Another Hospice Death

You are slipping away
again.
You, the countless shifter
of faces and lives.
You are ebbing out of
consciousness again.
Going to that place
inside your form,
that place of quiet rest
and stillness.

Your face is becoming
the same again.
On yet another body,
it looks remarkably the same.
Your eyes roll up inside
their sockets.
Your mouth hangs open,
breathing from the chest -
almost gasping.

Your skin gets cold
and then hot
again and again and again.
And, it looks and feels
like tallow again.

And them, all of them
that have come to hold
your hand and
tell you that they love you,
they are all in pain
and so unsure, again.
You have pulled so inside
yourself
that you are unfamiliar
to them
and they are scared.

I have seen you pull
inside and leave
a thousand, thousand
times and it is always
the same.

Again, and again, and
again.

And yet,
you will appear anew
again and again and again
in the unfolding of yellow
daffodil flesh
in the spring
and in the
rattling cry of the
newborn child.

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.