does not talk to me

has made me sad.  Where has she gone?

What has become of my thunderously

tender Delaware?  Why does she

get so very bone dry?  Why does

she not laugh as she lifts the debris

of life, carrying it to another place,

to another people?

I miss this woman, so strong

and so soft.  I miss the caresses

she gave me.  Her silence has

deafened me and I do not

care if I go on to see another people.

I do not care if I grow another limb.

Her silence has made me still.  And,

it is not the stillness I enjoyed after our

sister wind had forced me to swing and

dance and clamber.  It is the stillness

of being ill.

I have watched so much.  I have

watched too much.  I too must grow

silent, grow still, grow sick

and die.  My time has come and

I am sad.  I do still hope

that the naked ones will return.  I do

still hope that someone gains their wits

and cleans up her banks and makes her

waters pure to drink – again.

Stones and Moss I

I am captured by the stones.

The way they sit there -

piled and scattered -

in and out of relation

with each other.

The mosses can fold themselves,

if they like,

over the stones,

making mortar of themselves

for mounds of shifting rock.

They hold me, too.
I sit here,

among them,

and am unable to move;

sucking in the sun

and the rain

and the water

and listening to time pass with the moon -

Wondering how it all has

come together.

Have the rocks

and moss themselves

been arranged in such a pattern,
or do I, in my seeing, arrange them

in what appears to be a pattern –

even when scattered loosely

like debris. Do their forms exist in

any real way other than the way

I think I see them.

The Mid-life Poems # 3 - ALLUVIAL FANS

Fans spread out at

  the base of the hills-

  the base of our days-

  escarping debris

  deposited over time.

The force –

  always down

hauls all sort of silt

from the face of the

highlands to the foot

of the lowlands

Down,

always down falls

all that has died,

all that has decayed

and lost its grip.

It falls and is

washed away.

Are the things we

love really lost or

are they moved –

down, always down –

away to the pit

of our erosion.

Those pieces that have

washed away –

our youth,

our trust,

our freedom to be naïve.

Are they gone or

simply out of sight –

reaching out from

the basin of our days.

The nutrients and minerals

from the mountain

seed the basin

in a downward rush. 

The mountains and

the hills laid low - a time

cast collaboration of the

prophets and erosion;

everything leveled.

Fingers of the mountain

stretch out

hoping to pull her along

the earth,

to widen her presence

along the surface.  We

grow like this.  All that runs

off of us produces chains

and foothills.  Our life

touches another by the

build up of silt and alluvial

wear.  It moves away from

our core.  Then, lifetimes

later, the foothills of our

days spawn foothills and

are themselves carried away.

All things become one

as the work of time

spreads out the mountains,

bringing them all to the ground,

to the earth from which

they came.

The mountains and the hills

laid low.

The Mid-life Poems # 2 - STRATA

Our days are made of

varied ages and

altering composition.

Layers of change through

out time and space.

To feel the changes

that have been made

does not require

the minds’ knowing alone - of where

one thing ends and

another begins.

Nor is the

heart’s feeling enough.

We need a gut that senses change.

An intuition that

senses the shifting

plates and layers

of life.  We need a

heart and a mind that will trust

the gut.

In us,

down deep and beneath

are movements we cannot see,

upheavals we will never see,

shifts we cannot know will come.

We can sense them. 

We can lean forward at

the first stirrings – bend into

them and suppose or

hunch.

It is the gut that notices

this larger terrain – this immense

sliding.  It is the gut that

feels its way through changing

landscape.

The eye may not see, the mind,

it may not know, the heart may

not feel, but the gut senses.

The gut holds on

to shudders and rumbles.  The

gut explores valleys and

hills, the faults and

plates of the

topology of our lives.

The gut knows nothing

of fur and feathers,

of brocade and silk.

It holds no hope in the fine

and the soft: amid

the smooth and refined.

The heart and the mind, they

loll themselves to sleep

in the finery.  Casting their

eyes on the silt and lace

of low grade terrain;

feeling for a faint

interior pulse that they

cannot know.

Our days shift and move

without regard for the mind’s

vigilant hope for reason, and

the heart’s need for rhythm

and rhyme.  Things

move about without warning.

I cannot hope to see

that plate raised up above the others

or that one dropped down below.

The gut knows disturbance:

turbulence is its language –

and it knows it well.

My gut feels them:

A jarring drop or jolting

rise is measured for sure in

the gut.  The heart, the heart

reaches out and feels

through the layers of space

and time for the shifting

and the rolling forces

We no longer see – the

sorrow and the joy

that arrives from change

ushered in on the current

of the hummingbird’s wing

at noon day.

Layers of life

that we cannot see.

We are piles of layers

within the twist of time

and the stretch of space;

the spray of the wave

and the stir of air.

We hold on amid

our lack of ingenuity;

we dream on despite our

innocence of any true power.

Sensing only the dark,

feeling only the layers

of our piled past,

we hope against hell that our

heart and our mind have

listened well and found

what is true, what is sure –

what the gut has to offer.

The Mid-life Poems # 1 - ESCARPMENT

Some things wear you down
a deep aging in your center,
an erosion of your soul
or maybe your heart.


It does not kill you, but
it lays you bare,
open - exposed.


This wearing down becomes clear
in the middle of life - in the middle of our days.
One thing comes along
maybe a death, an accident, a final straw that
lights the mind's sky; and,
all at once you see what
has been there all along -
that which has undone you,
that which has worn you away.


There it is.
Don't be shy.  It goes against
your earliest hopes, your youthful
ideals, your grand theories.  There it is,
a piece of you; one that was
left exposed as if
it were something new.


Like the rock held deep in the earth,
erosion and time pull at the dirt from
around the stone.  Alterations.
They pull the dirt from this
piece of you, they move the pebbles
from your side, they move the sand
from behind and you are revealed
by the violence of change.


This need not be a horrid violence -
the great unleashing slide of
the glacier as it tears away from it's
millennial nest - pushing
with a crashing speed.


A simple, negotiated shift
is enough.  A slow movement
back and forth, to and fro,
earth and weather,
drifting and decaying and just
simply washing away.


There is a silent consent in
this negotiated shift -
a collusion of innocence and tiredness -
as what is left
deposits her minerals below
in the scarp foot and basin.


There is an inner nod
and assent to this erosion.
This tearing apart is for the whole, for
the whole of the earth
not ours alone.


We sense the need to compromise.  We
feel the coming change.  We agree and a slow,
violent change occurs.  Bit by bit,
I stand here
looking at the scarp
  exposed on the hill
  and feel the pain
  of all the death
that has torn at me, and
layed me open - layed me bare.
Bit by bit.


I see the deep rich soil below
the scarp, below the slope.
I can hear the fiddleheads
bathing in the minerals and
the robust loam built from
tearing.  I can hear them grow.


From where I stand, I cannot hear
my own loss as food for the growing.  As
food for others.  When I am able to
let this dirt slip from me
without complaint,
then I will have become a hill,
a scarp,
a glacier.


Bit by bit.


Some things wear you down
a deep aging in your center,
an erosion of your soul
or maybe your heart.