Perigee

Near moon

Waning gibbous

Night before last when

He came to bed, 

I stirred

When he put his head and hands

Upon me as he does when 

He comes to bed, 

I stirred

And there was in slumbered glimpse

Perfect sky, night black

And nothing else, save 

A calm in the universe, where

Near full moon throbbed,

Gold orb

In dark

December 14 

Looking for Harmony

 https://youtu.be/KiV7Vo9k8RM

Rant

I don’t want to be old

I don’t want to make excuses 

About my unsteady step

I don’t want to turn and face 

Scary things inside my body. 

I don’t want to watch the watchers

No longer watching me

I don’t want them to say

Tsk, tsk, 

And shoot sly winking smiles

(Bet she was a looker when she was young)

At one another, as they ogle those 

Ungreying others in their quick strides 

Toward the myriad of their tasks,

Stumbles and surprises 

And I don’t want to be invisible

Like the old ladies drooling 

In their wheelchairs 

In the warehouses set up for them

In our cruel national repugnance

And nor do I

Want a special driver’s license,

Discounts to keep my teeth ship-shape,

My hearing keen, 

My any, many premiums at an all time low!

Call now! 

I don’t want the faux deference 

From a passel of hustlers looking

At me and thinking there must be a 

Way to make a buck or two. 

They have no idea how rage 

Turns to fire

And how I can and will

Obliterate their dreams, along with 

Anything else getting in my way

Don’t suggest it’s time to put in

An elevator to carry 

My looming infirmity upstairs

Do not reconfigure my 

House to match what some greedy 

Snake-oil salesmen would like to peddle—

Short of consignment to one

Of those places eating up any 

Legacy and fortune that will be left 

To the children—for I care not  

About someone else’s dreams, 

Of course, and by the way,

Fuck them, fuck them and 

Their coarse green dreams of dollars. 

Leave me alone. 

Do not patronize

Do not share a friendly elder joke

Do not turn in your delimitus 

Because you wish to avoid my belittling

You cannot see it coming, 

You cannot touch my power. 

And anyway, 

You won’t find me

And you won’t know me

And if you try 

You will spoil just like the 

Rotting apples on the ground

Of my autumn birthday 

And if somehow you see

The tracks of my shoes

In my muddy garden 

As I kick all that’s in my way

You will know, 

Because you read these lines, 

That every golden woman 

Fighting the platitudes and 

Cheap dismissive assignations 

That accumulate like leaves from

My Japanese maple just before they fall  

Is I. Is me. She. We. 

No graceful aging here, 

No airbrushed portrait, no giving in, 

No forgiving of assumptions and

No starting over in

The  constraints of time. 

None of this. None of that. 

No nothing but the raw edge of 

A life lived gasping for the breath

Of meaning and of relevance, 

Though knowing in the end 

It’s mostly dust, and the silvered,

Lonesome, wayward jangle of

A few stars along the way. 

Fantasia

Sitting in stillness

No breath of wind

High heat, dew point, and

Stupor,

I slow, slow down, breathe deeply, I 

Sit in the most immense quiet

That I can summon

And then I see imperceptible motion

A tangerine butterfly 

Hummingbirds that don’t notice heat 

Looking afield, apples on our old trees

Are blushing up, 

Some drop and dot the ground,

I hear bird calls 

As they swoop and glean

Enveloping gratitude, 

For this moment of homeostasis,

Unexpected, tears springing,

For that is surely what this is, a

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

That I’m listening to in these moments 

I think to myself

Dad would have the 

Glory of this piece wired to this patio

To each peeling porch,

Volume turned up to fill my skies

My wondrous old Dad

Would be sitting with eyes closed

Arms directing each sublime elide, 

And its resolution 

The way life 

My life, our lives

Are lived 

One elide into another.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0U6sWqfrnTs

Untitled Night

A close heaven, fireflies,

A quickening storm,

Rivers and waters roil

Scattering across lakes

Up toward the Maritimes

Down along the Missouri 

To the Mississippi and the Gulf

It’s not as green out there

Past Ogallala and Arapahoe,  

Brown down toward Durango

He says, idling in the conversation

I do recall, I say, and

Peblo. I like to say it that way.

I am of the land and dirt

Seeking water in arid landscape 

As I seek footing in stars

I see in this gift of life

That change waters the landscape.

In the west the thunder grumbles

I feel the shift of wind

I don’t need a weather alert

To move inside,

The rain serious now.

In a bit less rain, we watch 

Heat lightning as it lights 

The west again,

A western sky

In beckon: 

Come, now, it calls.

Time for you to go. 

On the Way to Dark

The many years, lifetimes

I’ve been lost in sunset

Missing moon rise 

A thank-you God moment or two

I sit in the orchestra as the bullfrogs tune 

And I notice how quiet my dog is,

Gunnar accompanies me

I hush, hush 

He speeds to check whatever rustles 

The brush in the pasture behind us

Behind the pond, 

Dodging under the 

Sweet ancient apple tree 

He’ll return to sit,

Near-motionless, watchful, 

Though I’m not altogether sure 

He knows this moon

This moment, 

This quiet,

This slice of changing light is his,

Although I know

It is mine. 

Tu me manques 

Dearth

Busy, the humming insights,

The reordering in my head of

Those important reverberations 

Upon opening into 

Light, unexamined pathways

I begin to wonder 

I might say 

Wander toward, into a

Strange question:

Are your ponderings

The way a woman like you

Sensibly reflects,

Or are they a little daft?

Perhaps so. 

But what do we know of 

Beyond peril, of some kind of 

Wholeness if 

The spacings that

Shake off conventions

Don’t mean anything?

Landscape

On a night of insights 

Stepping into frigid

I turn my back to wind

I’ve had a notion

Most of my life 

About horizon, space, 

The vast as far as I could see

In the growing up, 

Wind across the plains

Constant in

The calling spaces

Now mighty wind

Rags my shoulders but

I don’t care, nor do I 

Turn to look out into  

Snow carried in this  

Night’s wildness 

And I can’t explain it,

Anything about it, but it

Falls upon me, 

Perspective

February 15

Portland Air

I was going to Portugal 

Walking on a forest path past a small 

Whitewashed stone house 

Somewhere in Switzerland 

Fragrant pine needles under my feet

I recalled traversing that narrow byway

One time before, and it was pleasurable 

A safe connector

First, tho, I had

To find the plane, and 

No one selling candy and Dramamine 

Behind the counters in the crosshairs

Of the airport

Quite knew where it was 

When I was asking

Where to find that plane.

But I saw a wide opening, an 

Airport arch into a long ramp, 

Bright sky awaiting, 

Beckoned, I walked toward 

Light beyond a marshy shore; 

There, rough seas suddenly calmed to glass, 

Lapping waters, a small raft waiting

Someone held my hand and 

I tiptoed thru the shallows 

And found an open seat

I mean, a place for me to sit, as we 

Paddled to the plane on a tarmac 

On a reef altho 

I do not know for sure

One thing though, I remembered to bring

A large sheaf, of art and drawings, 

Papers, blank spaces, to be filled with 

Whatever might be coming 

At first I thought they might be mine

But I gave them to a boy beside me

He too seemed to be a voyager

In search of larger understandings

The waters were grey then, as we 

Slipped moorings

And I woke up.  

Seeming to Arrivie

In that indiscriminate hour

Not dawn, nor midnight, 

When voices close & far quiet

And there is sleep across

A hemisphere where 

My mind searches for

Salvation as I struggle toward the vast,

I woke to light, and

Gunnar barking

And then he slept again

What if such small ordinary

Instances

Are just the 

Wake! 

Wake, You! 

Wake and Listen calls, the shift

Of tone, as my deep chimes on the 

Old side porch, oldness of the wood

Behind them, the soft reverb 

Of alto peale from changing 

Wind, not harbinger of anything, or

Small startle of headlights when

She drops off the newspaper as she’s done

For decades, this time 

Delivered to the mailbox 

A bit early, 

A bit late

Nothing to mind about, no need to fret,

Mundane rhythms 

Reminding me to sometimes 

In the deep of neither night nor day

Just be awake. 

I don’t know what happens tomorrow

Or in one month

One year, one allotted lifetime

To think I do is folly to the 

Larger pulse

That light, though, 

Could have maybe also been 

Just one of the young guys

In the next section, 

Lost, a little drunk, 

Turning around, wanting 

To go home. 

I think I shall cleave to these 

Simple explanations: 

The earth spins on her axis,

This too shall pass, 

Upheaval, and 

I like to imagine that

The learning got from loneliness 

And the shortening of time and memory

Tips us toward assembling

Another kind of light. 

 

 

Going Somewhere

 On the western side of daybreak

Opalescence in a winter sky, 

The faintest shimmer, soothed upon

The raw of waking early to what 

Was not remembered during sleep

Another day beginning 

With fists of fear and fury 

Claiming sentience best understood as 

Rough passage, though passage still,

Translucence the only certainty,

As the moment slips

Into the waiting morning.

I decide to sleep a little longer

In a room where sunlight chastens 

The dark corners, the ones defined, and

Those that are not, as well

Behind my drowsy lids 

This hope arrives again

I tell myself that 

One can never know 

The plans of a new day.

December 30

Sent from my iPhone

Wake, Wake Up

You were drowning 

And you couldn’t breathe

Your hands were tied behind your back

Oh! You were wearing a grey skirt and 

A navy blue sweater I think, hair loose

And long, 

You were lost in the riot 

Though you tried to be 

Intentional and proper. 

Seriously.

It wasnt you so you just watched her

She slipped beneath the still

Flat surface of her life, and 

You know, made drowning look easy. 

January 1, 2021 1:37 AM