The Atomic Age

How did they do it?
Those shrewd ones who stood watching clouds blossom,
But not like a white pink morning
Like something else entirely
Like hell releasing fury

A pillar of cloud, a spire of fire
Mushroomed to devour the quiet sky
The horizon shrouded so suddenly in endless power
That even hand and minute and hour stopped to pay homage to our limitlessness:
Good God, the age of men so quickly ushered in
To end every age before it, almost before it begins  

Some who stood there watching the sky turn orange
Could recall calvary charges and days of duels and drinking
Brandy and sherry and late night dances,
When there were no treaded tires
Nor airplanes speeding above the spires
Nor warhead's hellish fire
Before the mechanized way of things
And the end of everything

And those who saw the dark lines ring the earth, in trenches and barb-wire,
When war first devolved to utter madness,
How could they stand—they who saw all things burned down (or so they thought)?
They who saw the turning of the century…
How could they stand to see such new insanity?
The sun standing on earth
“O death, destroyer of worlds”

What did they drink at the bar, late on that first night after?
What did they toast to?
Or did they simply drink the bottle down, and fall to the ground?

To what God above did they pray to, to absolve them?
And with what zeal did they kiss the lips they loved?
Did they find welcoming arms, like loving flames of fire?
A sweet oblivion, perhaps, to soothe them
A darkness, come at last, to consume them

How Could God

How could God be out there, somewhere, seeing and feeling all this
Like an old man looking down from a tower
And not jump into the battle—
Overturn some tables,
Heal the angry and sick and tired
Strike down the ill-willed
And stand at the grave and say "come forth" and "no more"?

With such suffering, how could God stand still?

 It seems to take long years of unlearning, in suffering,
To start to see
That God slouches, just like you, just like me,
Against the onslaught of things
Shaking his head, bracing his shoulders for the day
Seeing love, holding onto it, desperately, above all things

God rises like the sea
Like the possibility of sunlight on leaves
Making his path among the broken shards of clay, on the painful way
Rising again, to be crucified,
With the breaking of the day

The Forest and the Wood

I.

The woods, once (and not so long ago)
Spoke to me only of possibility;
They would not let me go, 
Provoking that restlessness of heart which is longing in the dark
The forest was there not so much for going anywhere
But only to be explored

No more:
Now I see there are simply too many paths
And though the beauty still enraptures me,
The past is past, and
Something has been lost
A die is cast
And I can't look past the growing realities
Of dust and ash
As, I am, apparently,
All grown up
And not so very far from old
Like autumn before the cold

I no longer think I can undo them—the forest or the many woods
Not as I thought in my youth, to unlock their puzzle,
And though I would pursue them, still,
Despite their inextricability,
My energy is not what it was
(A new-found cruelty)
Making the mounts all seem insurmountable
A treasure destined to remain locked

So
My road is chosen,
My lot is cast:
My forest paths
Have all become singular
As age has one at last

II.

And yet
There is now a forest in me
Like a garden growing gold in August,
Its autumn seeds to sew

It is now my task to explore one daily path
And to wear it down in love,
Until every stone wears soft
Worn like faithful bones, to hold others up
Yes:
A path for children to walk
A path for coming home

And so I’ll no more roam
Not in the forests of the world, anyway
In this one wood only, I will love
And call my own
And make a home

Fingerprints on the Wall

Now I just let the fingerprints sit on the wall
They don't disturb me at all

In the months after we moved in, I had a wet rag at the ready
To fall upon any dirt that should defile that good and creamy white, to defile its light, and
To do away with any dread that I was failing or that we were falling into some early state of disrepair
Ever vigilant, in that vigilance that teeters towards despair

Now
I pass them at ten pm, to climb the stairs
Or I walk by them at noon, to get the mail
And see that oily patina
Which has become holy, in its way:
Touched by three children, as they face the day
Meant, as they are, to leave their mark upon it all
(And why should my wall escape unharmed?)

So I resolve to only see this holiness
Will see it only as a marking of time, as the walls have grown ever so slightly closer to me
As if seeking some message to speak to me

Would that those three would grow as slowly
Before they go

Though it is holy, too
The letting go

Regret

The words we did not say on that first chilled evening in October
I hold clenched in me still,
Like a gambler holding too tightly to a ticket, waiting for the race to end,
Afraid to lose
Afraid, too, to risk or win

Afraid that the fates would be unkind, I declined courage
And have now only the feebleness of a tighter grip to keep regret at bay
And all the things I wished to say—
All the things which were waiting in that space, like a fire waiting to find breath
(Like a sinner in search of grace
Like night waiting for the day)—
Sit within me, still:
Words to become worlds, stillborn and inert instead

The seasons, strangely, did not stop for me
My faltering did not bend time's knee,
Nor stop the stream from racing to the sea
All things kept flowing, and still make their way,
Just as years race on to the end of days

But the moment still buzzes in my mind
The tragedy of one dear thing left incomplete
Makes regret feel as death to me

To go back and risk it!
To return and release every thought, like fish, and to watch them swim away
To spread them like seeds, scattered on an April day

But I can't go back and send words out upon the wind
Just as we can't go back or home again

Perhaps, could I somehow return to pull at the seam
All would have pulled apart, leaving me, as I feared, naked
But perhaps, instead, we would have been covered in sudden miracle
Some great emptying somehow filling all the spaces between you and me
Some great yearning made complete
As a new world turned beneath our feet

If only some wise sage, other than time and regret and age,
Would help us make our way
And teach us
That we won’t regret swinging, even if we miss
But we will regret standing still
And though errant words can be spent foolishly
We will lament all the more
The day we would not seize and make secure
And that as we make our way
We will regret, above all,
The words we would not say

Metaphors and Similes, in Autumn

Autumn has yet to fail me
And has birthed again in me some revelry, too deep to name, that
Encircles me like leaves
As the world goes quiet, along the ridge line
To teach us about leaving

The ravens above the tree-line come and go
As if they know the forward moving way of things
So far from green,
As the geese sing

I don't know why this fall is more for me like spring than any season
I’d think growth would make me touch the deep down things—
The hidden parts of being, but
There is something about the falling apart that feels like freedom
And leaves scattered in an endless storm of unbeing, with little grief
Speak the metaphor beneath all things:
There's something about not having to hold things together, at the end of things,
That sets us free

Perhaps we want, beneath all the posturing, to be undone
And to come home stripped down but unbroken
Rising like the moon through barren branches,
Which becomes the simile for beauty, no matter the season

Now we wait for the new moon, unafraid of any ending
Afraid only of holding on too long
And wary of missing the release sent to welcome us
And the death sent
To set us free

There is a Grief at the Heart of All Things

Sometimes, driving on a highway, after the road has quieted
(Say at 10 am on a Thursday or Friday)
I feel, riding beside me,
The deep grief of all things, turning to greet me from the passenger side—
A surprise—
Like a wave rising from the ocean, higher than the ridges all around me,
Pouring over the bridges,
To drown the horizon which flies mindlessly to the sky   

It need not be a crowded byway
And even a road bedrocked in beauty will not be lovely enough to quiet all the sorrow, like water, pouring from God's speared side,
As the world limps by, like a wounded deer, bleeding with such endless longing

There is a grief at the heart of all things
And even the bright sun cannot erase it
There is a dark night in the bright day
And yet, even still,
Across the highway now, a murder of ravens flew out and,
Far from being some dark omen
They became, on the wind and wing,
The revelry of all things

Reminding us all, as all things can,
That we are alive
And that though we are dying
We still can fly
On skies that will make space for us
If we find the courage, simply,
To rise

The Shape of Truth, At Last

We finally came to understand
Beyond our world of binaries, which so closely held our hands and shaped the lands we walked on,
That everything is, instead, both-and

And truth, if you are to understand it (its shape if not its name)
Is always a merging—an estuary between sea and land—
As everything stands in tension,
The earth balanced precipitously and perfectly in orbit

Everything finds rest just beyond the storm demanding certainty
And now our hands stretch out, cruciform
At last able to hold the whole world

Unsure, perhaps, of certainty, we are finally assured of all good things
While a bird sings, unaware of anything at all, except the spring

A Collection, Alive and Flying

I have long collected trinkets and little pieces of beauty
Objects of tiny art and everyday artifacts, to set my mind apart from the ordinary
(Though the mundane is no bad thing)

My soul seems to sing in holding some thing held by many human hands before me
As if I am a part of something greater than me
A river winding its way, from mountains to the sea

When I travel to some new place
I might find a bit of bric-a-brac
A ceramic bird
A lacquered box
A rock
A painted word

They seem, altogether on the shelf,
To rise from the dust
Taking wings, these created things
Like offerings
Just as I hope to be
Some distant song to sing, until the notes coalesce, and,
All together, the notes fit best as a chorus, in many voices

From all corners of the globe, I see them rising
Their voices prying secrets from the deep, forgotten earth,
In mirth

I see them rising, at last, into the sky
Where creativity inside us finds all things flying, on wings
Like birds migrating from cold to the very heat of things
Longing for that country just beyond the ridgeline
And, finding the horizon no longer denies longing,
They fly in a perfect “V”, and find
The sky, finally, lets them loose
And sets us, all as one, free

We Let Them Go

I.

We only stopped at the gas station, and did not drive north

We wanted more, of course,
But also knew what we'd find: more roads, more white lines, more farms
We were not alarmed by our longing
Nor annoyed at the constraints of time
All that we’ve learned, and our grown-up task:
To not pass up the naming of desire
But to let desire pass—
To let it fire itself across our brains
And feel it burning to the brunt of insanity, before breathing and, pushing on,
Letting go of what we have not the time to climb or ride or drive or find

 II.

Who knows what we’d have found, should we have driven on—
A tree that stirred old memories
A bend inviting mystery
A bird that sang the grief of things?
But with miles to go, we left such possibilities behind

Still, I hope time will prove kind
Like an ocean, guiding an unbroken bottle to the shore
Like an antique store which prevents a museum from becoming a mausoleum
Like the autumn, gently laying the leaves to rest, the sky to grieve

III.

But I did pause in the sunlight, in the parking lot of the White Horse Gas
Marveling at the white clouds rising like mountains into the sky
Letting my body feel the beautiful, oppressive heat, stinging our skin, baking at our feet
To tell us, once again, that

We live
We breathe
We make memories
And
All the roads we cannot take, we must let go

Still, somehow, we take them with us down the highway, even as we drive away
As if all things will meet before the end of things
Beyond the ever-turning gates of dawn
And the changing of green leaves
In autumn breezes

October Smoke

So comes October smoke, with hope,
And my dog lays his head in my lap
At last,
The year and the dog bending at the end of day
As we make our way like a golden leaf, blown by the breeze, de-treed
And fallen in the orange stream,
As if all things are simply on their way, past decay
To the sea
To the bright and autumn sea, which holds the sunlight in just the same way
As it held the August heat, and the longer days

All things, it seems, find their way, through pain
To the heart of everything
Resting our heads as in God's own lap
At peace, at last

The Hopscotch Girls

They do not see me looking down from my window to the ground,
And when I sit back on my couch in the slant of the yellow sun
I come undone:
Their voices, muffled through the window, and the rhythm of their jumping find me
And remind me of growing up:
We all thought the mystery that entraps us now we would solve by lunch
We had a hunch, so how could we not fully comprehend, in the end,
The shape of all things to come?

An airplane passes overhead, and the sound of a running faucet three floors up
Makes the afternoon merge to a small, thin point
A sigh 
A regret 
A cigarette
A memory of what might have been
A piece of paper on the wind
A trinket falling from my hand
A morning dawning once again

Once you have learned the lesson the you are very small
Then you can be caught up in the new day, and make your way
But not before
Only after can you merge into the point of light
That comes with the sound of the hopscotch girls

The blue above them and me, impenetrable to any fuselage, is unpierced in its perfection
It will not brook any secret to fall from its wide hands
Yet it will let the sound of water fall from its sky
And give you air and wine to drink: the resurrection and the life

Like Fawns We Made Our Way

We sat by each other at The Shawshank Redemption, and
That was enough
No hands touched, no lips, no illicit bliss
But to sit
In that cavernous theater,
At the very beginning of our freedom (into which we'd fall),
Was everything and all

To be near each other
To breathe
To hold the spinning galaxies within ourselves
In the dark, pierced by longing
Made us young kings and queens
Riding nobly to first battle, and sure victory

Like fawns we made our way
Into the bright light outside the theater
It was too much light for eyes to hold
As we said goodbye
And fumbled into the endless world

On the highway home,
I looked out the window
And when my sister asked me how the movie was
I said, “Good”
Then watched the green trees blur by
In lines too wild for human eyes to see

Life

The goal is to give yourself
And to keep giving yourself,
Stoking desire's fire without shutting down the forge
Or resigning
Or closing the door
And,
Should the coals come to mere embers, to blow on them,
To keep rainwater away
All while knowing how many desires—most, perhaps—
Will be frustrated, destined to be unfulfilled

Even still
To give yourself
As you keep looking up, towards the near horizon
Where the sun burns down like a golden prophecy
Across the quiet mountains

Grief

We were muddy in the pond, and so were tempted to turn around, saying,
I knew it
Look how dirty I am now
But some voice would not let us stop, and so we kept wading to where
The water began to clean and cleanse us
Until
Emerging on the other side
We did not realize how grimy we had always been
Far before the other shore
And never knew it until
We went all in

Did Every Mystic Have a Dog?

Did every mystic have a dog?
And learn from him or her how to stop flogging themselves, for lust
And to simply love, like God?
Like laying out your belly, with trust, to the world above?

Did they all learn by looking into those eyes
So intent on running wild, but tethered by their need for constancy
For loyalty
And their need, late at night
To come close and lay down, quiet, with tender eyes
And feel the warmth of the floorboards
And the silence, deep within the darkness
Because it taught them, and us,
That somethings happens deep in us
When we trust
And that all holiness opens
When we love

How Eagerly They Hope to Find It

I have gotten on and off a plane a thousand times,
And stood in line
Or stood to stretch and waited, impatiently, in that cramped space
Which shuttles us, in miracles we cease to see, across the sky
Until such wondrous things become banalities

But there was something about sitting on the tarmac today, and not changing planes
Which had me watch the new people walk down the lane, in Pittsburgh, preparing for Phoenix
And had me see every new face, afresh, as human beings,
With hopes and dreams
In bodies which are like vehicles hurtling through the sky
Through empty space and time, through the galaxy
As if each has lost something and gropes blindly in the dark for it
Wearing the same expression, interrupted only by a guarded smile
To belie how eagerly they hope to find it

What I Will Remember from My Travels

What I most remember of our trip to Paris was not the Mona Lisa or her sly smile
(Though I could see why she has beguiled five centuries of minds)
But rather, I will remember the warehouses, near the airport, along the Seine 

They strained in their daily labors, and the laborers outside them smoked dark and milds, to put their minds at ease, beneath a timid sky, as if the day cannot find its way or smile,
But sighs
As if it is stuck in tedium, so far from revelry, next to the great city 
An unseeing eye in a world of light 

And while I took from Rome, above all, the Coliseum, the city’s ancient throne 
I will also remember a small restaurant near the Tiber, unpeopled by tourists,
Where we had a mediocre meal, of pasta and cheap wine, and then walked beneath evergreens, which lined
the quiet streets, 
The simplicity of it all somehow perfecting our time, and satisfying our tired minds 

In Jerusalem, I will remember Rehovot, that neighborhood so far from the Western Wall
Where people went to dance class and ate in small cafes and laughed and cried 
As if the entire crossroads of history must give way to our daily dramas, and our crimes
Brooding in the street
Laughing at the spectacle of human desire, so full of fire
Neatly hidden and pushed down, endlessly longing, 
Like the streams of so many rivers, and of centuries
Like the cool, quiet hours in the desert
Before the morning breaks in heartless song 

Because no matter what greatness is happening
We forget the sum of things,
Which is mainly a women watering flowers, nursing hope for spring, at her own feet
And a child filling hours with wonder, sitting on her stomach, coloring
And a man smoking on the sidewalk, tending to such strong desire that, were it a storm, 
It would tear a ship apart
As could shake the heart of the earth
As could shake all earthly monuments
And the foundations of the world 

More real, somehow, all of it, and the art of surviving and striving forward, with heart,
Than the most sublime art 
Hung on walls for us to gawk and smile at and cool or souls as we stare at it
For we have it all within our hearts already 
We only recognize her smile and the height of the Coliseum and the mourning of the Western wall, and the daily walks in quiet neighborhoods 
Because we have them all 
Down deep inside us  

We have them all, crying out, like mother earth in birth
Down deep inside the dirt of us

Bare Limbs Against a Cold Moon

One pure thing my grief gave me
The ability to see
The sight of limbs on the breeze, especially
Specifically, that beauty: 
The bare limbs of winter trees

And against them, far beyond
The opal light of moon
Too proud to swoon, too high to kneel
Standing, simply, stock-still
As if any movement could startle the mouse 
Who scampers across the field,
Aware as he is of the owl's impending shadow 
Perhaps, of his doom
Or, in his way, perhaps sensing the thrill
Of being alive on a fully embodied night 

The whole earth is wound up like a cat prepared to leap
As if there some secret to find and keep
And I, there in the field, my hands reaching blindly before me
Through my grief, some secret to see
Find it, and hold it near 
As the dearest thing to me 
The bare limbs of the winter trees

The Best and Most Beautiful Irony

It is the most beautiful irony—
Of comedy and tragedy—
That this house, which nurses you
This home, which wraps and binds you, to protect you
These hearts which love and hold you so 
Will bid you go
Will send you, in fact
With hopes you find your own self and way, in the bright, good world

Will let you go 
Knowing you are brighter still,
And the world needs the marvel that you are
If it will rise at all from its long slumber 

You will go,
An individual, and no one else's, 
Just your own, to make your way
With fire in your bones, the world to know
Yet connected, yes and always,
To these roots which held you and bid you grow
Which sent you, as the day sends morning light and follows night 
As the sun rises
As the moon sends sea tides

And as the dandelion sends its seeds
And lets them go without knowing where they will land or grow
Or what their life will be
And so grieves
And also,
Feels the joy of all things, 
Rising through the dirt
The joy of earth
In every longing tree and leaf