Kale greens. Beets grow fat and wine-dark.
Carrots spin sun into fibrous orange.
Someone carried soil up these stairs.

Onions open long fingers into the morning fog.
Small herbs and winter squash keep quiet company
here on the rooftop while sirens pass below.

In the afternoon one or two leave their e-mail
and ascend to this improbable place.
“Put your hands into the dirt,” a doctor advised,

and you’ll feel better.”  There is a time to plant
and a time to reap.  A time when nature, nearly
spent, needs tending in small places.

Boat-weary immigrants lay bok choy along
the sidewalk’s edge.  Geraniums bloom
in window boxes.  Here and there

insistent chilis dangle on a bush in a half-
barrel.  A rooftop is world enough for now.
You don’t need forty acres or a mule.

A few square yards, drip line, a couple
of spades and willing hands suffice.
The rest is blessing.

After years you know this:
that the course of reliable love runs
not through a slough of habit

but along a curving hillside
where even familiar landscape
offers daily surprises.

Those palms, those pine trees
outside the window, that stretch
of shoreline, this sleeping face,

so surprisingly familiar, still
catch you unawares in
a shock of recognition.

What you have done before
you do again:  you say yes.
You wake, and turn, and are thankful

to rise even from the happiest dream
into what, solid, factual, still strange,
you keep choosing.

Practice makes more deliberate
the thing you’ve done a thousand times,
each time an act of consent:

you pour the coffee
you feed the cat
you turn off the bedside lamp,

loving the simple labors
of shared life, loving
the changing light, evening and morning

and the currents of dailiness that run
deep under the whitecaps
and the waves.

We call it “a beautiful hand,”
the trace a practiced pen leaves
on its travels across the page.

Or a fine hand, whose sleight,
swift and surprising, makes
old letters new and delights

the dulled and scampering eye.
Swash and tail entice the reader
to look again, slow and consider

what it is that catches the breath
just where a spur leaves the stem,
or where the spine curves.

Men and women of letters learn
by inscription: the shape and space
of an O teases the mind

to a place just beyond reason. The S
summons us to a winding way and the T
offers a place to alight.  Alight

and watch the alphabet unfold
its thicket of veins and tendrils,
its solid declarations, its secrets.

From the cliff's edge
you can watch the earth move.

Hover over the waters
and see how the Spirit blows

and broods.  The sea
and all its creatures still crash

and tumble and return
to their deep silences.  

The sun rises and sinks
below the waves.  The curved

ocean clings to earth’s edge,
obedient, except where

something urges it upward.
The voice that calls

forth the mountains and summons
pelicans and wild geese

says to all things, Rise.  
Consent to the upward urge

that calls you out of gravity
into the welter of heat and sound

and color that will not stay,
that you do not own, but may

have for a day, and then
for a night when it falls.

First light offers its quiet
consolation to the wakeful.

In the dark you discover
day already begun.

The black branches
of the piñon tree
hold night like water.
Moonlight lingers

on rock and sand, slow
to let the earth resume
its dusty colors
after the silver hours.  

The last star gives
way, submitting
to the greater light.

Day does not break,
but touches each surface
with slow and secret
blue, the color of blessing.

Invitation

Come into the dark, and let
your pupils widen, and don’t
reach too quickly for the wall.

It isn’t there.  There is no switch,
no match, only the space
around you.  But it is yours.

Step into it and see where
your foot falls.  Find
your balance.  Accustom your eyes

to the light that remains, slow
and spreading and subtle like first light,
looking more like night than day.

The bee broaching
this flowering ****
alone in late afternoon
doesn’t know the hives
are dying.

Her work lies between
these white petals.

Still, she may have noticed
how few butterflies
color the air.