I headed out with my story tucked into my hand
But the wind in the leaves told me I didn't need it
So I left my headphones behind
And chose instead the dialogue between the panoramic hissing of tree-walls
(is a cathedral anything more than a forest-replica of stone?)
birds, bugs, humans, dogs
and my own breath, crunching of limestone under feet, heartbeat.

The path, so tranquil
yet swarmed with a crashing wave of life
The turtle making its way up to the edge of the trail
only the closest herald of millions of strugglings all around me
In sound and movement, all around me the successes
in stillness and silence the inevitable failings.

Along a north-facing tree-wall on the edge of a clearing,
a part of the forest made into a regular home by the bright blue buntings
In my short time spent getting to know this place,
they've become a welcome part of the landscape, a seasonal visitor
(more likely I'm the visitor to their home)
I wonder how they regard me,
this great, red-capped, blue-clad creature
like some bluebird-god who walks the edges of their land
with no flight, no song.

Out here I'm no trouble.
Out here my empty hand wants to be sought out, but
is happy to not be holding anyone
where they don't want to be.
Out here there's no one to disappoint.

An older man and woman,
he thin and careful of movement, tanned, balding, bespectacled, quiet of voice
she heavier, a shock of white curls crowning her head, yet bright in eye
and clear and ringing in voice
spend the time I run more than three miles
walking slowly, carefully, methodically within a circle of a dozen yards.
They move carefully, respectfully, agog
pausing at bloom, leaf, stem,
considering, sharing, smelling, relishing
finding joy in things as they are.

A simple, plain white canvas bag is slung over his shoulder
It looks old but cared for
cut like a backpack, with thin straps and a one-button flap over the top opening
only the words "Save a tree" printed on the back of it.
In that small thing is a simplicity, an innocence, a clarity
it strikes me as a landmark of an earlier part of the journey
when we knew enough.

We know too much now.
We are spoiled, cynical, ruined.
Across our digital threshold are infinite possibilities
and no humanity.
We struggled with our heavy plastic boxes, flickering displays, tape reels
We cobbled together life out of voltages and filters
And finally achieved our goal when our creation could do anything
without moving at all.
I can do anything with these tools, yet none of it feels real anymore.

There is no place for this in this world.
And so I keep going back to the cathedral
and hope I'll understand
what its voice is telling me.

Labels: Poems, Ruminations, Running

The twilight quietly gives out
And crosses the fold into dusk
The cloak of darkness opens,
and gives up the moon,
and the trail ahead lights up like a glow-worm,
phosphorescent.

Hush.
Only the muffled crunch of rocks in dirt
and the wind buffets the caves of your ears.

I am both things,
the fireplace and the wildfire,
the wine and the nectar,
the strum and the scream,
the stay and the leave,
the comfort and the cold,
the holding and the setting free.

And in being both,
I am neither.

limbo

dusk.

Labels: Poems

The pattern

Is what else Leonardo was doing on that day,
when he wasn't working on the Mona Lisa.

No one remembers now,
"What a day that was, when old Leonardo was
washing his sandals!"

We remember the days when they risked their safety for beauty,
When they risked their hearts for no guarantee of love.

For all the time I spend trying to dodge hurt
the story of my life won't be the days I avoided complication
won't be the tales I already knew the endings to

but instead

the times I stormed the barricades, unarmed
the times I let go of the railing and fell
the times I held my wounded heart in my hands and told it:

Our story is not going to be
about the one that got away.

Sometimes the hurt feels like too high a price for what I found.
But through that hurt is depth
And beyond it are joy, tears, laughter, and a new kind of trust
not based on the impossibility of failure
but instead on the movement through failure
where the restraints have been broken
and the persistence, the bond becomes a choice--
a willing, living, caring, believing phoenix of a choice
as alive and unprotected and risky as our lives really are

instead of

the pattern.

Labels: Poems

Hollow, the fuel tank
The landing gear is aching
Please, just call me down.

Labels: Poems

The heat is cut off from the cold.
It heaves, it writhes, pumping hot breath.
It wants to give, needs to, but doesn't know
if the cold wants to receive.
It only knows that it reaches out
but can't touch.
Whether hundreds of miles apart
or pressed firmly together
they can't bridge the gulf
or won't.

We're different, you and I.
You've quenched the edge of loneliness
again and again, plunged it into the cool water
to keep it from burning your hands.
You've sighed into the steam and avoided.
I've held onto the white-hot blade,
hours, days, months, years,
until it became a part of me.
Now, when I'm alone
it's part of me--it changes who I am.
You can't see it, but it scrapes against my bones
it makes no sound but I feel it all the time.

I can think as hard as I like,
I can make myself believe all the reasons why you're not.
But then one little point of light slips through that curtain
And catches my eye
Then it flares up
And bursts over me
It fills the sky and lights up any corner I might hide in
It reaches from horizon to horizon
And in that instant, there's no containing you
And all the reasons I've put together
Are contradicted

and the ache returns.

Labels: Poems

How can it have been so many years?
It doesn't seem possible
but nothing slows down in response.

When the last echoes of voices and sighs die down
and the only light is what we feebly thrust into the darkness,
dying from the moment lit,
slowly grows a roar behind me.

A rumble hidden by the hiss and hum and buzz and thrum
of daily movement, and any gaps
(keep moving! fill! cover! speak! anything!)
...

But I know what it is, it's not one sound but many
the cloud of sound from doors closing
hundreds, thousands, I've lost count, the will to count
they all blend into a roar, a ring, a shudder
each with a pain like a smack on the face
an ache like a bruise you forget until you run into it
each with a voice saying the same words differently
no, not, never, won't, can't, shouldn't,

no, thank you.

(Was my hand ever on the doorknob? It's so hard to remember... )

...

Sometimes it feels as though life is about choosing against.
Where choosing for something is an illusion,
just the absence of what's been rejected
as darkness is the absence of light.
And life's not an opening,
but one long closing.

It's hard to take a step sometimes.
I can't see backwards, but I feel the wall against my back;
with every step I take, it moves with me,
its granite skirt scraping the ground,
far too hard to ever be broken back through.
I reach my hands out to either side, palms back,
and feel its coldness.
That way is nothing.
There is no longer a that way.

Sometimes it seems like the door is so far out in front
that you'll never be on the other side of it.
Then, before you know it,
no matter how hard you try to turn your head,
you can't turn far enough,
and it's behind you.
And the memory is frozen, and your heat,
cut off, burns in you

And another clap and lock
is added to the cloud
and the door is

closed.

Labels: Poems

Your things are quiet;
Still they sing a silent song
Of many moments.

Labels: Poems

Wrapped in full-moon cloak,
Splendid mystery you are.
Give, Sweet One, and take.

Labels: Poems

I still have your key
Though you've long since moved away
What does it open?

Labels: Poems

Quiet

Soft damp bed of green
Soaking up step-sounds
Mushed dust of old mountains
Crackles gently underfoot

Deep rusted red herald
A hoary halo overlooks comers, goers
In the soaked gray air it's deepened
I give a salute of auburn curls, underby

Alone and surrounded
Echoing, chirping, rustling life abounds
Slithers, flutters, hops, buzzes, whispers
In a language too slow for me to catch

A lightness fills me
Stands me up, lifts me along
As my legs stretch around solitary bends
And a fleeting connectedness washes through

The curves create friction
The inclines spark surges
The resistance replied with a sweaty push
Hot breath and hammer-heart

Soft-tails alight
Retreating to their canopy
Human ruin a muted presence at the fringe
All come and go in the closest thing to peace.

Labels: Environment, Poems, Running

Halfway behind me.
I knew, the very first time I saw
The first of only two times
'Recognition' by another name
I knew, but how little.
Hands seething with heat
Pulled aside layers and felt for yours,
And you stole into the rescuing night
As in my thick coat I unfelt
And remarked at it.

Déjà, une décennie?
I looked past you, but you caught up
And replaced everything in my eyes
A door opening and re-opening
With no handle for me to hold.
Silver chariots and cold oceans
Summer rains under canopy of green
You looked back over your shoulder
As I gasped and learned
And I learned a lesson I'd live to repeat.

(Three)

One in six, the dissatisfraction of the beast.
Knowing again at the very first glimpse
And with clearer mind and evolved heart
I made my greatest mistake.
There are no words here.

Close to a lustre.
Fire, consuming everything within and out
Chimera, inevitable this illusion meant
Fruit of seeds entwined with each step
Weeping thorn and withered blossom.
Ceaseless gorging of endless hungering
A sweaty, frenzied remindlessness
Literally hundreds of explosions
Between us couldn't hold together
What one small drop of regret slid apart.

(Six)
(Seven)

Two seconds of the life-minute.
Barely out of sight
Yet never completely in focus
Centaur-warrior crowning Venus
Hunting and haunted.
With eyes that nearly overlapped
We saw everything but the distance
Tiny and infinite
Bridged with a touch, yawning without
You writhed, I let go.

Still on the breeze.
Heat and forgiveness
Pushing and understanding
Patience, golden moments
A near-perfect paper-performance.
Held in hands habitually tearing
Destroying and protecting
Sometimes even intentionally
Cut down on the vine
Spilled before a chance to age.

Hazily in front of me.
I strain so hard to see you
To read the ashes for some clue
To make it all make sense
To make a narrative of transience.
You give me no warmth or solace
Your ecstacy an imagined promise
Yet I keep choosing you
Looking for the period, the

Fin.

Labels: Poems

Up, up it comes, and over the rim, and I'm chasing it.
And I burst out into the dark
Wasted on nothing, giddy
I run to you, but you're not there
And I open my arms to empty air
I race out to nowhere.

I circle the scene of my folly
The bruised armor rattling alongside
I blow dust from Claire's buoyant crystal ball
And see myself trying to teleport
somewhere, anywhere,
Ahead from before, back from nowhere.

You leap to your feet and spring lightly about
I'm not sure how much of you is really there
You're an early spring day with your flax and apple cheek
And a sky blue promise rimmed in horns
Inside I rewind and laugh at the distance
From this feeling to nowhere.

And I want everything I've been saving up to want
And I want to spill this dream-drunken seed around my roots
And I see the nothingness of elsewhere, elsewhen
And I don't want to be anywhere but right where I am

It's the only place that's somewhere.

Labels: Poems

The air is swollen, the trees ache for autumn. Night comes and the heavy fruit of summer falls at last, and all is wet. The heat is let out and it rises up into oblivionfinity. In the morning the weight is gone and we've broken through the heavy curtain into the cold lightness, now the air is open between here and the end of the year. We all steam, the heat that had been trapped by a suffocating season rising from us as from forged metal being thrust into water. We crawl from the cocoon, gasping, and the chill curls down our throats and starts stealing our warmth. It will be a splendid struggle, we willingly yield and delight in our coverings to stave off the cold as the year grows darker.

Labels: Poems

Shuddering energy, hammering the floorboreds. A swirling, dry slithering like earthworms in the air. Kinetic energy passed like an invisible crowd-surfer. Eyes dart around the room hungrily, carelessly, abstractly, from energy sources to the map of faces to obscured images of lustfulness. Roping and mounting this current, a view from above the seething bed of flesh, smoke and solvents. Fourteen limbs pound and pull and stroke at unleashing the essence, a hand-hydra of striving simultanea. It pours out like a broken dam over the edge and crashes down into the ringed eyes, where it's met with warmth and coolty. Bodies gyrate as in a great invisible grasp, others observe the ritual from behind and out front of masks. Openness and closedness, penetration and deflection, acceptance and remoteness, dissolving into the stinging cloud as the djinn flee their bottles by the fistful. At the edges, around the corners out of sight, chilled eyes calculate a practiced ritual, tabulating tos and fros and the rising and lowering of masks and the rate of djinn-liberation. Unheard under the din, tiny abaci rattle, total, and spit out their verdict. Their ears like sieves, allowing the essence to flit through unconsidered. Hidden knives slit out and dissect the moment, neatly separating the components and in a blur exchanging one part for another, a chugging blue train for a shambling crazy-quilt. Outside the rumbling walls is cold gray and frozen amber, emptiness, lonely scatteredness scrabbling for warmth and oblivion. Bitterness and brazenness and brokenness hover and dissipate, draining off under the sweep of the great hand, silencing any protest, drowning and exhaling any honor, any trust, any hope.

Labels: Poems

Revolving doors thrum
a heartbeat of movement which can't be stilled, held
for an unguarded moment resists grasping.
All this useless beauty, worth more than
a thousand hours and scars of progress.
Caressing and pushing, cascading keys
flinging open doors inside and throughout
all is connectedness and distance dissolved,
an elusive deluge of sugar and warmth,
a more elusive opening, aching to be entered.
Step or half-step creates a gap
which expresses more than the presence alone can.
A yearning energy to feed itself, give itself over, consume
itself to fuel the light of unconscious smiles
and outpourings of presentness, to take
your hand and stalk like a tiger at your side
and chase the doubts that keep your fingers from
the keys
for even a moment.

Labels: Poems