Listen to the tipping-down
of branches, after rain, after rain.
Listen to the world-wash,
to the yes of blossom, to the anxious
out-stretching, to the notes
born from a dream.

Listen to the inside silences
and speak them to the sky.
Listen to the stone wish to
be softened, to the earth wish
to be held.

Listen to the bluebird’s warble,
to the looming hum of bees.
Listen to dawn light deepening,
to the flutter of soft-sheathed wings.

Listen as the stream remembers clarity,
Listen to the strange complexity of beauty.
Hear the one design of motion as it sings.

Despair, immeasurable
as shadows perceived
in fading daylight.
Colors of an unseen
rainbow beckoning,
hope just out of reach.

Prayers beyond words –
a bright reflection imagined.
Questions hanging like ghosts
in the atmosphere.

Time without substance,
a moment of breath,
suspence awaiting repetition,
help or comfort.

Speculations about angels’ wings,
darks tunnels, light rivers of love,
and the memory of a story we once believed.
Life, like a stunned bird, held between
invisible hands.

Gone, last year, you’re gone,
as a guilty lover steals away,
No use zipping up the bright
horizon as the day begins again –
your replacement will still barge in.

You’ve grown old, weary, your face
craggy as a mountain, your beard
a wisp of cloud. Time to chase
your end around the world,
your destination everywhere.

Run, old year, to time’s
bartered space, where
the chaos of bewildered atoms
cannot follow. You, who were
only a shadow, a shape of brief
episodes, departed moments,
forgoten yesterdays, a bridge
swept away by momentum’s
transformation.

I’ve heard the muezzin’s call at dawn,
Church bells at noon, the gentle twang
Of singing bowls in temples,
The hushed chanting of mantras,
Meditation’s heavy silence.
I’ve heard the waves slapping the beach
Again and again, gull’s protesting.
I’ve heard the earth’s tectonic rumble,
Thunder’s base grumble, thick rain
Falling like window blinds, the wind’s
Subtle ghost whipping through helpless leaves.
I’ve heard magpie’s jabber and crows’ ***** discourse,
The dove’s soft evening prayer.  I’ve heard locusts’
Rhythmic rubbing of skinny stick legs, lizards
Scuttle in dusky corners, unseen things flap
Their wings in the dark. Even the soundless wings
Of butterflies, they say, can change the world.
I’ve heard mountain streams giggling, lazy rivers
Yawning, bubbles of love floating on wet kisses.
There’s no rivalry, no conflict, no violence here
Because all sounds have harmony in common.

SPRING AGAIN

Season of crowded joys,
fragrant and blessed with
an excess of light.
Mind floats and dances
amidst voices of the breeze.
The messenger of the east
strikes with the spell of youth,
singing with the bird of morning.

Branches of trees sigh
with festivals of flowers.
The perfume of the lilacs
greets the breath. The day
is a dancing girl decked
in garlands. Notes of
the flute float on the spring
air.

Let the season’s ecstacy
blaze up like divine laughter
and burst upon the day.

Almost like a conversation,
trees come into leaf.
Last year gone, time to move on.
Time to tumble soft flower explosions
into imperatives driven by the wind
that approximates a song.
Let light fall in thick drops,
entering through perfumed windows
and silken doors, fragrant with love.
Let there be a daily siesta of green
solitudes, a sigh light as a feather,
stillness reovered. Let this season’s
world become a dream, a ceaseless
burgeoning of seraphic joy,
an elevation of oneness .

The butterflies have flown out of sleep,
young as love’s beginning,
soon to turn to tomorrow,
an utterance of praise,
a mirage of swift emotion,
an olive branch shading a verse
of poetry.

Love walks on two silken feet,
lightly on memories, select
in its crystal days.

Let love be unknown
like a night of lilac
where the full moon
fills the sky’s emptiness.

Love forgives the heart
more than one mistake.
In lovers’ bodies,
heaven and earth embrace,
then take them higher
and at last descends
into a marvelous mystery.

They may have grown in a wood
or a garden, wholly in bloom.
They now rise from the vase
in a sovereign floating of joy :
crysanthemums in bud, narcissus,
full-blown peonies and tulips,
fulfilling themselves, they ripple
and throb with passion. They speak
to each other.

One bloom has fallen, an arabesque
of salmon pink. The empty shells
and one small insect add a spiritual
dimension, mortality’s immediency,
a yearning for the unattainble.
Those delicate blossoms hang
against the blue sky, nostalgic
for eternity.

STORM


Morning and the world recreated
from the ashes of the night.
Listen to the earth speak
with the arguments of energy.
What will the day hold ?

A sky of unforgiving frowns,
the upheaval of change –
thunder wanders among
the hills, trees broken
by the wind. Threads of
lightening fall over the rocks
in flash floods of light.

Dark buds of dreams open
like fleeing ghosts, their eyes
dazed with catastrophe.
I walk in shock with loss
of balance, trudging
the long road through
the madness.

A storm is a whirlwind
of sensation in the on-
going humdrum of
nature’s design.

Then suddenly the sun
rises like a spot of blood.
The sky begins to bloom
again, painted with islands
of pink clouds, each a wish
heard and granted.

Frailer than dreams, love came,
soft as a song, shy as a glance,
but perfectly alive, into
the unkempt meadow of
my heart.

How to measure love…
a trillion nano-seconds
untranslated, flowers that
guess and miss, stars that
don’t exsit and what excuse
for not except « of course »
and « maybe »

For the syntax of love
is feeling, when chemistry
approves and life’s more
that a paragraph and death
a mere paraenthesis.

There’s this crazy house but
Where? No one really knows.
And it’s full of poems, not a line of prose.
And even though the sky’s the roof
all the doors are closed.
She keeps the whole place clean
and neat so anyone can see
that what she’s really after is Possibility.

For this is the Dickinson rag, yea, yea,
this is the Dickinson rag.

There was that carriage, sweet and slow -
Sunday driver – stop and go.
He picked her up along the way -
It seems it was the end of day,
and they drove to some strange mound -
damp and musty, underground.
Was her gossamer gown a bit transparent?
Cause the guy’s intentions weren’t apparent.
I guess she really liked the ******
Cause she wrote him poems in great number.

For this is the Dickinson rag, yea, yea,
This is the Dickinson rag.

Her characters are really weird -
Those roses “out of town?”
Wish I’d gone along with them –
but I got no scarlet gown.
Yea, Emily, your verses rock,
but I know I’m not alone
In not quite understanding
what means “zero to the bone”.

And that’s the Dickinson rag, yea yea,
that’s the Dickinson rag.

A master of brief absence
floats on the drops of night
that leak from the moon,
writing tomorrow on
yesterday’s sheets.

The night traveler speaks
to the absence of sound,
an echo of gentle vagueness,
a longing for what’s far away
on the slopes of dream.

The sleeper moves from
one planet to another,
creating who he’ll
become tomorrow.

He travels to the ends
of earth, softly as a cloud

A master of brief absence
floats on the drops of night
that leak from the moon,
writing tomorrow on
yesterday’s sheets.

The night traveler speaks
to the absence of sound,
an echo of gentle vagueness,
a longing for what’s far away
on the slopes of dream.

The sleeper moves from
one planet to another,
creating who he’ll
become tomorrow.

He travels to the ends
of earth, softly as stars
guide dreamers. Colors
of the night fill the heart
beyond darkness until
it resonates with the return
to wakefulness., before
dawn arises , becoming
a new day.

Flashes of yesterday’s garden,
deep green under a gray sky--
I step into the canvas, moving
slowly, regretful and watchful,
with the weight of past light.

So many colored years,
some bright, some somber,
and you, the voice that ripened
youth, the accented syllables
opening the hours between
cliffs and sky, your presnce
re-appearing in soft explosions
of living, so painful to let go.

I pray for change, impermanence,
for last year’s dust to settle to
acceptance, to turn over the pages
of the past and to forgive everything.

THE POND

The sky is a mirror of dizzy hew,
the pond stunned into wakefulness
as the lips of dawn caress the glassy surface
and sun sparks glitter on the water –
an evasive universe of light
eflecting the instant of now.

The silhouetted heron,
sharp, spare and simple,
marks the pond’s hazy edge
and silver fish, tiny sparks
of energy, burst with mild
explosion on the water.

Gray mist lifts, leaving
liquid beautiful and still,
air rarefied as if expecting
a sacred presence.

Day brings the light of time
and earthly energy--
texture, color and shape.
A yellow-billed blackbird
whistles sweet disturbances
across the water.

With evening’s dying light
the sun is in rosy flight
soon to be replaced by
the palid moon’s reflection--
the haunting face of one
we passed along the way.

Moving an enormous past,
so many years of things,
each once having had
it own significance,
now become a burden.

That lacquered box
of coasters, gift from
a dear friend,
that hand-crafted elephant
from a long-forgotten holiday.
Books are the worst, still speaking
in loud voices of hours of pleasure
spent together.

Life cut into small pieces,
boxed, stored, given away.
Heartbreak is what remains
in the tiny space allotted.

Abundance now resonates
with regret, yet it’s all about
letting go. Time transformed
to some wonderful winged creature,
recognizing no difference
between before and after.

Listen for the syntax of time,
invisible hands winding
the striking clock, awakening
the sleeper as each hour
reveals its cove of secrets.

Daytime rolls in like
an avalanche, illuminating
the by-roads of consciousness.

Listen for the scent of present,
the sound of non-occurrence,
the sixty small silences of
each minute.

Time blusters through the hours
like the wind through naked branches,
yet the present may happen at any
moment, the chilling loneliness
of your absent self replaced by
a sense of now and the sweet
epiphany of peace.

TIME

Time is a mere idea turning
in mysterious circles
in deep and nameless
fields of mind.

Seconds, minutes, hours
floating on the dark edges
of life, fragile and unprouvable
once faded into memory.

And what of the present moment,
that spiritual cliché, rapid,fleeting,
yet when discovered, becoming
a celebration.

And what of eternity,
a possibility held within
imagination, a state of mind
floating upward on the soft
wings of hope.

But mostly time drifts on
like a dark angel, unnoticed
until it is too late.

Childhood address remembered
all these years. Used now as
a password, a code, a credit card number:

the place itself a mist
of memories, light palpable
in the smoked filled air

Lawn springing downhill,
steeply impossible to mow,
steps winding up to a green door
as if in a dream.

garage below where is used to hide
among small dark thoughts
hanging from their webs
barely discerned in the dust
of time.

That’s where it all began
the endless internal battle,
the wasps’ nest of emotions,
the constant buzzing of the mind’s
heavy present that always
“seems to fail this bubble of a heart.”

The tulip, your flower, has changed its form,
its upright stem no longer crowned with
perfect instances of hue.

Like fallen petals, randomness now
flutters in my heart, the sweet scent
of bloom still floating on the edges
of belief.

My memories of breath’s brief signature
break away and leave me in a world
of lost directions, each flower shaded
with the ghost of its inhabitant.

Each flower is a kind of heart
that can’t let go.  Other losses
translate into nuances of dream,
but you are still a shadow in the
moonlight, showing what’s no
longer there.

We had been gentle as two
humming birds, beak to tail,
fluttering on lightness….

Until the green flames
left your eyes forever.

Until something invisible,
persisting aloft,  kept
your hands moving, as if
trying to make contact….

Until April stopped shouting
emerald, whispering pigeon-
gray instead.

Until you,who loved music,
left your plush guitar case
open, empty, indigo velvet
turned to the dun of stone.

Until my heart turned puddle-brown
and I cried tadpole tears into a black
pool barely needled by the moon.

Light flung down –
and something nameless
arrests the gaze –
the silhouetted hip,
an exercise in curves.
Woman or goddess ?
At her toilette,
no riches present –
god of love in chiaro scuro
holds a mirror where
imagination plays.
Her back turned, face blurred,
reclining Venus, illusive,
mysterious , tempting the eye
to desire, the mind to wander.

Whether…

death’s dark moons of tidal sadness

or
ferocious heaves and sighs of birth

Whether…

yellow warmth of day’s last kiss

or
dappled shadowed semi- tones of earth

Whether…

storm’s thunder in heaven’s raging brain

or
the cautious rhythm of a summer rain

Whether…

a night of passions’ lucious moans

or
morning’s taste of sweetened honey tones

Whether…

a dream’s dissembling reflexion

or  
a second’s truth of camera inflexion

No momentay frame of flesh,
No precarious green shoot,
No wink of precious inspiration
Without those secret wavelengths
of vibration.

VOICES

To hear ancient music in the pines
or the bright moon speaking on
a cold, wild night.
Voices flow with song and speed,
loud as a busy highway, soft
as transparent air.

Vine leaves speak in whispers,
palm fronds shout their struggles
with the wind.I eavesdrop on
the gossip of the waves as
the blue hush of dawn fills
the morning sky and gulls
recite their own mournful hymns.

So many voices translate
mintues into hours, hours
into days. So many messages
passed on in time’s quiet
mystery, and the language
of heart whispers its own
gentle secrets.

Silence: the whispered voice of grace,
its careful slowness and this planet,
in time’s enormous hurry passed charm,
left behind in a dream, spring field’s
openness, now crowded with the goings-on
of business, each body,
each speechless phenomenon crying
to be heard above of roar of the collective:
chatter
twitter
buzz
shriek
thunder…

Headlines blaring their soundless alarms,
unlanguageable media: the execution of privacy,
and the Oneself, ignored yet fascinating
in its own becoming.

Watch it grow, mute, change, strive
for its own fragile path, each journey unique,
each arrival a new beginning.

The year is old and ready
for re-birth. Spirit moves
on dawn-gray wing.
Wind is shaken in and out
of darkness.

Thoughts brim up from clouds,
rising among shadows, casting
starry beams on cold pastures
of the mind. Frozen grasses
tremble under the breath’s flow
like fingers reaching for the heights
of air enclosed in silent gloves
of prayer.

Across the distance and through
time, sacred song echoes at
the forest’s edge, a precocious
sign of what’s becoming.

WORDS

Words – Pandora’s box of emotion,
sounds shaken loose, music
summoning the listener, the magic
of a voice freed.

Words, soft or violent, escape--
loved, hated invented or real,
power of unmuzzled thought
with tensions that threaten
to undo.

Shouts or whispers, secrets
or prayers, rising to a sky
of rosy quartz, kissed by
a passing breeze or slapped
by a storm.

Feeling the rhythm of mood,
surfing on a sea unchained,
communing with the universe.
A soul’s burst of light illuminating
instants of life’s mysteries and
the mist filling the space between
them.

Pale shadows of early spring –
a sense of unfolding into fragile hours,
not ours to keep.
White winter days of danger past
and still, that on-going uncertainty.
A word in every drop of crystal breath,
Caught and held a nano-second
and hope running back to a beginning
never found.
A glossy serpent bites its tail
in an endless game repeating itself.
This circle, this oval orb
Empty yet containing all.

Endless she blows
Through tough rhizomes of marram grass,
Moving sand, making dunes,
Bringing storm clouds or sun,
She’s mistress of the skies.

Sometimes a temperamental adolescent,
She rattles windows, slams doors.
Sometimes an agile animal, she spins
Invisible nose over tail.
In her world she speaks her own language,
Rolling sounds, inventing strange songs.

No one really knows her
Yet she’s a stranger to no household,
Lifting awnings, skirts and parasols,
Rippling pools and swelling sails.

The Greeks called her Zephyrus
But surely she’s a woman –
Capricious, compassionate, creative,
Cleansing, sometimes invasive,
She’s the artist of dawn and dusk,
In her sweetest mood, soft of touch,
Gentle of spirit, mysterious forever.