Alexander Technique

Walked past, by your place today,
in the neighborhood, you know, scouting poetry
at a bum academic show of a score of miserable poets' ego.
I looked up at your gently glowing windows
in whose light you work and share your art, expecting nothing.
At the outdoor market once, expecting street domestic garb, I couldn't find you;
but then, your beauty wrapped in glamorous dress and elegant style
shone out, not of vanity, but care.
One evening in that light I witnessed artistic being amongst
those who share your practice who shared
their talent, music, movement, and delighted in your voice.
We kissed to a soft romance several evenings there,
chatted, shared, explored --
even learned to float a perfect soft-boiled egg on water --
respectful admiring and parting, each to dream alone.
One evening, I saw you wave good night
from that perfect windowlight, and blew you a kiss,
not desiring or expecting it would be my last.

Bumble Bees (working)

In the garden ground is a nest of bumble bees
who go about their business with no intention of interruption.
who gather pollen, let a little go with each visit to a new interest;
Who in their beauty share the possibilities bountiful in their nature.
The garden needs a chore, a human chore to move your habitation
Out of the human breast to a less intrusive spot more amenable
To our common needs -- thinking less in common than in needs.
Oh, I wished you to be gone, placing our intentions' common purpose
Beyond our selfish needs. Yet tomorrow you were there and forever,
Beyond my existence, beyond my possibilities, beyond my narrow kind.
And so, forgiveness want, I waited till the sun could no longer witness
my ingratitude, my selfish ignorance. I burned your habitat and beauty,
your selfless existence, your sharing and my admiration and shame,
all one dissolving in the smoke of gasoline and match.

World News Tonight (2002)

The day darkened blue grey and poured down
rain on the world earlier today.
Grass grew under the wet heat
and the cool sweet rush of air before
the lightning shook the trees in thunder.
More rain is expected tomorrow and tomorrow.

Last week's storm exploded the bark off
a respected, two-hundred-year-old walnut
and blew the ground up off its roots.
Though reported critical, it seemed to have survived —
counting its decades more patiently than most —
but during the week it weeped off young leaf clusters
in a slow, uncontrollable rhythm, barely perceptible.

The grosbeaks come to join the singers and peckers,
the bullies, the meek, and other proud birds at the feeder.
A single thrush ate and trilled, delighting onlookers
while the old man who grooms her left clumps of Bessie’s
black hair on the low garden wall near the house.

People in the house are studying for final exams,
the Prom at the Plaza, and the deepening, anxious sadness
of parents’ imprudent end-games.

The May flies are gone, but hundreds of damned mosquitos
emerged from standing water, roamed the heavy air last night
and sucked life out of unwitting hosts. Dozens have been killed
in continuing hand to hand violence
while others are simply chased down and disappeared
by roaming gangs of bats and swallows.

Locusts bloomed and dropped their supple yellow flowers
in two short days a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday
their primordial green leaf fronds sifted leisurely
shadows from the light of the late afternoon.

Bessie had a bloody, near-death spell of
diarrhea and vomiting last evening
and woke her alpha at 3:06 am after a guilt-ridden dream
of fighting in shallow excrement on a despairing, humid day.
She hunched and stumbled about outside,
poured out the remainder of her bowels and wretched
a neat pile of curds in the darkness. She’s still a dog.

On a personal note, I ran my hand under the blown off bark shroud
still hanging fresh on the walnut and was stunned to experience
the electric thrill of its smooth, damp cambium. I admit
I took pleasure in the tips of broken capillaries
looking like freckles on its exposed supple flesh
in the quiet morning light.

By this afternoon it had turned wet black.

Am I David?

Surrounded by quiet circumstance and days-long isolation --
the vacationing Poets' gift --
I walk naked freely, alone, atop the mossy rocks,
among the massive trees and off-spring,
along the steeply nestled creek to dip in the pool
above an old log dam wedged between the banks.

Along the dog-worn trail passing a fire circle and a labyrinth of rock,
back to the exquisitely purposeful yet seeming random-built and scattered house,
embedded safe and secure in the mountain over years,
I pass berries, leaves, flowers, plantings and fruits of the endless garden,
enter through the spacious, airy, well-appointed
vacationing dogs' apartment (some would say, "enclosed bare-wood porch").

Back inevitably to the Poets' den of intellectivity:
rare and rarefied, addictive library corners, enchanting shelves of collections,
Camus, Rodin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Michelangelo, Dylan,
fireplace, piano, guitar, commentary, candles and plants.

Still naked, and but for my paradisiacal isolation's looming Goliath --
the voice who threatens me with return to the human world from this nest in paradise --
I watch, asking my reflection in every mirror and glass for courage and a sling,
"Are you David?"

for Mary and Heller

Where am I?

Where am I?
Like, yeah, no, like becoming some first times.
You know.
You know the inadequacy, our shared experience,
where you, like, know what you want, yeah, no,
and I know, too.
You, a mystery, infusing me with nuclear fuel,
like Iran, illegal according to some,
but so powerful to us locals, so legal, so impossible to deny.

River of Love

A river of love flows
out of my heart
non-stop. And another out of yours.

Our torrential flood
flows into the frail human desert
surrounding us,
willing to sustain life in abundance and
the thirst for keeps.

Yet here is sand,
And elusive aboriginal arts aside,
I see no silk and spice in caravan,
no oasis, beyond the slippery banks
of this lonely violent flood.

February 9, 1999

Seventh Wave

Stunned, not swept off my feet,
my feeling, inadequate,
somehow absorbs the love that comes
to break, warm, around and then within me.
It is not a constant, burning heat,
not lapping sweet nor massive crest tsunami.
But like the rhythm of the seventh wave,
almost inevitable, it breaks and, more than expectation,
more than passing, overwhelms.

1/1/2014