To the Unbelievers

Spinning ball in the
Darkness of nowhere;
Earth: infinitesimal speck in
A middle of all we
Don't know, you are

Stressed and begging,
Living, carrying all
The breathing and
Sighing, changing
And hurting
Systems, but

We just don't
Speak the same
Language, I fear;
We haven't listened
Carefully enough,
Have we?

Have mercy, you sad,
Wretched humans,
You who think money
Is an answer,
Do you not understand
That you have enough?

Do you not realize
The crying you refuse to hear
Is your own progeny,
The unborn children of
Your unborn children?

You've no ken, I guess
No appetite or imagination for
The gold of unknown mysteries
That swirl and uptake, that
Segue into the shimmering
And dark velvet great beyonds,
Where in spite of all your
Powers and all your
Machinations,
You, too, will,
You will arrive
To face a mighty everlasting.
 

Alfresco

Edging of flame
Gilds shifting
Clouds that
Move, ponderous,

Floating gravitas, they
Cross imperceptibly
An unsettled sky
At long twilight

The pinks like
Prayers of ballast
Underneath gray ships
Of cumulus,
Nimbus of late summer,
The waves of weather's change
Gold-tinged ephemera

I
Cannot
Capture, in words
Or image this
Fire of west in sunset
Behind the moving
Gray that thunder
Left behind since
Rain swept in
And then away

But in the preternatural
Quiet of this
Homeostasis, I find I
Pause to try.

The Summer Deepens Forward

I weed the English garden,
Plant bloomers in my cutting beds
Inside the vegetable enclosure,
I pull the vagrant weeds in there,
Then water, water
The stone barn beds are
Packed and fragrant,
Perfect imperfect
Bursting, rampant

Dusk descends
And seen through trees' leafed branches
Against sky's chiaroscuro,
Small brethren
Wing, darting under canopy,
Undercover, to near-night's call,
And the ground all scampers busy.

Down the road
I'm waiting for them to finish
Mowing, working,
My own chores now done,
And finally, then, the silence sounds
As sky dims.

It seems a long twilight.

I think they're all
The same, somehow, these
Stretching twilights,
Something longs, and all the breathings
Settle, well, wind down.
I don't want to stray too far;
I am part of day's transition.

Old dog, alert,
Her ticking fading into darkening fields,
Moves her head in perpetual attention:
Her job to survey,
To patrol the night, for now.

It is too dark to write.
The wrapping air is soft, though
I wear a winter's jacket
As late bits of seeking spring
Dissolve on their way to summertime.
And from these old stone beds out back,
The farmhouse kitchen glows.
  

Day's End

I discover, again, in season's
Change, the little worlds
Here as I walk and
Listen around
My evening house.

Night bird ending day
Says to bee
My time, please, hush the buzzing
and speaking of day's closing,
There isn't anything to rival
Pond's symphonic bullfrogs.

In these quiet, twilit rural fields,
At day's end a farmer mows
The patchy, grassy dirt
Around her garden,
Close to the yard.

And all that nonsense
In the wailing world out there
Can't touch me here,
I'm balanced on the safe edge
Of world's green growing,
All the warming sounds and songs

And on this rim
There is peace enough,
I find, to see what
Blooms.

Evening

The sun hides now in the bright west sky,
Holly bushes birth in threes, in
A garden alive in color,
And the dogs are stealthy on the 
Evening land of spring,
Hunting small creatures. 
They are part of the cycle.

Light in the room fades 
Past the twilight; 
No sounds arrive, and
That is all, enough, for my deep breathing,
My sighs; I let the small universe outside this
Pastoral gaze settle just
Enough for a  moment of balance.

Layers

layers of an early warm evening assemble themselves,
first you hear the birds,
in the just-before-dusk they have much remaining business,
and there are small mothed winged creatures playing tag in
the near foreground

and pretty soon, because the smell of rain comes in,
in a quick breathless breeze,
tempering the unseasonable 90,
your attention shifts to the next layer:
in the background now
the neighbor turns his tractor towards home;

he kicked up dust in the fields embracing your place earlier,
when you were mowing, each of you busy in the volatile

changing,
trying-to-settle season

so he heads home to supper

the goats bleat
and wind picks up a little, still balmy,
another layer,
the neighbor down the road, mowing now because he

worked
all day.

you remember the sounds of suburban evenings when spring arrived, and
children called and shouted
from their swing sets

you don't want to hear that anymore, you
earned your quiet
tho' no one could accuse you of
being small and mean in spirit.

you remember how those were once your favorite sounds.

now in later time, your years
and the pace of life seek some salvation:
the fathomless depth of beginning blooms against a
graying cloud-paneled, sunlit sky, the end of day

marching, no,
rolling
toward the missed west,

the peaks of red-roofed barns turning into etched maroon against the spring soft trees

and fading into the darkening day.

all seems well, and the pause of a spinning world imperceptible,
just

enough to remind you that
all this is
now

your own.

Dog

Often I am staggered when I contemplate
The mayhem wrought by

One large and wily dog;
His wiring at the hands of Dog Creator
An awful joke upon the several owners
Previous to me;
But I am the one who wears the sucker sign
On a chain around my neck:

Sure, big fella, come along,
You’ll be fine and cared-for here.

What folly I repeat and then repeat
In my conviction that no dog is bad,
That I am friend to each transgressing smelly

Canine; I guess my father’s love of dogs

Survives in me, so I stubbornly persist

With the wrecks that come my way.

This one, luckily, has lived to bark his tale,
His damages an embarrassment I relive often
After calling my insurance:

“A wild animal has attacked the house;
The barns!
The siding’s gone! Oh God!”

Dead creatures rarely catch
My attention in the country,

They are all about, and I am hardened to their fates,

And so did not see the piles of fur and wing
That accumulated on my

Porch, only to generate more embarrassment
When the neighbor said:

“Well shit, it’s your damned dog that’s killin’ them,”

And about this time, I decided that
Such antics aren’t acceptable

Behavior in my realm,
And as the Sovereign, thought my

Wishes would suffice.

But heaps of carcass, shredded boards and

Holes big enough to bury hedgehogs gave

Way to a fine chaos my decades had not endured.

How can one dog eat a privy?

The destruction of the garden around
The defunct structure

Collateral damage simply taking breath away;
And what massive jaw,
Paws the size of paddles dug up standpipes,
Old metal tools used by farmers dead and gone?

What mindless springtime joy dismantled garden

Walls and redistributed boulders
Near-big as dog himself?

What frenzy smeared tall back with grease
As my vehicle's undercarriage

Was liberated of its hoses and gas lines?

Tell me, dog, are you tired of living?

Is this how

You thank me for your life?

Some thanks, I say, some thanks.

“Put that one down,” the neighbor says,
“He’s sure as hell no good.”

It all came down the night dog ate
The propane line
And caused a spill, the husband stuffing thumb
Into the spewing break

And shrieking loud for all to hear:

“Call for help, damnit, call the fire department,
Help me out here, help me out,

“The house is gonna blow,
Get out, get out, get out!”

“Go get the bird, and run away!
Jesus, do something

“Quick, right now!”

No one believes.

And yet I do not lie.
This graceful, buoyant, joyful, loving dog

Defies all I ever knew about man’s best friend,
Except he is, best friend or wants to be, that is.

And never would I give up on him,
Though I may go gray and lose my

Mind before we’re done, and
He is too old to rampage anymore.

It does not matter how I’ve coped,
Nor what I’ve done to stem

His mirthful havoc;
I’ve found some feeble measures and

I drink a lot these days.

Dying in Water

Flat, the August lake rests placid in mid-day,

And clover blooms above the shallow, pebbled shores,

Slow summer heat bursts scent from purple orbs

Nodding in the season’s long and waning close.

Boys swim and toss their words in splashing play,

Daring one another to swim the gentle waters,

They know the cool that rushes from the sandy bottom,

They’ve come here all their lives,

They know the contours of the shore,

They are seventeen and just begun,

They have no fears, no thoughts of mortal

Being, no worries in the languid sunny moments.

And so they swim, lean arms curving through silver droplets

As each turns his head in rhythmic breathing, legs pushing

Through the water, each thoughtless as their bodies

Slide silken through the center's depth.

One tires in the middle, and turning back to green pines

Above the clover, somehow his effort falters, some

How his effort falters, the boy slips once and

Slips again as friends grow small in steady reaching of

The other waiting side, the far shore he too sought.

He drowned in the summer of his only just beginning,

Just seventeen, just swimming in the lake.

Taos 2004: Adobe and Magpies

I go down 25, from Pueblo, and get off at Walsenburg,

Heading south, still, but west,

Into New Mexico.

Early afternoon and the light is harsh,

Flattening the changing winter landscape,

And the colors of the desert as it deepens

Are like no winter colors I’ve ever seen, but here,

In New Mexico.

Back roads twist, steep and narrow,

Past remote adobe churches perched on rocks,

The Madonna in repose in the nave; I don’t have to go in

To know where she is.

I start to come down out of the hills and see, below,

Smoke lifting from low adobe outposts

Hugging the floor of the desert.

I pass rusted pick-up trucks and falling-down corrals.

The earth is pink and the entire sky begins to turn purple—

There is no west at sunset

In New Mexico.

Low green sage bushes clump with snow and

In the pass before Taos, a squall whips around the car;

I slow to a crawl, seeing just the cloak of white.

Coming round the bend, snow stops,

Late afternoon light blooms over the mountains, and

There is Taos.

Next morning, I sit with coffee, wrapped in blankets.

From the balcony of the old adobe inn,

Again I watch smoke rising from adobe houses

Scattered in the distance behind me;

Rising from the Pueblo on the outskirts of Taos.

The valley smells of fire—mesquite and pinon—

Burning in the kivas and the kitchen hearths,

And it is the deepest imaginable quiet,

A hundred miles of quiet in the frigid early morning.

Magpies interrupt my repose; scolding, quarreling,

Calling; flitting from fence to fence,

Tree to tree, a racket I don’t mind.

Far from the chaos of home, a backdrop for the

Slow settling of my bones and breath,

High desert consolation, black and white,

Magpies startle against the blinding of blue New Mexico sky.

Platte 1950

Here: a take-apart moment—
I slow down, relish each drift of memory, still alive, this
Past. I sit in my cowgirl shirt, pearly snaps catching a glint of sun.
I am almost four years old,
My hair is curly, and although the picture,
With its ruffled edges, is
Black and white, anyone looking back in time can see
That the sky is blue in an early prairie spring.

I sit on a thick tree trunk, cast at some point
After a storm, probably, uprooted from its
Mooring in the bank of the river,
And turned by wind or the push and tear of water,
Laid on a horizontal line to earth, an end just over the river,
The Platte, and so I sit, my small body straddling
The thick-laid slabs of bark,

Tossing back a glance at my handsome dad, his blonde hair
Lifting slightly in the breeze, and wearing his own cowboy shirt,
A yoke of tan over red plaid,
He smiles back at me.

The picture opens long-closed doors,
And the rest of that day begins to appear, settling around me
As the memory blooms:
A cloth imprinted with fading yellow and blue flowers,
Spread on grassy tufts a step or two away from the
River; my mother in peddle-pushers, smoking
And gazing fondly, detached,
At my brother, my Johnny, just walking;
He picks up miniscule buds and tiny cones,
Tastes skeptically and looks up at our mother
With his round brown eyes, and
She laughs, indulgent, brushes the bits
From his mouth. The picnic hamper has
Fruit; she butters home-made bread
And sprinkles it with sugar.

And that’s all.
It’s just as real, more than
Half a century gone. There were smiles,
A splash in the river, pretend games, parents
Vibrant in the moment, laughing,
Smoke lazing up through Russian olive trees,
Cottonwoods rustling, Johnny, my dad, and Mama,
And I am always and still there,
Still alive in this past.

· ·

Breathing Home

So there I was, sitting under the great black dome of heaven, far stars as close as an outstretched arm, ancient wise old Taos Mountain barely visible in the night, but powerfully present. And in the way of the unfettered mind, I started remembering some years back, when we tore the tangled vegetation off the privy, thinking to make a garden around it and turn the old structure into a gardening shed. A few hours later, as the sun was rolling west and closing the day, a bird flew back; sitting on the now bare metal roof peak, it squawked a single cry unmistakable in its poignancy, for home had disappeared.

Looking out across the low pinon earlier that New Mexico evening, a coyote, barely visible in the hip high scrub, paused and looked at me. I looked at him, close enough to gaze into his yellow eyes, the flash of such connection momentarily disorienting. And then he trotted off; it was his place, after all, not mine, and this time I had not disrupted home.

The living life is fragile and tensile everywhere, but none so clearly limbed and starkly seen as there, in absence of tree, suburb, chaos of what is made, not what organically is. There, all that remained, in the homeostasis of the moment, in the confluence of mountain, desert floor, and sky, was for me the archetype that feeds a soul – mine, at least. That pure form, brilliant in mountain contour, and mystic, ancient sky, miracle of changing light, was testimony to when and then, inhabited by beings wiser than the human observer.

Since I tore away some long dead bird’s thicket-home those many years ago, the ways bird, toad, fox or coyote appear have been a gift to apprehend. We share home, and we dare not forget that; our outer landscape cradles it and our inner landscape creates it. And this is how I began to think of the inner landscape of poetry; the internal architecture of my creative self, and I began to realize how the literal landscape often informs the internal one. For me, then, poetry is my internal home; the space I feel my most expressive me, and when I go to water my western roots – the Great Plains, the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, as I have since I moved away and to the east – I turn to words and the poetic form to nurture the symbiotic me, the one breathing in the same space as those other beings, hopping, flying, trotting, scampering, and making home.

At Last Barbados

I took the small white oblong pill and by the time

I awoke, flying blue-green over an ocean prairie,

Caribbean sirens sang from island to island;

Lower and lower we dropped until ground speck loomed,

Settled in metal rooftops’ hot colors, and my world had changed from

Dread to calm.

High above Atlantic sounding, on a cliff atop the surge,

Wind patters palm trees’ fronds, a sound like night-time rain; the hemisphere sleeps;

Monkeys scramble and a night bird calls faintly, once, across an answering sky,

In the morning as the eye searches for nothing but what is rolling below,

I swear I see the curvature folding horizon’s coverlet,

And Africa there, a thousand thousand miles across the deep marine and

Along the eastern coast gods march,

Mythic, pitted rocks cleaved from ancient coral reefs;

Nimble boys and old men with grey hair tied in ponytails game the surf,

And ride waves home in crests of long forgetting.

I watch their eyes see nothing but the water;

They care so much that nothing matters anymore.

Still, if I were seeking how to make my bit of clay mean something

In this world when I am gone to whatever home awaits

I’d recall and feel the scene I see; the tide comes in, the tide goes out; it pools

Among the monoliths standing on the shore.

Between the breakers water waits for an instant’s universe,

And eddies, each ephemera a different masterwork.

I will be there in the next millennium; my bones and dust at one with

This pulse of life that more than my short breath

Confirms what was and is; confirms an evermore.

November Alchemy

Last night I drove up on the ridge between the lakes,

In the solitude on the seasonal road,

Soon to close in winter’s snow,

The bowl of night encompassed all there was,

A full moon bathed the landscape in

Daylight, it was such a moon as that,

A universe according to its rhythm

In one swift moment then

Spilled upon me a revelation:

That I am of and in

This space of dust and light,

For there, in empty pastures, cloaked

In winter’s coming on

I felt of life, among the spirits from the fading stalks,

Goldenrod unblooming and dewberries gone,

The clumping of the earth

Shielding shoots and seeds within,

Until comes a spring that cold has made

Forgotten now.

Uneasy these few weeks, distracted and uncertain

And too much touched by what I can’t explain,

All gentled down and washed away into the balance

Of what has been, and what will be,

My own connectedness.

The winds come up, soon calm descends,

Full moons arrive, inexorable and pacing surely,

And there I understood, illuminated in

Those now-quiet summer pastures,

That all mystery of completed place was

Perfected in

My beating heart.

Clearing Space

Early on an autumn evening, after all the animals are fed and I’ve made the first small fire of the season, I stop the whirring in my head, and begin to eliminate the static. I turn off the television. I turn off the music. I let the phone ring unanswered. I close down my computer. I push the magazines and books I dally with each day into piles, dog-earing the pages or bending spines, marking my return.

I am wondering. I look outside at the early dark, and try to stop the internal racing. I am clearing space.

In Taos in July the wind devils dissipate in the evening; cloud banks collide over the tops of the mountains, changing the colors of the sky as the sun disappears, leaving residue of color not just in the west but all around, for there is no west at sunset in New Mexico. The magpies chatter all day, but at night, finally, they begin to tire. A calm settles. I am listening to the grandfathers. They message in the wind, the rustling of changing skies, the spritzing of brighter air into slow closing of grey cloud cover signaling rain—sheets of it curving in the distance as the winds push its veils across mountains and mesa. The grandfathers talk and I listen. The grandfathers hover on Taos Mountain; they are all around in that expanse of place; they come if one will listen. They speak if one will hear.

In the house, there are spiders, and of course, whether I want to be fully engaged with them or not, there is cognition; spider cognition. They live where I live; we share a wedge of place. A small lizard sleeps on the adobe wall, hidden as she rests. In the morning, she scurries under the screen door when I surprise her, opening up the house for sun and coffee. We are an unlikely family, searching tenuously for our rapprochement. I know the spiders and the lizard are simply where they are supposed to be, and so am I; the only difference is that I feel quite assured that they are not so discontent and ungrounded.

When I arrived, I carried trials and sorrows; I was full of fretting and unease. None of this was out of any ordinary. It is the way life attaches. I had thought to write, to be disciplined and record all the wonders of the place, but the seduction of space and color and elements entered into the being of me and I felt a certain energy roll away from my very self. As I sat with my sister one evening, first arrived, I looked out toward the oddly subtle pulsing view of the sere and drying desert praying for rain, and I released my static and my clutter. I held up my arms to the cooling night, and I released the humanness of my life to something large and comforting. The grandfathers invited me to let it float away, and so I did; I cast it all to Taos Mountain, where nestled were the woes and hopes and secrets and dreams of countless pilgrims and countless natives in the stoic of geology and place.

No poetry was lurking. No age or care or intention existed. I tossed my me to Taos Mountain, and the grandfathers cleared my spaces, my internal crumblings and my fretful heart. The loveliest dawn arrived; not one of pinks and yellows gleaming into my bedroom window, but, that night, the dawn that I had arrived in this place for a reason. I came for my sister’s healing, and I found my own salvation.

The Hebrew word for salvation is literally translated “great opening spaces.” All my life I have intuitively understood that notion—the Great Plains are vast, and a road always leads to somewhere, and if you stay on it long enough, it always leads up. Arriving in Taos, at an elevation of some 7,000 feet, my journey paused. I cleared out my internal spaces, and gave all that stuff to Taos Mountain. My cobbles and shackles joined the repository, the one in Taos Mountain, the repository of the ages, where the people, those who gazed upon what is immutable and constant, knew, as I did then, that it was safe.

The grandfathers watch me, and in the wind that still kicks up now and then, I detect their nods. Some call it giving up, and I call it surrender. In clearing spaces, I create the room to grow. The grandfathers bid me listen, and Taos Mountain knows.

Blind Eye

In Exeter, the apples lay rotting on the garden path,

As gentle Devon summered in a late last bluest sky,

And man-tall hedgerows that lined

The brown-mapped roads up on the moor

Began to show their russets and their goldens

As the light began to die

Earlier and earlier, the thorny hawthorns bare,

The maple, oak and dogwood leaves floating down

To hedges’ grassy banks,

Leaving holly and primroses to brave the coming wind,

To color through the gray.

The chill was there that long past fall,

A marker of an unseen pulse, a throb of

Strife, not hers, she thought, but from the

Rovers on the quai, the travelers’ dogs all running wild,

Or hearty shouts of revelers closing down

The pub at 2 AM in Wonford Road.

She didn’t want to know.

She closed her eyes, and didn’t see the world was spinning

Way too fast; her garden bloomed through early frost,

She carried on; the blind eye turned to

Balm enough no matter present tense:

On the trellis by the terraced beds, the bramble and the ivy twined,

She should have seen the signs.

Ah, well; all that was long ago, the choirs stilled, the

Gateways closed, the spring of making new again

Choked by betrayal’s rust; corrosive lies,

And long into the future that came awake in that bad

Dream, the beauty of that year turned to dust and formlessness.

In dormancy all things repair; they sleep into another time,

And so she did; the decades cloaked in silence as she moved

Through past and memory, stoked indifference, turned

Away, resolved to find some relic, some retrieval from the ash.

Who knows just where forgiveness lives; who tells one how to do it?

But forgive she did, with wisdom earned, eyes seeing all around,

And now she sees another turn, another of life’s seasons:

Her spring was dashed, and summer too; all that is gone

Forever now, a waste of her, a waste of time, time ungifted witlessly,

And no recoup, no recompense, though

Steeliness and wholeness won,

And she is seeing where she’s been; the hedgerow bare,

The thorns to keep the wild ones out,

But the holly’s red, the primrose blooming,

For she is autumn now.