Thanks for another day
Others curse their luck, stale breath
Eventually our enemy becomes our brother

Cancer checkup, another swinging **** who fears his death
To not necessarily sacrifice each and every day for another day
I’m going to go to my grave unsung like almost everyone

Numerous number systems beyond the real
Look one way, from another come the heart’s missed beats
One way out of the mind’s limitations is through another mind’s
      contemplations

Another autumn, another election, so aimless and sublime
The white egret ate fish after fish, one then another then another...
You get a limited number of long walks, so take your time

One gives up body and soul but that’s not what I came to talk about
Slug the world and the world slugs back
It was amusing in my youth that God’s finger could move me to another
      square

Another duality, a day in the woods, jet passing overhead
I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps
The slow death of one sometimes makes the sudden ****** of another

To survive only as many more years as there are petals on a randomly
      picked (ox-eye) daisy
Another winter passing its calling card in at the window
One day follows another until the last day and on that day there will be
      weather

Everything is normal
so not much to sing or say.
No summer thunderstorm,
the snow was magical only for an hour.

Old men
aren’t removing women’s ******* with removable dentures.
A belly laugh now and then,
an empty belly’s holy.

With simple joy
mortals may forget to fear their deaths.
Simply put,
we do not survive. But what an adventure!

I heard an archangel cry
Don’t hurt the trees!
Also, save democracy.
Also, stop barking, believing in that higher power.

What’s Ken doing today?
Watching TED talk lectures,
planning next Spring’s garden.
It’s Death, not the Jewish king, in your rose garden.

As climates change
species escape predators
and predators chase down prey.
Choose sacrifice or blame.

I look at faces
and they look at mine, mute, animated spirits,
black wet rocks,
victims among flames.

I embrace my anonymity,
lost in my own city,
in the shade of a gazebo,
a mosquito’s acceptance of its position among a million mosquitoes.

The dead woman’s cat in the furrows of the garden
does not let herself be picked up
although hungry and thin after five days
with the dead woman and a night in the rain.
It has gone to join the other feral cats
among the junk behind the house. To be outrageously
******. On my way to work I try to entice it
with false friendship, guilt that the dead woman is dead.

On my way home I buy a can of cat food
but can’t find the cat. I let her go
to her fate. Later that night I try again
but there’s a tom waiting in her place.

Maybe I could have saved her if I’d known
her husband overdosed last week. Just maybe,
no more.
I ask the neighbors what happened to the kid.
The kid lives with her grandparents, they just used her for welfare.

I used to say
Somebody dies every day, it’s normal.
Walking through a residential part of town
I frightened a cat into the street
where it was hit by a car.
The car drove on and the cat jumped
high in the air over and over to escape the pain.
I caught it and held it at the side of the road until it died
and left it in high grass behind a house, sorry I couldn’t do more for it.
A young boy on a bicycle stood nearby the whole time
then rode silently away.

Back from the desert and loving it
both the visit and the return.
The powerful plane deiced in Chicago.
Brittlebush, difficulty distinguishing acacia from ironwood.
Mesquite, and plenty of paloverde.
A good jazz band in Phoenix, their own style, no apology.

Could you also love your cancer? The vicious attack of a hedgehog
      cactus?
The winter storm that kept us on the tarmac three hours
followed us home. Used to be
when weather made the headlines, that was good news.
No more. Those melting icecaps and incoming meteors.
Some pray, some stay still, some keep playing.

Anyway, notwithstanding inexorably expanding or otherwise rapidly
      contracting universes
I saw cercocarpus, phainopepla, tomentilla, saguaro, and a great
      guitarist. Prayers were answered.

The day after my Aunt Ro died
a doe approached within a few feet
as if confused about where she was
and what she should be doing.
I could neither comfort nor advise her.
I let her be not considering until later maybe
I had witnessed the transmigration of a soul.
But in the end I applied Ockham’s razor—

you rarely see what you believe.
A mile further along my morning stroll
I was greeted cheerfully by a flock
of cedar waxwings I always consider it a blessing
to encounter. Such social, amiable beings
I hope Aunt Ro will join, so sure are they of who they are—

Spring morning,
quiet. One coyote,
three deer
running in snow.

What else have I seen?
A sparrow hawk in mid-air ******
a robin, a sharp-shinned hawk catch
a rabbit in its talons.

A deaf mute in a pear tree.
Not one wolverine
in Utah or Italy.
Nor a famous samurai.

A young black bear
traverses the lawn in August.
Also quarks. Also oaks.
Do not disturb its progress!

A red fox
alert, no limp
flows silently
across the meadow.

First light, green tea.
A person thinking
epochs and eons.
A platoon of chickadees.

I have a special interest in telling about my colonoscopy.
The doc cheerful, secure in his specialty, colon cancer being
the second leading cause of cancer death after lung tumors.
They can snip the precancerous polyps right out of you during the test.
At first the doc gave me the statistics but having paid 25 bucks for this
      interview
I decided to make him explain the science. He was most comfortable
describing the physical architecture of adenomatous v. hyperplastic
      polyps
but what about cell structure I said. He was vague about genes and
      hormones,
I could have been chatting with an Electrolux salesman.
I wasn’t worried although my *** was burning.
Everybody dies, everybody, even Whitman and Emerson, so I browse
      models for dying—
mine are middlebrow, saddlebow—John Wayne in The Shootist, Paul
      Newman in Hombre—or hagiography
Plath her head stuck in an oven, Hemingway who ate his shotgun.
Anyway I was upbeat flirting with the nurse, a muse who has seen it all
      before,
acting tough, which isn’t actually an act
you do your prep and say your prayers.
I thought I’d be in and out **** as you probably already know
the prep for this procedure is worthy of Gandhi. A day of fasting,
clear fluids only, and constant voiding.
You arrive at the hospital one spiritual chicken.
I reflected it can’t hurt, lose a little weight, remember who you are
without so much **** and flesh between you and the natural world.
Snipping polyps is like taking electrons to a lower quantum energy level,
      nearer the nucleus, with fasting and ****** abstinence.
The art of total presence and abstinence, dependence on the Other for
      future existence.