waking into sleep, take your waking slow

You wake up a sphere
of clear crystal and the bed
is in you. The blinds shoot

curved through your belly
and light glints where
there are no eyes.

You roll out of bed
and surprising legs lift
you, hands touch

your belly, shoulders
open, tangled hair
catches still

air, and the invisible
eyeball itches,
now two.

You scratch their edges,
rub with clumsy fists. Blink.
Shuffle to the toilet, the mirror.

And the flesh’s uncertain
and certain longings begin
knotting the endless net

of thoughts by which you
organize your day into
that which you

want and don’t want
to fall through you. This
is the morning’s way.

with thanks to Roethke, Emerson and Tenzin Wangyal

2010

and this poem is finally a leaf

My poems have been a gas
powered lawn mower
with a duct taped wheel,
an electric weed eater flinging

pebbles into spiral galaxies
and blistered palms around brooms
on sidewalks littered by trees
pruned by hail.

My poems have been wordless
rich stench of gasoline and ripped
green, the ping of stones
against chain link, the weeds

whose roots I’m too tired
to pull, too careful
to poison, so the roots
stay, the green flies.

Buddhist sages say thought
is the root of speech, speech
the stem of actions, actions
the leaves. And I wonder

if my garden means me.

To the Word

Thank you for the way you shape
my lips and train my tongue to flatten,
bend and reach for teeth.  How did sound
come to mean, to be, you? What strange technology
of intelligent flesh led hands to break
you down to curls and lines, now wires and waves
for which we pay? All to say: look here, listen.
Some say you were here before us all,

in the beginning, that you were God.
Perhaps it’s true and our bodies are nothing
but the curled script of you. Write, revise
yourself into being. Vibrate, move matter
in your scratching invisible ink, nothing
more than song. And song: you without spaces.
You: fluid undefined, but meaning, more or less.

I ask you, friend, what does the word of my living mean?
The ways my quarks scream and dance, our hand
cannot keep up, hand of song and sound, listening,
every pore an ear, an eye in every hand, trying to see,
to hear light or make it, stealing space between the quantum
waves of me, though me is not the word I seek.

Is there a space sound does not fill, where you do not spin?
If there is, we could not live in this inhospitable place.
Let us not think of it, or speak its name, so it will go away.
Though I is a lie, and I am yours to write or erase, I pray:
Great Utterable Word, here is my hand. Tell me what to say.

college campus trees

trees white
and green flash clouds
their leafy teeth. a line
of younger trees are each
tethered to white tipped farm posts,
sentinels of fragile limb and wind.
may they live until the day
my children climb them,
toes dug into bitten bark, birds
scattering at our imminence,
limbs trembling.  we’ll look
down at the grass, so well
manicured, dead on each
hacked end, wishing
it were trees, more able
to dance, tickle, whisper.
listen, it would say, you
must not live cut off
on top, faceless in a field.
there are other things to be.
reach out your arms, climb
the trees, see beyond me
then sing to me, weeping,
kissing your feet.

How to Herd Moths

Turn off the ceiling light.
Hold your small bedside lamp
overhead like Lady Liberty.
Lovingly lure them from blinds,
corners, ceiling and walls,
open the window, reach outside,
shake them loose into cool night.

A few may refuse.

Think.  An hour before sleep,
turn off all upstairs lights
except above the bathroom sink.
Leave the door open a crack, a lean beacon.
Wait.  Peek in to see the velvet clicking
herd, mad with their love of light,
whirling dervishes of night.  Breathe.

Minutes before sleep, screech open
the screenless bathroom window, squint
against dozens of diving wings, brush your teeth,
pull the light’s string, close the door:  done.
By morning, the bathroom will be empty.
While we dream, moths free
themselves into rising sun.

Time to wake up

My dream…Something good was about to happen. I was trying to go back there.
~Samuel, age 7, in tears upon waking late for school after ignoring his mother’s calls

Sometimes, no matter that we slap ourselves to stay awake,
we fall asleep. We wake within someone else’s dream,
driving past their 7-11, their grocery carts, speeding through
their neighborhoods, getting pulled over by their police.

We go with it. Wear their brand of bra. Raise children
in their schools.  Watch their favorite movies: horror.
They tolerate ours: foreign drama. Years pass.

We try to remember the dream we were having before,
the one where something good was about to happen.

Then the dreamers who pulled us in—leave,
leave us in their dream.  We walk their streets
at night. Paint their walls. Tend their weeds.

We twist and kick to wrest ourselves awake.
Speak in a dream tongue no one else speaks.
The dream quakes. Its inhabitants turn away.
Maybe someone watching us sleep sees

our lips move, hears the sounds becoming heavy
words:  wake me. They do. We grab our children’s
hands and try to pull them through.

But the dream holds on to our feet just when
something good is about to happen,

because something good is about to happen,
is always happening, and to be awake means
something we never dreamed.

Mantras

Sit under the full moon
until you are sitting there,

and the week’s riot orchestra
is replaced by crickets,

and crescendos
and is replaced again.

Wind raises skin
and orange moon

brims to white while words
of the busy day grow quiet, replaced

by sky, glinting space.  It may be
morning before the messages

sift through  and out of you, so slow,
though speed has moved such water through

the body to burst, aching diaphragm
a fist.  Unclench, unclench,

the crickets pitch at angles.  And owl
begs its usual who? who? who?

unblinking under moon,
and Oh, mmm,  mmmm.

The chest opens its lid.
Breath joins the gentle wind.

Lidless, you are more
than you, and blissfully less.

2009

Green

Somehow my thumb is not green
Anymore, or hasn’t been
For the past four years of pulling green
From the bank and students’ minds.

My house plants died.
My garden is awry
With dried up useless weeds.

But the clover I was given
Ten years ago has survived
And survived and survived.

What spark in those blind
Tuberous roots shines?

Is it my hope?
Is it my refusal to grieve?
Is it God?

No matter how limp, shriveled,
Brown, barren, or how deep
My disappointed sigh,
All it wants, like me, is gentle
Water, living soil, light.

Up come the tender leaves
That fold up at night!
Up come the fingered cups
Reaching, nodding, sun white!

How many dozens of springs
Has it given me in ten years of life?
Why wait on the springtime sun
When the sun is my own sight?

of breasts and mushrooms

A loose jowled, broad shouldered woman in black
wanders our camp with large handled basket and
pendulous breasts swinging freely beneath peasant blouse
above thin legs. She asks in lilting accent, perhaps French,
“May I have your mushrooms?” as though they were ours
only for camping for a price on a mountain where air hums
with RV generator songs. Admiring her trespass of parceled
campground boundaries, her astute respect for American
habits of possession in a quest for fungal delicacies,
and having enough delighted in their frumpy company peeking
at my pointing children from tiny mosses and pine duff, I say,
“Yes, of course,” and notice her basket nearly full, soil clinging
to creamy sponge roots below dozens of burnt red waxen caps,
echoing her own robust form.  She squats and pulls. Wanders.
Squats and pulls some more, looks up at me, around me,
as I write. I want to walk with her, watch her cook these mysteries
over fire, taste her Rocky Mountain dreams of French cuisine.
I imagine, instead, her crossing into other camps, ambassador, visiting
my rough brothers-in-law, their blonde wives, leaning against red
trucks and silver mini vans, not far from here, through lodge pole pines,
her gentle request, their eyes upon her passing swaying breasts,
crude comments chuckled beneath beer breath,
relieved their own wives’ tits are tucked away,
firmly compressed, hiding their age, padded and wired
from wandering eyes, mushrooms unable to rise,
no nipples greeting the duff of day.

featured in Four Corners Free Press, September 2011

in a bardo house

you take down the photos
of family and red and gold
smooth paintings of nudes

because the doors
are now open to those
who have made you

want to leave
from the beginning.
now they wander

your halls, the only
place you were
ever yourself

and they become
the critics you
feared, making

pronouncements:
you are inappropriate.
you don’t belong here.

so you strip the walls
of anything that will
remind them you will

burn in hell so they will
buy your home
so you can leave

this hell
they’ve made of preparing
for heaven.