The floors have cooled in
this old wooden house. My feet
love going barefoot.
I pile fresh blankets
on the bed and look forward
to turning in soon.
With age the good life
is subtly erotic. Si-
lence expresses love.
Love unifies and
compacts, I’m told, and my dreams
show me that and more.
The light on the cove
today was the cove, coming and
going, shedding light.
I stood in the same
spot today but the light had
rinsed it through and through.
I didn’t feel the
same until the green of a
duck flashed in the cove.
From a pier on the
Pacific as a child I’d
throw my catch back. Rad-
ical suffereng —
Ravensbruck and so on and
on—I’d face later.
Buson on Winter—
crows are black, herons white— is
a cold cold poem.
”A living metaphor has the power to stun us into surprise and open our receptivity to unexpected otherness.” Desmond, G&B 123
Tumbleweeds blowing
across the dusty schoolyard.
The Fall was coming.
But the stars at night—
they too were my companions.
The seasons a blur.
In time I moved a-
way. Now I watch shining swans
gather in the Bay,
preparing to go.
They flap their huge wings, half-
rising, falling back.
I see gods in them,
ecstatic originals
of all our passing.
Why am I dancing
to the blues on the radi-
o? Tonight of all
nights? They still say the
war on terror; prosecute
the war on terror.
Words justify words.
And so I dance to the blues
tonight, dance to words
that move my artless
feet to the music. The blues
will teach us to dance.
”There is more than comimg to nothing. What then is the resurrected astonishment? Is it not the ’yes’ to being as other that always did and always will pass beyond us but that, just in its passage, intimates itself as good?” Desmond G & B 121
The end of a day
in which I finished nothing.
I take out the trash—
the least I can do.
I clean up around the bins.
The tin lids are cold.
I sneeze. Buson wrote
a great haiku when he sneezed
and knew Fall had come.
Now crickets louder,
Eros, Thanatos—Greek to
me. Jeweled, urgent.
A plump clementine
from the convenience store.
It sits on a book.
I’ll have it for tea
when the sun goes down over
the Bay, carefully
pull apart its flesh,
luminous and wet, each part
like a whole poem.
”We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.” Wittgenstein
It’s Fall. Public Works
has torn up the sidewalk I
had made into Way.
Yellow ribbons, holes,
sawhorses where daffodils
flourished all summer.
Jackhammers pounding
concrete into dust. I stum-
ble on haiku bits.
Life is tough, the Way
is not. Myopic, lame, I’m
back on the rough ground.
Deathless chatter of
poets, interrupting each
other, left open
on the desk. That time
of day, cicada chorus.
I walk through it and
down to the silence
of the Bay, the feeding swans
fewer day by day.
”We seem at home within a whole, and the whole seems our home. And yet we must ask: Is there a God beyond the whole?” God and the Between, 54.
I do a double
take, doubting my eyes. It’s blue-
gray, a tough-looking
heron wading there.
Fast forward into the dark.
Death is quite normal,
we must not resent
it. The heron’s eye sees through
me, a visitor.
