The End of the Road
Where I live, winter
is known for deep snow, summer
for swans in the cove.
The End of the Road
Where I live, winter
is known for deep snow, summer
for swans in the cove.
The appearance of
the snow-white swan hereabouts—
whole lot of walking.
WORK IN PROGRESS
An ornamental
lemon tree, the patio
in dry Bakersfield—
boyhood companion-
ing cool solitude.
I’d sit out there and watch it.
Tiny white blossoms,
sour, grape-sized fruit, slow
slow invisible growth. This
taught me how to write.
“…the radical soul … its landscape and inner domain.” Geoffrey Hill
Seagull’s cry over
the Bay. My radical soul
flashes beyond me.
WORK IN PROGRESS
It takes some ego
to push yourself out the door
on a cold April
morning for a walk
and see crowding your neighbor’s
yard blazing crabap-
ple trees. Take your walk.
Other power will become
self power as you
pass exuberant
dogwood trees spreading the news:
Go slow: Nirvana.
Holy Saturday.
When Jesus arrived in Hell,
it was quite empty,
until we heard the news.
There are other narratives.
We all talked at once.
Later I watched an
egret liftoff over me.
That empty fullness.
WORK IN PROGRESS
I moseyed out to
a spot on the breakwater.
A sunny April
unseasonable
day for a look at the Bay.
But all I saw was
bareness —a raw stump
where an old twisted pine had
framed the immense blue.
The shock wore off as
I wandered away thinking:
O Maunday Thursday!
WORK IN PROGRESS
Spring strains disbelief.
Deep chaos of Holy Week.
Gold forsythia
rampant, poverty
of imagination gifted
with the heart’s sudden
willingness to fall.
We wake from dreams of old loves,
glad to start over.
WORK IN PROGRESS
“What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 226.
You’re light on my arm
today. Wind-blown clouds, sparkling
water—we meet there too.
We met late in life.
On breezy, light-filled Spring days
we’d take a walk. Rome
or Bath proposed perfection.
At home such perfect
days proposed Bath or
Rome. You’d lean on me, and now
I’m in Bath or Rome.
“Thinking is forgetting differences.” Borges
[ The crucial equivocation on ”think” was a response to the commentary in Moeller and D’Ambrosio Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (Columbia, 2017)]
I run into you
on my way to see the ducks.
“You think they’re happy,”
you say. ”Right,” I say.
“But you’re not a duck,” you say.
“As you say, I think;
if you knew how I think, you’d
see ducks are happy.”