Let it Be

Homeostasis comes fleet and 

Comforts for long seconds 

In these solstice nights

Now passed, when

Light and words arrived

In the bark of

Trees, some ancient script, 

In patterns across land flicker-lit by

Late fireflies now come in these 

Last nights, and a

Summer skipping through spring and

Back, just too cold sometimes, or 

Hotter than hells’ bellows

In another life

I trod a highland pasture,

Not sure if I would cultivate it or not

It was the work that wore me down,

I tried to find some 

Balance in the heather and the gorse, 

On tavern floors, heels

Clicking, tapping, schessing,

Sounds lifting me to dancing 

And back to a cottage, still and spare, 

Gleaming whitewashed, perched on 

A cliff side tor

Under a highland moon, while 

Wind-sharp current from the 

North Atlantic carried longing,

Unknown, to never dissipate

I would rather have what 

Could have been

Than what was,

The now is what is, 

A bypassing storm

Leaving beautiful

Grays, lit by wind and motion, 

Whippoorwill call, and 

Other birds;

Bullfrogs tuning into night, and 

Close I hear them, hummingbirds,

Magic, all this motion.

The wind picks up again,

One storm floats away, 

Called across another constellation of

Patterns flying to the here then gone.

It’s like that, I think, 

Storms, light, wind, the 

Zephyr from an ocean shore, the 

Clean wash of stout breeze bringing 

Calm after those 

Cells that moved across

Plains’ skies

Flashed purple, lit by

Silver strikes, now flowing into

Years and decades on, 

And I, in primal memory

Recall how to read the signs, these

Things, alive and singular,

Coming from past, another life, 

Coming across oceans, 

Rolling from the prairie,

All the while when I was

Dancing in the mountains.

My Prairie Thinking

Trying to pick thru the thickets

I find I don’t do it well

It’s paralyzing, in the same 

Moments as all possibilities

Are alive,

Those with promise, those with

Sorrow,

Those that confirm

The is and shall be,

Still,

I don’t know how to navigate

Them. 

It is a fortune, though,

That I can go outside, literally

And pick through 

The thickets,

And perhaps

Right now, since there’s been 

Too much rain, and 

I bent a mower blade

But have the new one

And do not like to not

Do what I’m supposed to be doing

For lack of 

A blade, as Robert says,

“A boy job,”

I’m off-balance. 

It’s an unnecessary hiatus, just when 

I’m nearly fully

Into always-healing

Spring, the one that just 

Sprinted through, right on 

Into summer, 

Hence with ferns wild,

Peonies in riot blooming south 

Around to north,

Apple trees and climbers 

Setting buds and blooming, 

Ankle high grass and weeds

Needing my mowing

And me needing my zen.

I have other outside things to do

Though, and so I do,

And feel the heat when

I stretch to hang a basket, 

Damp and full of blooming things 

Planted heavy in the fiber liners, 

Or go out to clip 

Branches that get in my way 

When I am mowing, 

But I don’t think I can

Lift the canopy with the

Big trees now myself,

Although I did three years ago.

My heart pounds too much

And the humidity rolls through me 

With its certainty,

Flows down my face 

And drenches me,

Small mighty river

As I tell myself to get things done.

The canopy needs to be taken up,

No question, just a wee 

Lifting, not too much, because 

There is refuge there,

Deep shade, green filtered sunlight through 

Old oaks, linden, maples, and 

Beyond back to my gardens, 

And the flowerings out there,

Ornamental pear, weeping cherry

And the smokebush. 

Along the new outside

Worlds around here 

These last few years, there’s 

Bramble, 

Wild honeysuckle

Rambling rose

All kinds of things growing 

In the near-two decades

We’ve been composting 

Into our small frontier, stewarding 

As best we can a future in this place 

For someone, 

But I digress, my point was

A trim will do.

I spin like a disappearing world

When I’m doing these sorts of 

Things, or even trying. 

The looking up is sending me into

This vertigo, and sometimes if 

I wait until it stops before I 

Tell myself that it’s all right to wonder

If I’ll be able to keep my bearings,

I see that I am quite steady looking 

Forward, where my vast has always been,

Salvation’s opening spaces. 

Outposts in the Madness

Sketchy, walking this line 

Along the bow of disbelief

And the ballast of

Certainty and balance,
An insisting narrative

Seen from the rim of the abyss.

Whatever point is there

To any life, if one cannot

Trip along the high wire now

And then, reimagine an

Unexpected glory and 

Puzzle about it all

Right up through on the way to 

Salvation, and all the time

Thankful for 

This gift, life, 

Golden on the horizon.

Grace comes in

Draughts of light, memory, 

Joy, the carrying currents,

The maybe physics 

Of how things go along.

Motion slows, lets
Language in, words that 

Just seem right, 

Stream of seamless

Synesthesia, this world is,
As it was and is,

And I think into the 

Feeling that has nestled on

My shoulders,

Almost all is well, 

I trust that 

All is well, that 

We will get there. 

New Light

We take love where we find it
She said to me,
And decades on I understand
That it’s whole and
Doesn’t go away,
Love
Doesn’t go away.
It changes
Stretches, gives, releases
Tensile, everlasting.

How do we find, on our
Hard roads picking through
Brambling thickets,
That salve of endlessness?
I think it finds us,
Love does, a buoy,
A ballast into any storm,
Into any unbelieving.

What we think we can know in one
Lifetime is folly; one
Lifetime just a construct
In the spangle of question,
Mystery, and why.

As the dust of it all
Glances off my clay
I feel the eons brushing by,
Silver and infinitesimal.
There are no truths as we go to stars
Save one:
We are where
Love takes us, which is
Where we find the truth.

Written Fourteen Years Ago

My Mother

Every day I pass the spot
Where the picture of her hangs.
Frozen in the frame,
Her smile is bright and does not change.

Her skin untroubled, smooth and young,
No gray is in her hair,
And over time I see her less,
Forgetting she’s not here.

Sometimes I turn, pick up the phone
When I'm preoccupied;
I need to get in touch with her,
Perhaps for some advice.

Forgetting for a moment then
That she’s been dead five years,
My sense of time is scrambled,
My place in it unclear.

But didn’t I just talk with her?
Wasn’t that just yesterday?
I don’t know where the moments go
But sense them slide away.

I hadn’t had the feeling that
Her death had left me grieving
For after all, I saw her face
Each morning, every evening.

But visiting my son I saw
With old, remembered pain,
A different picture of her there,
And felt her death again.

And for a second, just a flash,
I wondered at that face,
The picture carried in my head
Was suddenly replaced

With yet another smile, a gaze,
I heard her speak to me,
No longer frozen in one age,
But fluid memory.

~ PHL
1920 - 1999

Sometimes

Only the harmonies survive

Keen, together, and as complete

As the chord joined, resolving into 

Breath as one.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qm-NGwTRMlw

Moving through Trouble

Nothing makes this easier

Season balks at its rebirth

Everywhere the vapors,

Discontent and worry,

And I’m thinking the

Best way to deal with all

Of this is to take it

One day at a time

And in the carousal of 

This particular spring,

Her barely-greenings dressed in 

White pinwheels or soft

Large-dropped gentle

Rain, or whatever they 

Are as long as there’s

No hard frost, 

Are blessings,

Are dreams’ remnants, 

And they are promises, and 

They are whole  

In their own times.