Paragraph

My brother said to me 

I should write it all down, 

But when I was talking with him

About this stasis and my flooding mind, 

we were walking

In a grove of pecan trees

In the valley of the Rio and

I forgot to tell my brother that 

I can’t write it all down

Until I find the words in my head,

Not rustling like butterflies 

Under old cottonwoods along

The river, walking with you 

Hito, along the 

Rio Grande

Hito, I say

Some years ago you gave me advice

As always, as it’s always been, 

You tell me things I need to know 

Have you words again? 

I turn out the light, no new day coming on yet, just 

This day ending 

And for some seconds 

Everything twinkles, points of light 

I guess, leftover from taking in

Sun, clear high blue sky, heat 

Harbinger of solstice 

Still a promise only felt, 

Sparking all around in the dark that 

Quickly gathers in a room screened 

Open to the pulsing night 

Outside my bedroom window 

The sky is plush and deep, 

Like the rolling marine when the

Only light left somewhere in the North Atlantic

When we were sailing in my dreaming

Is what silver taps 

The tips of waves in moonlight 

Here, the patch of moon 

Without my spectacles on appears 

Like quartered, silvering gold hanging 

A fire in far sky

I think for a moment that 

You are under this sky too

Just some things I wanted to tell

You, Hito

No worrying sense of them,

There never has been

Tu me manques

Not Sure

 Somewhere Over the Rainbow 

Where is that?

I would like to think I might go there 

When I am no longer

Animate and breathing in this 

This

I think 

When I die

I will, I hope 

Call into 

And recall 

My leaving moment

The promise of my own

Energy left behind on

The infinitesimal calendar 

Knowing 

That is all of my own life

Left there

And still, nothing

Nothing

But a pleading blip

 

Spring

 Birds fly low to new loam

Gleaning a bit of twig and brush, 

Lifting off and airborne 

Making home

Plumbing season’s architecture 

Fluttering thru the chill

And more than any hallmarked words

Scientific paginations

Their deep knowing settles 

Into my waiting bones, 

While the 

Geometry of their evidence,

Empiric, always startling anew,

Wings icy winter’s discontent

Into the newborn ether of 

Just an ordinary day.

Tiptoe

I’ve lost myself in a wilderness

Not entirely of 

My own making though 

It does have roots in 

My sloth, laziness I guess,

My unwillingness

To push through agitations that rose up,

Rise up, burble up,

Fragments I seem unwilling to 

Lasso and beat into these barren, 

Unkempt and 

Fallow fields, these caverns

Missing 

Some chance to join the 

Rooted wilderness 

I love beyond expressing

But I’m lost to that rich, spare landscape

In these last unpresent months. 

Year. Years. I do not know. 

If I want to be kind to myself I say

That I’ve been marinating

Perhaps

Perhaps not

Perhaps wishes, lies, dreams, truths and 

Gazing across landscapes, into skies, 

Stirring ancient questions 

Are nothing more than indulgences

But I wish to find a fulcrum

I have been unable to put 

Plea and deep heart into a universe 

I no longer understand, 

If in fact I ever did, save now and then in 

Some infinitesimal starry, 

Momentary nexus that comes along 

Brushed when precious worlds 

Collapse together 

Still, my affair with words and spaces, 

Emptiness, color, change, the shapes

Of sound and love 

Float stymied and unmoored

In ordinary, endless days.

I do not know if she, I, I guess, can return; 

I’m not hoping 

For any continuity 

I am just being in some way brave

Admitting that if I cannot write 

I cannot imagine how I’ll breathe. 

In the fragile, loamy new days 

Portending spring, I try to take 

Some deeper breaths

I’ve been here in this 

Hilly hallowed hollow before.

Far away, now, I dare to feel 

The ringing bells. 

20 June

 On the eve of solstice I find

I am unable to stay inside,

My notion to prepare our dinner

At a reasonable time just floats away, and

Though my kitchen is flooded with

Late day light, 

It feels like a summons

To wander into a new season

And so I come back outside, and 

The light feels like joy

Recalibrating dinner intentions, 

Repast can wait

In recall of breathing through 

The vesper of these long twilights

On their ways to pink, peach, 

And the purple deep, I travel 

Far into vast salvation.

 

Night Feelings

Oh the sky, 

Looking out the window 

Into the dark before

Sleep, emotions admixed into 

Deepest weariness, 

And it is, in this hour

Barely into a coming new day

So light, unnerving because 

It is not the solstice yet come

That I give in to every scrap

Of unknowing, wherein lies the knowing

And I tell myself that

The roadmap is tucked away somewhere 

In the constellations of my mind

Maybe in my heart, although 

I’m not too sure about that.

I’m  so tired, and not even 

Too sure about why

But as my old boat floats out to sea

I wonder, could you ever 

Come with me? 

May 24, 1:15 AM 

Finger Lakes Spring

I sit outside on the front porch

Once in a while, on a late-lit afternoon

I come here 

To look east across a reminding sky 

Rarely telling east or west,

Such is the gift of ancient lakes

Reflecting mysteries,

Covenant of geology and sky 

That no one can ever really know, since 

No one sky here can hold the land’s light 

Of any day much less the past 

As the sky surrounds,

Pinks arrive, floating along stretches 

Of trees’ limbs and illusions, 

Rising on the fade of  

Horizon; southeast giving to

A coming dark 

Bird song, immense quiet, a 

Sudden slash of rain awakening dry land,

Watering a thirsty latency of

Scent, bursting loamy, 

Bursting fresh now into promise, 

This late spring.