October Meditation on a Red Eye

Tonight I took the clips 

Out of my hair,

The clips that hold it 

Tidy and presentable,

I took them out and wound a band

To hold a ponytail for sleep.

I swept my fingers up 

To catch the strands,

And, just accidentally, in 

An errant movement in a

Familiar nighttime ritual I gouged 

Ring finger straight into left eye,

And before I could say, 

How very stupid,
The burst vein bloodied rich and deep, 

The flooded eye a fright.

I thought to myself, arch, deprecating,
Oh, your carelessness has 

Made quite a costume 

For this scary season coming on, tho 

I have long hated Halloween.

And yet, here comes the glowing fall,
Trees' leaves in final brilliance 

Before the skies grey into snow, 

And it's the season of my birth.

Tonight rain pummels hard upon the

Metal roof and roves its vents, 

Coming in unwanted here and there, 

But I don't care anymore,

I just move the paintings 

And the furniture, 

And otherwise the towels do.

It occurs to me, 

In the dark night-lit velvet of 

Our uncurtained bedroom, 

As I'm writing this

That there's no such thing as 

Perfection in this life. 

We bear our wounds and imperfections,

Our shelter seeps and creaks from

Time's demands,

And more often than not 

We learn too late how 

We've wasted the psychic gift of 

Rising far above the mundane glories
We think we need

To live a life worth living, 

Though serenity was waiting.

I'm approaching seventy. 

I have no framework for 

What this means, so far,

Save sorrow, fury, and 

The fear I'll be irrelevant.

But persistence and the force of 

The energy I've been given

Hammer hard on my resisting soul, 

Like this rain upon my roof:

I make a promise to myself 

That I'll search the snowy woods 

Of this last quarter, and 

Hold fast to the resplendent vision

That snows will guild 

The forests' branches and 

Sprinkle silver as the dusk descends

Into unending skies. 

And anyway, 

I can't go back,

I cannot turn away, and though 

I may not wish to understand,

I am the coming change.

A Small Lament

Perfect imperfect, awareness
Dawns uneasily and
It seems that the ancient
Script says dismiss
Though sometimes it says accept —
Perhaps more awaits an excavation

In the march, Alpha and Omega,
I stop to ask myself:
Did you really need all this
Time that compresses now,
Races to a finish that can't be
Comprehended, just to
Figure out that in the end
It's human nature to regret?

Meanwhile this nature seems to
Right itself into rhythms
So primordial,
So much older than I can
Ever be in my allotted speck that
October runs ruinous morning glories
Over hedges starved for rain
Earlier in this drought,
And honeysuckle climbs like it is
June in a bursting, watered summer

Oh, I know the frost is coming
Just as these blooms take off,
The frost is coming,
That frost I dreaded
And hoped would never
Come has come already and
Now is mine, and
Just as all these
Things arise to boom, and
Despite what colors burst
Atop my pergola and riot
In the autumn ditches,
Now, oh now,
I am turning older.