untitled alright

Just so clear 

Just the clear shapes

Uncomplicated and spare

From a bedroom window

I’d forgotten about

And especially 

In winter 

Oh the chaos

And I say,

Steady, you,

And in the eve of explosion into

Stars 

I sit in the window

In the dark of a night

Day followed a day, days, nights, 

Only my elemental allowed

To be

And then I call time-out.

Outside a swath of the dark baby blue

Sky (when all below is white, barn rooftops white

The ground all white 

My gardens deep in white under

This night sky,

Roads white), it

Rolls gentle along the horizon, 

Sky with earth swelling into one another

Traversing barns and firs, alleys of evergreen, fields

I think homeostasis

I will probably sleep

Somewhere very deep tonight

Recovering in my landscape

Tu me manques

Winter 

Remembering

Not easy recalling when dream state

And landscape merge, 

Navigating visceral as another 

Foreign land appears

Between the dreamed and actual, 

Some third state of being,

Yet another way of seeing,

A transitory candle in a winter wind

Lit and buffeted by unimagined unknown 

Grays, and snow 

Pale in a once rose-tinged sky 

Lighting the way home,

The sweep of wind erasing hints 

Of anything 

Until the changing day drops

Deep onto the hills and fields along

The lakes and between them

All the blue, the twilight light,

Breathless blue, translucent, dense,

Eliminating delineation 

And I had been thinking to myself

Take this photo, try to take this photo,

This one, this, until I said, 

I can’t, 

And I told myself,

Remember.

Reflection

Everything is uneasy

There would be something 

Wrong otherwise, so I listen

And I listen to myself 

The fulcrum is his

Blindness

I don’t know yet what that means

And yet, so much I apprehend comes 

Quite alive 

In this: in this darkness everywhere, 

It is an odd convenience that

A crisis comes that we must face, 
Because it is 

Easier to locate the pain of it, 

The blind eye, the damaged port, 

The fearful, rutted roads across 

Salvation’s elusive fields (although 

this doesn’t matter in this lifetime), 

Than face another loss, that one

We can’t describe, although perhaps

It really does not matter. 

What is it that we see in this maelstrom 

Of dark matter, what is it that 

We are not seeing? 

Bewildered. 

Do we see a thing? 

Do we understand the defining 

Tick-tock 

On the clock that will never lose 

One nanosecond

Over this or any other conflagration? 

Do we even matter?

We’ve a glimpse perhaps of goodness, 
Though, a hope that lives and thrives as in the 

Butterfly’s breathless

Seconds, its seconds into life and time, 

And into some vast that 

We will never know

So I say, enact into your human 

Script, although there are 

Stars that beckon 

If you only stop to wander in them, 

Let yourself navigate across the 
Fulsome sky, you know, the one 

There for our taking 

We just have to let it be, 

We are all, the two of us,

The all of us, the 

Bone and breath and sinew of us

The heft and weak and waft of us

The matter of a glorious whole, 

Frail and open, stubborned into

Contrary, fighting for the light and wind, 

Moving through this moment 

Sailing pure, sailing perfect, sailing
Incomplete and fierce, and do you see?

Sailing into the 

Unknown land where 

We find there is no choice 

But to throw our spark of life, 

We now cast off 

For all that’s holy,  

Into the opening space. 

~ December 30, 2018

Many Ways to Testify

(Young socialist 

At Berkeley in 1938,

In 1942, Lieutenant

In a bunker command,

Naval Intelligence

In San Francisco, 

My mother shipped troops

To the South Pacific.)

Sometimes my internal navigating

Doesn’t really change,

It shifts a focus, and harks back

To what I put into 

The reveries when

The moments and time 

That look like mile marks

Clicked by, green interstate 

Data standing sentry as needed,

While I now turn toward some opening,

Wide potential of salvation,

Giving in to an existential demand

For just a bit of knowing. 

Here in a calm reflecting

I don’t much care for ongoing

Debates or too much parsing.

I know what I know, feel what I feel,

And those are my whole places. 

Some understand 

Others don’t, and 

Some love anyway,

But there’s no agitation any longer.

Longer is what I 

No longer have.

What is this one whole life,

The one that’s mine?

I turn this way and that, casting

Gaze and seeking possibility, and

Looking in the rear view mirror

The lessons either fade 

Or bloom, and one way 

Or another seek fulsome, 

In their quiet possibilities.