First Taste
I want to get
back to origins.
To the first taste
of color on papyrus.
Back to when berries
hit the cave walls
in Lascaux.
How long did they
soak the walnut husks
to make the eternal
ink that covered so
many scrolls and
vellum sheaves?
What sound did the
words have create as
they were scrolled out
fresh and new on
the virgin page? That
is the un-struck sound
I want to know and feel. 
True poetry;
true art.
From the outset
of the day, there
may have been
another day I would
have wanted if I
knew how this day
would turn out.
Just sayin’.
The small yellow
guidebook for the
Horseshoe Trail looks
the same, a little worse
for the wear from
sharing and all
of the years. I
turn the page and
forty years fall away.
It is Monday, 1986.
Finding a way through
the way that is life.
Finding a way less
encumbered with strife.
We found pounds and
pounds of Day-Lily
bulbs in the Spring. And
would fry them up
in butter when we got
home. Took thousands
and thousands of black
and white photos on
our little Tomato
Camera by Konika.
Walked over footbridges,
through streams, and on
horse trails following
the yellow hash marks on
trees and poles. Three years
of Mondays, 8 miles a week,
out and back - sometimes
hitching back to our car
if we walked too far.
Finding a way through
the way that is life.
Finding a way less
encumbered with strife.
We wrote hundreds of
first lines of poems
and pages, to the rhythm
of the seasons and the
boot-fall on dirt.
“Bury my heart in
Sassafras grave.”
“Hear my foot-fall
on the damp wooden
bridge.” Talked over
the details of newlywed
drama, argued, and laughed,
and stopped often to write.
Backpacks and journals,
hotdogs and brownies, and
oceans of water in our
old tin canteens. Toting
along labs Rebecca’s
and Isaac - if not on
the lead, somewhere
after the deer.
Finding a way through
the way that is life.
Finding a way less
encumbered with strife.
I think that I’ve learned
to sometimes lead, and I
also learned to sometimes
follow. To sometimes walk
side by side. To sometimes
wait for the other - behind.
The measure of life’s wisdom,
comes from attention to what
is needed right now, not what
you did the last time around.
That moving on through often
gets you ahead. And that rain
and snow are a part of it all.
Horseshit, and muddy paths
hold sway o’er my heart and
linger so lovely in my mind.
Her fingers worked the needles and yarn
like she was kneading bread dough blind.
Looking up to gauge my response to what
she had said, she’d knit and knit without pause.
It was not long before I realized that my
mother used to do the same. And somehow
as I sat with this hospice patient, listening
to her tell her tales, one by one I saw the
women of my life enter the room. Mom,
Mom-mom, Mimi, Nanna, Mertz, Karen and
Ruth, Aunt Pat, Aunt Norma, Aunt Betty, Dawn
and Pat joined her, knee to knee, needles tapping out
their cloth. It was then I first knew - deep down -
I carry those women with me - EVERYWHERE.
Those first and powerful women of my life,
they have knitted themselves an endless
blanket of my days even as they were
nowhere in view, just always under the
chatter of knitting, behind the threading of
a needle, or beyond the cutting of their
cloth. Somehow connecting me to
who I would become. Really, no words.
Just their ghostly appearance doing what
they did, all the while as I listened to this
woman slowly dying. And the others.
All the others. Slowly leaving through the years.
They are all in there, in me, lingering forever.
our stories are what
feed our souls - deep
and on the inside.
in our story we
eat the broken one;
we throw him up on
the table first, divide
his flesh from his blood
and we eat him - after of
course we mumble a few
words. we grind him up
and swallow him and then
he is ours. and then we, we
become the broken ones.
this is to remind us that
not worthy to judge
anyone else - we are
unworthy and we are
as I said before and up
above: broken ones.
the end
sometimes
when i look at
my hands
a weeping wells up
within me
a hoard of hands of
those long gone
display themselves
across the corners
of my mind
sometimes
the hoard of hands
are mine, all mine
from across the sands
of my own time
has the remembering
of my mind left go of
all the countless hours
of joy held near by all
the hands i have known
or, is it just
that all that joy contains
each o’ their meanings
as grains in an endless
hourglass of feeling
so much, so full,
so tenderly eternal
that all the emotions
well up as water across
the lids of my life
sometimes
when i look at
my hands
a weeping wells up
within me
the beauty
the glory of it all
at once
here
and yet not here
