The Strange Truth of Last Hours

The whir and beep of the machines will go on
Transferred to some other room, newly washed and dressed,
They will walk on, mindlessly,
Insentient of their duty,
While the sun, too, keeps shining
And the grass outside the window is postcard perfect

Everything about the noise and the bright light of this day is paradox
Comforting torment
Laborious rest
Natural life prolonged artificially, 
As death stands windswept by the windows

I stood to the side as he squeezed his son’s hand and told him,
“Don’t be angry with God”
I kept a poker face, like the machines beeping, pretending
They aren’t the slow countdown, after which,
They will stretch, wash, take a smoke, and start again

But my breath caught and I almost laughed
Not because it was funny, of course
It’s just that, when everything’s absurd—our longing for life betrayed—
Truth is a cold glass of water poured over hot souls
And the steam is so strange
Through it, there’s some indictment of what we’re holding dear

It indicted me, anyway
And I laughed because it’s so odd and pure and good
That the one dying should so easily let go
While I stand by with fists clenched, beside so many bedsides

On Clichés Becoming True

On my math teacher’s desk in junior high there was a postcard standing sentry to remind us that “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” the first in a long kick-line of clichés we learned to dismiss along with all the veracity of romance novels
Either so clearly false (unenchanted wands waved to produce one last bit of sleep for us, the awakening ones)
Or truths so true they became trees to the proverbial forest of our heart’s unseeing wilderness

“Aim for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”
(maybe)
“Sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you”
(until you start therapy, twenty years from now, and find they are all still inside you)
“God will never give you more than you can handle”
(no wonder so many people hate God)

Even with the true ones, you don’t know the truth until it’s true for you
And familiarity breeds contempt, so we overlook the closest truths to hand
Until we stumble into them and remember we read them on a poster back in high school

As when I cleaned my yard this afternoon and saw all the unscrupulous pieces of dirt,
Returned after last week’s good brooming
And the leaves fallen once again, the vines re-claiming aimless space,  
And I knew, as of a sudden seeing,
There will be no place in my life, no space in my yard, where it’s done
My backyard has become the metaphor I’ve denied, the cliché I’ve hid away, the fact revealed:
There is only journey

Yes, I feel it now in my bones, moving up my stomach with sobering sight, this revelation,
That I will not arrive
There is no destination except deeper down and real, where God is—
The arrival of letting go

And somehow, without wondering what else I could be doing or where else I could be besides here,
I put my hands on the rough-catching handle of the rake
The bristled top-hat of the broom (with its flakes of paint falling in a great irony, to be swept away)
And move the dirt that’s always returning, holding the rake with steady breaths, at peace, while another sort of irony snakes back upon itself
Finding me mindful for a moment, that  

The journey is an always-becoming-destination
A train station merging always with the tracks
A process so very close to place 

Omar, on the Border

My body can no longer hold my spirit  
It shakes at the smallest lifting
It quakes through the watches of the day

And in the night, when I lie quiet,
Awake
I can’t sit straight, stand, get up

You move your hands, feeding me, shaving me
My chin presses in as my body abandons me
Once again, this morning
This now eternal re-occurring
The never-ending boarding of the flight of myself
Leaving me, as I stand at the window, waving

But my mind still sees so clear and bright and clean
I peer through the curtains, and in-between here and the hills, the highway
With its flashes of sun, reflecting off all the cars and trucks
That run and ride blind to the dumb luck of youth

Quick rivers of light flash into being
Blinding apparitions through these partitions of glass
Promising some world enflamed with the light of the sun
Some world burning on the other side

Escape from LA

I made a home where the sun always shines
With freeways and palm trees and traffic signs
A home where you rest your wearied feet
Though you’ve walked not a mile, and stepped not a beat
But pedaled through madness, through crowds, and through heat
In gray lanes, in metros, and urban retreats
And neon, and smiles, and meet-cutes-and-greets

Through refrains of headaches, the seasons are concrete
And tulips and roses are burned out by heat
So asphalt’s the flavor that floats on the breeze
And car horns the sonnets that play through the trees
The song of the autumn is trucks in their straining
In merging lane-changings with no thank you waving
As they swagger and stomp with their impolite feet
And bleat down the freeway like overstuffed sheep

But now I’m bound for somewhere far
I feel the burning, I’ll answer the call
Of land where sea is rolling in green
Where summer is gentle and winter is mean
And we’ll forget interchanges and pages and frets
From smog alerts and the hundreds of texts
Beeping like peace-seeking missiles directed
At a man’s sense of quiet and silence and feeling
Without which a man can’t make rest with his being

We’re bound and we’re leaving, we’re going afar
We’ll search through the bogs, barbaric and wild,
That thaw when the springtime’s passion’s enthralled
We’ll find them, we’ll walk them, we’ll sit on their logs
We'll battle the brooding of mist and of fog
As the geese and the mallard honk on the breeze
As windstorm and headwinds sing through the trees
And the bog echoes back with the croak of its frogs  

We’ll ride to the north woods,
We’ll hunt for the birch
We’ll hike through the forest
We’ll wipe off the dirt
Where magpies and skylarks and puffins are perched
Where the November storms promise battle has come
And we’ll grip and we’ll feel the roll in the stern
When the aft tips downward and sails are a-fly
And the spray of the sea puts salt in your eye

Yes, we’ll sail to the lands where the flags are a-buckled
And windstorms and raindrops send curtains a-ruffle
And the wind in your hair sends your backbone a-tingle
With the promise behind it of storm and of winter
And we’ll laugh and we’ll relish the flight and the fear
And will earn every draught of the sun and the clear

We’ll know that out here a man will be drowned
And we’ll revel that mystery still can be found
Far from the mouse ears and freeways and sounds
And the asphalt that blankets and covers the ground

We’ll start a new baseline, with shadows and fears
We’ll learn to tremble at the roar of the tears
Of the vast-speckled autumn, melting the year
Till winter, so naked and barren and sparse,
Reminds us that life is a poem not a farce
Of sun and of surgery, highways and cars
But a battle for living that must leave its scars

We’ll respect the black ebony of December’s floorings
When winter at last has slipped from her moorings
And then as the snow casts its pall on the land
We’ll laugh and we’ll revel and grab at its hand
And go skipping down hillsides and dales and down glens
We’ll run through the meadow and skate oe’r the fens

And when winter has locked the land up in its grasp
And no man can stir, not a moose nor a mouse
We’ll curl by the fire and look through the glass
Where snowflakes are falling and coming down fast
We’ll look and we’ll know that preparing is past
That now is the time to batten the hatch
And that fire is friend and our strength and our life
We’ll laugh and we’ll rest in the joy and the strife

And all will be quiet and silent and holy
We’ll wake with the morn and go to sleep slowly
To hear every noise of the wood off its feet
Slumbering through cold, the snow and the sleet

And when springtime so dappled revives all the trees
And the birdsong returns on the meadows and lees
When summer comes golden, with wheat in its hands
No one will find us nor know where we stand
We’ve gone out a-roaming and roving the land

Pages

It is clear by now there will be no great work, no magnum opus
No statue looking down serenely on crowds grateful for what I gave
No volume held with awe-struck hands by someone who,
Having poured over the pages, felt saved

But my God, my world is just so bright around me
The sun burning on my daughter’s face, as she faces, with no hint of guilt nor guile, the coming day
As my son smiles and embraces, with quiet pleasure, the first orange light

I want to tell them
Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, flourish it
Pass down unwritten pages of life and love
And that tree will stand in the coming city with its many gardens
Where there are no statues, just oaks so full of sap they almost droop,
And seeds, flowering
As bees surround and crown
Their many leaves  

A Girl I Once Knew

There was a girl, lived just up this road
Pumphouse, named to hearken back a century,
Before so much iron made things spin,
And they used instead the wood and water of this forest
Which hides, now, the long path to her house
Or, more likely, where she used to live—  

For surely a new family lives there, and she’s moved on
And that is part of the mystery of changing rooms like we change days
The residue, though…that’s always the same
The filmy wash of love and longing, and so much pain
On hearts and windows

We never dated, never touched, but
Dear my, the lust of those brown eyes
“Chestnut," “mahogany," “coffee" and such
If they were written in rhyme
On some love-note inscribed
"Dark eyes piercing their own mysteries
and piercing mine" 
The tall longing to be known, a sunflower breaching sky
And strawberries, her skin
Grown warm in our Alabama sun

Her mother died and there was tragedy
She might as well be a maiden or her lady’s waiting maid
From some sod-trodden century now romanticized
The hardship of rock and mud forgotten

It’s all the same, after all—the same longing, whatever the time
And whoever owns the skin that contains within it
The taste of strawberry
Its scent wafting on the wind, still
Wading through so many years

Tide's Come High

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s come high
And the moon’s riding orange in the bright October sky
But the geese by the river sense that autumn is a-quiver
By the blue band of winter, sailing up the river

Sailing up the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your true love should be,
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Cause the boy couldn’t buy a golden ring, girl
The boy couldn’t buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s by your side
And the moon’s riding low in the blue October sky
Out across the bay, the waters rush and play
But they pile on the rocks without shame, girl
And they’ll pile down on you just the same

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love let you be,
Past the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
Sailing for to buy a golden ring, girl
Sailing for to buy a golden ring

Wake up, Jenny, for the tide’s at your breast
And the moon’s gone to rest by the blackened raven’s nest
Cold as the morning is the ocean in his mooring
And it’s time for you to up and go

Sailing down the stretch of sea, girl
That’s where your love you will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring, girl
He’s gone and he’s bought a golden ring

Lie down, Jenny, for the tide has touched your lips
And you’ll soon taste the darkness, beyond the ocean’s kiss
Unforgiving in its blackness is the ocean in its passion
But there’s morning far beyond these broken dreams, girl

He’s sailing down the bay straight to you, girl
That’s where your love your face will see
By the brown and burnished heather
Where he pinned your hair in feather
And he’ll cry and he’ll throw away the ring, girl
And he’ll moan and he’ll throw away the ring

A Circus Memory

I remembered, when my son came to my bed
Still stumbling up from his nap, just awake
That you took me to a circus

I don’t know why
I haven’t thought of it in years and was, in fact, surprised to find any memory of it,
Let alone something so pristine and clear, like a photograph dusted off, but
There it was, a file suddenly found

I was focused on the subtlety and smallness of his breaths, minutely filling the minutes,
When suddenly I saw the great green hall of the civic center,
The concrete once swept clean now filling with popcorn and peanuts and sunflower seeds
And in my hand a yellow fan they’d handed out, advertising a dealership, cross town,
As children bounded in and sat down in the delicious dark, waiting for the start

It had been raining—a good storm, too
So we were wet, which was part of the fun:
To step from storm into a place where the soul heaves away from sad shores,
For just a moment even, to remove itself,
To be restored in those tents
And in the centuries of trains traveling cross country, long before the show was contained in the big rigs which rumble now, with such melancholy, into town

I don’t know why I remember it, except perhaps that you loved me in it
In-between the crazy of our family and the broken glass of pain,
The ruthless love was there, rooting me
And I stand amazed—or sit or lie, as the case may be—at how deep and strong the love goes, covering (as they say) a multitude of misses,
Like ink which colors the whole pot of water

And my son, my son
His face without lines,
His life the very meaning of miracle
With such a heart to hold so much love:
Wordlessly he crawled up the sheets and lay down, smiling sleepily to find me here
And I tried not to move, still as a lion
As he slid beneath the big tent of my arms

Arms poised to hold, and also aware, already
Of letting go
Because that’s how love goes—
The tender breath of it so subtle
Though it builds worlds and holds us, through the storm

Subtext

It’s hard, she said, in that way that you say "it’s hard" and almost look away or retreat inside
So that the seam of the bag doesn’t rip and spill its grain all over this nice table
The heart is like a sack, after all, the bottom of which we stuff with the stuff that would keep us from getting up and getting on, one step after another

“It’s hard,” she said, and as she looked away I thought of textbooks or the Bible,
in which we read “and they went to war”
Which means blood and death and rape and the mad frenzy of hate
But,
The black words look so clean and straight on the white page
Sanitized, stripped down to just the glories—Alexander on his podium, say—and the orgies after
The dysentery in the camp forgotten
The boils, the sores, the blisters swept away by the smell of warm ink on pressed paper

Such is the subtext of pain
"It was hard” means, I guess, she almost spun out into the abyss, like a cartoon riding a bike over a cliff
But somehow, just before looking down and falling
She somehow threw the sack of her own heart off the bike and landed here, at this table
Where the water tastes so much like lemon, and the windows keep the rain at bay

The Chinese Women Talking on the Benches

When my family and I pass the Chinese women
They who sit eternally on the benches by the gate of the nature center
I can’t understand a word, but I get the gist:
There’s laughter, there’s mirth, there’s merriment

And there’s the just hushed rush of gossip
Which tone must be universal, across cultures
Coupled as it is with raised eyebrows
As if we are truly scandalized and not satisfied

Age is relative, but they are old enough…sixty, sixty-five?
And what strikes me as we walk by—
My four-year-old throwing rocks and running like a squirrel when she sees the ducks—
Is how passionate, how enthralled they are
As their laughter rolls down to the valley of sighs

There are still things to talk about, then
We do not exhaust each languorous hall
We are visitors to a museum, who never see it all

Young Cashier at the Hardware Store

The cashier put down my bag of keys
With a false “yea,” and a flourish of her hand
That was sarcasm’s twin, but not unkind,
Before she told me, "four twenty-nine"

It was just a small trumpeting—an irony, a rhyme
An encomium to how mundane all this is
Both this transaction and, so it seems, her life

Which is strange, because she is so young
And it’s a shame to feel stuck when, as the cliché goes,
The whole world is at your feet

But I found it, also, almost brave, like spitting into wind
And I thanked her sincerely for her help
Grateful to be let in to an honest sigh,
Which is far better than a, “Thank you, sir, please come again" 

The Humbled Puritan

I always thought in protest,
As any Protestant should
That frills are frivolous
And guilt their just dessert
(And dessert a guilt)

But I see you there: The Wine Drinker
The same as He the wine did make
And still with perfume’s scent
Upon your robe’s bright filament

With no shadowed brow for pleasure gained
But a prayer of thanks and mercy
To the Father, 
Same Who made the rain to fall
And cleanse the land, with pleasure instead of pain

So here’s to you, my glass I lift
And as it kisses both my lips
I join creation’s song (I think)
And the secret of the saints--

Those who've learned to worship
Of this earth’s goodness
Where, like rain,
Pleasure need not leave a stain

Yellow

I am only writing this to remember that I was not looking for a sign
And only realized hours later, as I turned the lever and felt the rush of untested water which caught my breath, the surprise even worse than the cold blast on opening a shower door (such are the pains of all sudden absences)
That the yellow-breasted bird sat like a needle in the haystack of that brown, mottled wood
A coy reminder of something too quiet for words
A prophet whispering wordlessly, “yes, and keep moving forward”

Socks

My clean socks smell of fields brought into order
Dirt, tamed by cotton
And cotton claimed by the long hands of workers who sewed the stitches
As faithful as a conductor's watch
As faithful as the baton of Brahms

Oh, I know they were made by machines
But the touches of those long needles moving tirelessly, like the axis of earth,
Always follow the hands of man, which first break the ice that we pass through
All things made and crafted, for our quickly-passing-through

So that young feet growing old, like mine,
Can find purchase, warm and dry, in one eternal moment
In all the wonder, treading the scent of mud and rock and so much green,
And the longing just above the next rise
And the next one, not so very far behind

Ed

His name was Ed, but I can’t remember or I never knew his last name
He was just Ed,
A walking whirlwind, rail-thin, with tired eyes and cheeks that dropped like wet socks, his face
worn haggard like rock long exposed, his life worn by some sorrow too deep to name,
But he rode the pain like that cowboy rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, waving his hat in the air,
running one step ahead of the train, downhill, mouth open, hands off the handlebars

One night not long after I met him,
By chance we stood, before our shift, looking out over the Blue Ridge from the careening hotel porch
Me, bright-eyed and moving on come fall (it’s easy to enjoy adventure when you know it’s only temporary, after all)
He, a careerist, traveling the resort circuit to snow in Utah, to sun somewhere in summer
He quickly, and with the ease of a gambler, divulged his desire to hit the new waitress hard
As he pumped his fist rhythmically, dissolving my confusion

He was a poet of the vulgar, a magician making innuendo disappear beneath a never- ending handkerchief of description
It was so strange and silly, though he used words I can’t write here, that my body floated out above the hills,
Finding no words to rejoin him, awkward like a musician who can’t find the beat, I just nodded and pursed my lips as if to say, “Alright, then”

Late that summer, the sun already honeyed by an early autumn, I woke up to hear
“You goddamn piece of shit!” ringing near my ear and
Scrambling to the window like the man in the cap, tearing open the sash,
Awake from my nap I watched Bruce, the bearded and burly owner of that mountain retreat, man-haul not presents down a chimney, but Ed himself, out of his sheets and out the door, whimpering like a dog-cussed pup, unable to muster a “Stop it!”
Just “Okay!” and “Jesus” and “Okay” again

I never knew the transgression
Perhaps, drunk, he’d missed his shift
Perhaps he’d grabbed the new waitress’s rear, as he’d so often promised, in much more florid terms
Probably some deeper sin long brewing between the two of them
Though I don’t know how a proprietor could saloon-slug an employee beyond the fear of a lawsuit
Some things just pass before men in a place beyond, with its own laws and understanding

When it was all over, Ed sat in the dirt, listless,
In the long sadness of life, he had found a metaphor, a picture of the sadness always hiding behind his eyes
And I sat there, debating if I should go to him,
But before I moved, he disappeared into the woods, a shame-faced mouse skittering away, though the shadow of the owl had passed

I remember, equally, from that good summer, another surprise:
The subtle manipulation of niceness
How the hosts and servers would lay hospitality on the table, then dog-cuss the guests as soon as the swinging doors closed behind us,
Concealing hidden truths behind closed panels
Unaware that all the things we hide come home to roost
And life always has some Bruce knocking on the door, to throw us for our loop
Which was why I didn’t laugh at Ed, or shake my head,
And lay in bed, as if crossing myself
Wondering what lay ahead in this strange, sad world 

Origami

Love is like a child folding origami
Always for the first time

She discovers, slowly,
Crease by crease,
The paper 

The Rite of Spring

I remember the ritual
Like an explorer from the brush I stumbled into it
Or around it, approximating an angle of approach not too close to the circle that surrounded them
My eyes wide but feigning calm

They were locked in a ceremony I had never seen
We are all, at some point, adventurers discovering rites and tribes, and at first our own and our own self
But strangely I already understood it, and I could feel it coursing through me
We all felt it moving through us like current

David stood on the blacktop with Laura
Circled by a crowd so anxious and so full of energy, you could see their own longing bound up in expectation, their own necks on the line, sheep to be slaughtered who cannot look away

It was a warm day, warm enough for us to return outside, and the blood flowed like sap, just before the summer, when
We would fill our days with growing into all the expectations just stirring in our bodies

I craned my neck above the circle
Fully emerged from the brush and hushed, in wonder, holding my own heart
As someone yelled, “Ask her!”
And the ancient chorus rose, waiting for the letting go

Some were dancing, literally unable to contain the tension
The boys and girls intermingled, rippling as one as if a god’s spirit poured over us in libation, in frenzy
As David held up his hand, an effort at nonchalance, a priest officiating his own sacrifice

“Will you go with me?” he said
And the vulnerable way he said it, a question on so many levels, the last far more profound than the first

Someone, I swear, leapt into the air at the release when she said “yes”
The beast confronted, for all of us,
So that we were safe to pass into that reality that holds all atoms together
The universe, held by that one question

Love is always a release, a fledgling question hanging above a blacktop and the cries and screams of so much longing, and so much hope 

Blasphemy to Minnesotans

There is no winter here, but if I am diligent
I can cobble together some semblance of it

It does get cold in the night
And if I wake up early, the mist will just reminisce of frost
Or, when we’re lucky, real crystals crunch on the blades

If I go out early with one layer, I need to pull my jacket tight
To keep the air out
And can more easily remember places where survival was at stake
Beside the lake
The night you grazed by me and I wondered
If the weight of your shoulder against my arm was intentional
In the land where all speaking was sent sideways
And we never looked too long in anyone’s eyes

I have realized
This is the sort of thing that winter holds for me
Memories that will not let go
The crisp dawn, the smell of smoke
The feeling that we are free-wheeling over water
While bare limbs bounce on winter wind
Beneath a bright full moon

The Self is Like a Paper Cup

They had in my dad’s office one of those glass jugs of water and,
Beneath it,
The coned paper cups which were good enough
For a drink or two, maybe three
Before we crumpled them into the can
Wiping our lips with our long sleeves and sighing

All this I remember because they would tear so easily
Like our own souls
Into which God is always pouring water

Baseball

These men are common, like us
Felons and poets
In a game that makes them gods all afternoon

If you can find some glory that transforms you, seize it!
If you remain the same thereafter
What does it matter?
All any of us taste is a mere moment, anyway

So if it’s the game that restores you?
Let its poetry become part of you--
The perfection of 90 feet, from here to there
And let the beauty of a baseball curving at the far end of physics
Transform you
And the slow waiting in between slow your soul down in this, our sanctuary

Good God, I don’t have to play
Just give me warm evenings
Redeemed from the haze of summer’s sad heat

I’ll worship God all night
Starting at the long, slow slant of sunset
As they turn the lights on and we stand and sing like monks
In chant before, with once voice, saying our simple blessing:
“Play ball”