Moving into Rain

This blessed rain

Pours and hammers, 

Splatters,

Floods, 

Washes

Washes

Washes Earth

Travels in currents

Builds in grey galleons

Falls in its torrents

Washes miseries, 

Miseries

I thought it could be snow

I thought it could be green Christmas

I thought it could be grey, 

Sadness inexplicable.

These winter solstice ends of day,

Though,

Gleam through bare trees standing

In the distance, flames burnishing 

Up from ground, horizon’s twilight sky 

Pulled into 

Solstice change,

To rain.

Maybe all of this

Is what is always there for us to hear

To apprehend,

But in the strife,

This night,

Craving waiting gentling

I dare to wish 

The turning. 

December 25, 2020

Wasted Time

Too old, sort of, to get hung up

On wasted time. 

Not a thing might change, except

Some less elusive sleep. 

https://youtu.be/nWlEsta4xS8

In the Old Times

Hito, he had red hair

And in the old days, 

Oh any music and we danced

Even if there wasn’t a sound

But the moon singing in the trees, a star

Or two that we could see

Above the canyons,

The music could change

And on we went, well

You know, on in 

This life. 

In this life

We carry on, riding

Currents, 

Maybe, even, into the next.

Sometimes right before he’d 

Come to find me, I already knew, 

I’d watch him, narrowing my eyes 

To better see him, 

Watch to see him coming 

Through the cottonwoods 

By his place down on the river

The currents sparkling, 

Part of the dance

Moving, Thinking

 Opening doors

Latching a gate

Framing an ingress

(Always an egress)

Stepping up, climbing over, and 

Scrambling through  

Patches of goldenrod

Thickets of bluestem,  

Asters and woodbine, 

Watching for signals from

Sky-topped starched fields

The harvest is past.

Balance doesn’t come easy

Despite all the options. 

Rain

Just how solitary 

Must one be when 

Rain on the metal rooftop

And an image from

Across the digital divide

Come near at once 

To surprise

Raw in the Moment

Forgive me

He comes in from his

Garden,

From the pond where he 

Swims,

In the lowering summer night-light 

He really doesn’t need

Focus

Any light

Is sufficient; 

I’m not sure he knows this.

He has one good eye, but 

Even that good eye is so not good

And hasn’t been, but he takes his

Glasses off when he swims,

And 

His Italian  

Features are 

Beautiful when he 

Snaps at me

No, no, don’t take a photo

So I do anyway and I obliterate 

His scowl

Thinking that the way

My photo looks after I ignore

His worrying

Is more than likely

The way this world looks

To him, unbalanced

Unwelcome

But what he has been dealt.

Conversation

Later on, 

Neowise

Crossed the sky

I saw it, elevenish, 

Not really watching, 

I’d only meant to think 

About it, how perhaps 

It flew away 

From chaos.

In the bedroom 

I pulled my chair

To look

Northwest, the way I do

And in the familiar sky

There it was, perfect,

What I didn’t know and

Wanted to see for myself

Just there, 

Then gone

Doesn’t even matter 

If there is a point

I found the comet, 

In the northwest sky

Under the tail of the Dipper, 

Something led me here in my life

To darkness, no canopy 

To shade infinite question

It just may be that

I’m moving to what is: 

Each glimpse a whole 

Earlier, some sky 

Announcing difference, perhaps

Meaning 

More beautiful than 

Nights before, 

I found a notion to just

Take pictures of the conversation in

My head, looking into the opening of

Nights on end. 

Who walks then, in to 

Stars, behind logic 

Constraints that won’t stand 

Any test of time,

I watch a sky, I 

Watch the stars, 

Not alone

July 23