My Math Madness

The days are long 

The years fly by 

Days and nights merge 

Into the endless question,

The so-what of it all

Meaning, just what is it we 

See, what do we think 

We see? 

I am not one 

Of those morbid, despairing types, 

Half the time, when I gaze around,

I understand

What I am seeing,

Or I think I do

Even though half the time 

What my brain says I’m seeing

Makes no sense to me, 

And the other 

Half the time I don’t have a clue, 

But no matter

When the algebra of this madness

Unwinds into my consciousness, 

I just think to myself that I want to

Go for a coffee with someone I love

Beyond expressing. 

Wading in the Shallows

 

I thought to come to a blank page

Because swirls and clouds are 

Crowding in my head and heart.

I had a notion to excavate 

The granularity.

Well, here I am,

I’ve no idea what all that agitation

Was about, except a flash of insight: 

Beauty’s no mood or recognition,

No, true as breath 

In every second

In every glance or affect 

Pinwheels snowing, 

Scent of patchouli, mesquite, 

Memory drifting off 

Into a saving for another time, 

The softness of this isolation—

This is beauty, everywhere

Still

…I see the trouble coming

The train is on an old track

Arriving when it’s neither 

Night nor day, the trestle trembling

And no whistle blowing to 

Haunt the strangeness

Of the interstitials, and 

Even if I wanted to,

There’s not one thing that I could do

But let it arrive.

Perhaps this solitary 

Is something to be reckoned with,

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, 

Examined closely for some implicit lack

Or message 

I think,

Depending on the view,

I have a choice: I can 

Wrap myself in the beauty of 

This emptiness or move,

As well, into 

The sweeping shallows

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.