Pilgrims

"I'm a wanderer with a background in theology
and a penchant for quirky facts."
—Annie Dillard

I thought a lot about what things mean,
what hidden messages come in the intricate veins
of a maple leaf or the spots on the back of a beetle.
I suffered myself to search for the complex
algorithms left by whatever passed for gods
before people who thought a lot came to be.

Then I followed you down
past the tree with the lights in it,
past the row of Lombardy poplars
that grew outside your bedroom window,
beneath the moon you reached for
(I reached for it, too.)
believing enlightenment
could be so easily grasped,
down the winding path,
through the meadows and woods to the creek
where you rolled up your eyes to see
in a way that was not seeing
and I just took my glasses off
and saw the same
as you.

(Today is Annie Dillard's birthday. If you haven't already done so, please find yourself a copy of her most excellent book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and read it so you, too, can know what it means to see in a way that is not seeing.)

Teenaged Saint

A little butch, a reputed virgin,
accustomed to the weight of steel
in her fist and across her slender shoulders,
she'd have needed voices in her head
to drown the cacophony of Abercrombies
poised like Harpies to shred
the flesh from difference
and pluck vision from the skulls
of the unusual.

A maid not made
for an ordinary life,
she listened to the voices in her head
(the ones prescription medications
with a litany of unpleasant side-effects
would quiet),
and made herself a saint.

Nota Bene

the shimmering whispers
of winds dancing among tall trees

the crisp edge
of a page turned for the first time,

the fugitive sparkle
in your lover's eyes just before he smiles,

the creamy caress
of fresh Egyptian cotton

the nutty whiff
of distant shores in your morning cup

the buoyant music
in the laughter of friends

for now
is what we have.

This Longing

"Take this longing from my tongue..."
— Leonard Cohen

No cup of coffee does
when sweet tea, blond with cream,
brews in the brain
as the cure
for the hollow,
the drop through the floor,
the feeling like someone pulled
the plugs and squeezed
to rush the soul right out of you
like stale air escaping, sending bubbles
to the surface like a letter
written in a language
the reciever cannot read.

Weeping Icons

It started when Hitler's war
machine used Basques
for targets, bombing the Spanish town.

The media responded
with first-hand accounts
of carnage unimaginable
and images, stark jumbles
of black (for blood)
and white (for flesh).

The uninspired madman,
successfully fat and bored
found fire in the tortured shapes:
a woman, a bull, a twisted horse,
an all-seeing electric eye,

WIth something like that
to remind us
we should remember.

Maybe that's why icons weep.

Cynical Picnic

Deep in a drowsy, sullen afternoon,
when promised sunlight teased
behind clouds as thick and gray
as a Soviet politician's eyebrows,
we decided on cynics
as the better guests
to a picnic than Romantics,
because they will see the ants
in their mind's eyes and
understand what may happen.

Those others can't imagine
ants or rain or scorching sun
or any other item out of place
in a simple idyll.

In the end, it's better
to have bug spray, umbrellas, and sunscreen
than unhappy companions
on a picnic.

E-nigmas

The random text arrives:
"chemise similitude oligarchic meadow
suggestible bile wherewith clubroom frizzle."

The poet trapped
in some vile computer bug,
a victim, I'm certain,
of nefarious mathemeticians,
sends me hidden messages, accidental
odes to unforseen
circumstances and unwelcome
enticements, abstract pastiches,
beautiful, beguiling
in their incongruity

Days of Glory

"Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."
—Wm. Shakespeare, King John (III, iv.)

This day's as good as any, I suppose,
to ponder loss and wonder what is left
when water comes only from a fire hose,
and he who thirsts is still as much bereft
as one who wanders in the desert sand
beneath the sun's most relentless gazes,
confounded by the emptiness of hand
after grasping for the sweet oasis.
What willow will not break if bent too low
by buckets, torrents of tenacious rain
and slide into the slurry, just let go,
dissolve to sticks with minimum of pain?

For us who are made of flexible stuff,
sometimes too much is worse than not enough.

Poetic Justice

"Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave..."
— William Wordsworth

The news is in.

It isn't good.

Science declares with steely
confidence, the kind of calm
that comes with knowing
the Bible in your pocket
would stop the bullet,
that poets
(surprise)
die young.

Of all the sad ironies
ever scratched on paper
in lead or ink or even blood,
this shines supreme:
perched on the headstone
like Poe's cackling bird,
the last ignominy,
a fat cliche.

The Secret of Flight

In darker times,
when science was magic
and the devil, not God, dwelled
in the details,
any woman ripe
for burning knew what to pick
from the hillside greens
to make herself
transcendent:
moonkshood, henbane, deadly
nightshade, mandrake, hemlock,
nothing safe or pretty
as the garden rose,
she picked and dried and ground
into oil and spread it thin
across her skin
and spread herself
across the sky, floating
like an angel
toward the moon.

Super Hero

Watching the Steller's Jay
that swoops and splashes
in the backyard birdbath,
his head a set of darkly pointed
angles perched above a body iridescent
and improbably blue,
I dream a hero, stranger
than a bat, whose raucous cry
sends villains scattering
like finches through the dappled
thicket and raises an alarm
to wake even a napping
cat.

Giornata

Like a Florentine painter,
brown from the Tuscan sun,
I work in the wet, fingers
racing pigment into plaster,
capturing character in color
and line, catching gestures
subtle as shadows at noon
in quickening marble ash.

This day's work
is finally
done.

Forced Confession

Before I knew the simple truth,
that nothing had to hide
beneath the words
like a fleeting blush
on an anxious cheek,
behind the spaces,
like soft, gray mice
gnawing patiently at the wall
between the breaths
like glimmering minnows
darting through still, dark water
I tried too hard
to make the poem
work, not knowing
that the harder it looks
the farther it gets
from me.

Lost in Books

Days of sunlight pass
in dappled moments stolen
by ink on a page.

Compass

for my brother, John

We have gone,
by and large, not where we have been pointed,
but rather where we have been drawn,
like metal scraps to magnets
or mad eccentrics, bent on finding proof
of the round Earth, eternal youth, lost cities
made of magic and gold.

We have come
to these places, settled among the natives,
and made ourselve invisibly
at home, but never more
than when we laugh
like coyotes howling
at the memory of a moon
so full, so blue, so close
it pulled the tides
so high they washed
away our tears.

The Last Minute

Like so many before,
so many times before,
you've waited
until the camel's back
is aching and time
shaves close enough
to make the final nick.

Relax.

The waiting's over.

In the Details

From earlier on
than I can rightly remember,
I've squinted hard and gazed
with the intensity
of a cat on the prowl
for some obscure morsel
into the crevices, under the rocks
where truth sometimes bides
its time while we become ready.

I've stared into the places
where anger roots in secret soil
and the sudden glare of sunlight scatters
a thousand crawling things,
invertebrate ideas scurrying for cover,
for safety in the darkest part
of seeing less
than they know is there.

Look closer.

Put your nose in the dirt
and smell the pungent honesty
of earth, the sacred simplicity
of the worm that's been under
your feet all along.

Garden Shopping

Wandering through aisles
lush and fragrant,
no plan in mind, my hand
plucked pansies, apricot
and burgundy like upholstery
in an Edwardian parlor,
two columbines, true Lily of the Valley,
a bleeding heart,
impatiens and coleus,
small now, but full of leafy promise,
lavendar and rosemary,
ingredients, I recognized
only as I tucked
the boxes into the car,
of my mother's garden.

Gravity's Darling

You'd think I lost a bet
with God or nature
or whoever runs this show
the way I manage
to place myself
between objects
and the spinning core
of Earth they hurtle toward.

It's like I have some strange tattoo,
a birthmark invisible to human eyes,
but bright, fluorescent, strobing
like a neon invitation
to Newton's bodies,
obeying the only laws
they know.

Or maybe it's just
that I'm shorter
than my own ambitions
and the people who stock
the shelves.

Books About Russians

It's not good to read books
about Russians
on a sunny day, when dogwoods
and magnolias flaunt
pink blossoms, so profuse
that petals fall in carpets
on the tender grass
and still the trees look lit
from within, improbable,
fragrant, pastel fires
impervious to irony.

Eventual Spring

That day you dreamed
when January's hollow heart
pounded all around you,
hoplessness mingled with cruel,
capricious flurries and a bite
of darkness long before cocktails
could be gracefully excused,
arrived today wrapped in gleaming
yellow light and soft wind,
warm as shallow breaths
on cotton pillows.

In Tulips

Today, beneath a plane
of sheer, unbroken blue,
while Baker's snowy shoulders shimmered
pink and gold in the distance, I caught
a glimpse of her
among the sun-drenched cups
of fairy porcelain
quivering in the breeze,
her cheeks as pale and soft as petals,
that wry smile and arched brow,
emerald eyes glistening
with a thousand hours
of laughter, dancing
with her sisters:
the flapper, the philosopher,
and the long-suffering saint.

Just then a giggling child,
his round face like an ochre moon,
set with eyes of glittering obsidian,
stumbled into me and gasped
surprised, I think, by my cool
touch on his chubby arm.
He turned and ran, clumsy as a puppy,
to grasp his mother's dangling hand.

I looked again into the endless
stripes of color, but they were gone.

Only tulips danced like swaying gypsies
on the wind.

Simpatico

Safe, far away from the oily cause
of your current torment,
I squirm,
remembering the aftermath
of a long-gone expedition
into the wild hillside thicket,
a quest for berries black
as the coal that veins the ground
but sweeter than sin
and the price
for those stolen nibbles,
the swollen lip and fingers,
tortured twice by the itch
and the agony of not scratching.

A Day Without

Strange how deprivation,
like a lexical chameleon
takes its meaning from the background,
from the situation.

Yesterday, some hiccup
on a server farm
brought down my access,
turning my machines
to lead.

Deprived of contact
with a world still spinning,
I stood still in a beam
of sunlight until shadows
crossed my face,
I read a book,
cooked supper (grateful the kitchen machines
are off the grid),
and scribbled notes for poems
on a yellow tablet, amazed
by the spidery tracings
of my own hand.

The machines are back today.

The news is no better than the day before.

Except, of course, the words of kindness
I got from you.

Going to Extremes

Not quite a dime
into the old new century,
Peary raced, shivering,
toward the pole,
a spot of somewhere
in the middle of nowhere,
a frozen mass of white, gray, blue
and little else to help a man
discover where he might be,
save conviction
that his calculations
were correct.

Ten years ago, another explorer,
sequestered in a wasteland
of the heart,
checked his compass
and found his only direction
was out.

Today they're both remembered
for going far
and stopping short,
for missing the last triumphant
miles of the journey.

Missed

Because, for a moment,
I stepped away, attended
to the world unattended
by technology, I missed
your call.

Because, for a while,
I tuned my ear
to hear the ocean's secret
frequency, I missed
your call.

I discovered too late
to call you more than half
a continent away,
so you get this poem
and the call I'll make
in a little while
to let you know how much
you are missed.

Water Music

Uninspired, I drive west,
toward water, a patch
of sand and gray-blue churn
that whispers with the wind
to chill my bones and fill my ears
with every promise, kept or broken,
ever spoken
in my company.

Fat Pants

Yesterday I bought new pants,
two sizes smaller than the ones
I've laundered, folded, and stuffed
into a bag for the Methodists.

The woman who wore those pants
was me, perhaps a little more
of me, but also less like me
and more like a mutant camel,
packed by anxiety
for a mapless sojourn
into lands from which no camel
had returned,
fattened by worry
for a desert crossing,
dry monotony over endless,
undulating dunes.

Now that my caravan
has come to rest
along this sunlit shore,
I can close the bag
and drop it in the bin
with hopes for some other camel
on the other side
of these sands.

Old Bones

They say some fish
about 365 million years ago
stretched his fins
into arms so he could lift
his head in a piscatorial
push-up, perhaps
a primordial attempt
too see beyond the surface
of his slimy creekbed.

They found the evidence,
the fossil of his fishy limb,
embedded in some rock
along a Pennsylvania
highway.

I can't imagine many folks
got too excited
when they heard the news.

Most just shrugged,
shoulders aching from a day
of labor or holding themselves erect
on a backless barstool,
and wondered what it might be like
to be a fish.

By the Horns

Is there a better way, I wonder,
grappling as I do with antique, agrarian clichés,
to take a bull?
They seem the obvious choice for reasons
of convenience, ergonomics, and optimism.
And it's better by far to face the thing
that frightens or threatens you
head on — snorting, struggling,
studying you with eyes full of blood —
than to meet your fate
at the other end
of the bull.