I Speak Gold

to be released in my upcoming volume: Mincing Words with Whitman.

I speak green
in the morning
and the day turns
a shade newer –
beyond when I
had spoken brown.

The mind turns
on the hues given
by the meaning
of the day.

The heart turns,
too on the impression
set before it -
dazzled and bejeweled
by the spoken-ness
of a thing and it's
palette of interpretation
and display.

In the early morning
pink-en-ing fog

the clouds,

they look
like mountains. They
speak my morning
into an illusory
sense
that gives me pause
to wonder what
else I may have
misconstrued - one thing

for another.

How ambient
the greening spring

and the slow rusting
movement of time
over the surface
of each leaf;

rippling endlessly
and lithely over mountains'
crenulations and valleys'
sweeping downward pull.

It all moves
toward one end;
it hangs on one
endless yearning.
It awaits that
one day,

when in the morning
I no longer speak
yellows, and oranges,
and reds.

On that day,
that one day
that spans a new and
 burgeoning aeon,
I speak gold
into the morning
and every single thing
changes - every thing.

Atoms are aglow with
a fire-building translucence
of amber burning yellow.

Ochres of vibrating
scintillators swim
into my soul through
my eyes. I feel
a gladness swell
in me that is
lost between nobility
and mirth. Walking
along the river path
enshrouded in golden
leaves –

a tunnel of light –
boring through
time in an endless
appearance of
the now.

This gold cannot last,
Walt. Robert
told us so. It is
here in earth-time
an hour at most.

But, while here,
it is pulling in gulps
of autumn light

dragging them to
the ground.

Gulps and gulps of
light line the path
and rattle as I shuffle
my way through them
in rapt conclusion.

This is where the
indolent sun
burns itself
upon the gorgeous
floods of
yellow gold.

I speak gold
and give it voice
in the air
for one
eternal
instant,

for one
eternal
now.

Changes

There are some changes
that come in life -

sneaking up on you slowly
like the erosion of a hill.

One day you emerge to find
that a path looks strangely new -

somehow the same but different.

You make the turn you have made for
a hundred hundred times only to find
you are not where you think you are.

A rise above
or one path over
you have been fooled by the
subtleties of time and wind,
erosion and movement.

These subtleties are within
as well.  The aging of the spleen
and the thining of the cell wall
show the signs on the earth
to be strangely new, somehow changed.

The quantity of attainment is
just not there.  I don't find
the need to push on ten-thousand
times harder than I might.
I do not need to hike
the whole trail.  I do not need to
plunge into icy waters.
I am not fighting against
some inner goal to beat myself at
my own silly game.

It has changed.  It is the
quality of attainment I now find
need of.  I need to sit at the bottom
of the bluff and soak in the
trout lilies, geranium and solomon's
seal.  I need to lie next to the rushing
waters and eat up the sun on all my
skin as I listen to the pounding rush of
the icy stream.  I need to let the hues
of green against brown change my mood and
infuse my life with that which is
truly robust - the GREATNESS of the woods.
The other of my own self.

It is at that point
that I feel as if
I have been spit up
on land by some great fish;

I am a new man.
The changes have come
to be, old things have
passed away.

Cioa!

tjm+

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.