lifting random hushes of grey green,
gentle pushes and unknown time
of salt sprinkled quiet and solitary
mist,

rising;
lifted;

speckled sand; flecked dunes
clumps grass blades,
their yellow curled tips

watching;

a small girl;
single tiny impressions
on level reaches home.

and the waves watching,
urchins but children of the sea,
learn their moods and reasons
searching in her eyes.

Expectation stands in Middlecreek’s waters, it toddles
In curious little hands, in Marylanders only up for the day,
And the snow geese hang like freed shapes of the sky;

This lake comes alive with fluttering wings,
The people around me keep their eyes close to the ground
While a new and weightless thing who walks in fickle grace
Stands in awe from every eye transfixed and terrified
Even the infant child, reborn like of us
Under what little sun 100,000 geese would allow
Through flight, into a world of charcoal.

Something happened in every eye. I don’t know what gods
Revealed themselves to us, or if we walked joy from scorn
But none of us felt human or pain only the swirl of the birds
Dancing inside one another like fire, like passion,
And all the words anyone tried to say were wrong.

Could I say my name anymore and still be right?
Could I call myself so separate when every heart there
Stuck to a single note, and every mouth struck dumb?
Could I speak beauty any longer, or had the geese
Renewed the tongue a fictive beast?
We never were what we thought we were
All but angels afraid of floating there.

Icy tangs are all the early morning, budding its flower
The young mother born into the sonata of her own being
That seems so foreign to thick sheltered blood,
My adult notch in this Exquisite Rotation.

Humid skies are as spy glasses to the truth
So says the colossus with our sun for an eye;
She steps out of the illusion beautifully blue
Robed in silks of celestial gold;
The skin hangs taught over the most beautiful
Pair of collarbones you’ve ever seen
The pass of your previous life comes in sublime waves
Of crashing aether and all the souls flee with irreclaimable mirth
Before popping in the atmosphere like spit and wishes
And everyday is the day of rest, a pondering
Of avant-gardens where a savior once walked.
He and his church left the path of the geese
For, he hears not, the pass of prayer on their lips.
But, I do not blame them: their mouths are full
With the sky’s drawstrings, reinvigorated from their disuse,
They’ve no time for the good word.
My family of geese fly for the astral bodies’ abode above
Where the casual speak of poets, philosophers can be hears
Talking about their *** lives, talking about themselves
No longer galvanized by their own recreations.

And as I go to place this thing in the place of pain
Warm rushes in the shifting life-force, the green of
Exuberant joy hits our hydrophobic throats
And we exhale, watching it roll back as the geese fly overhead
With no mind or reason why.

Red was the colour of her hair,
The colour of blood in a bed,
The pastels of lovers burnished
By an indifferent, waning sun.
The mark of my own undoing,
The fey burning in my veins.

Blue is the colour of mirage,
The marriage of the naked oceans
And of the non cloths of the skies,
Blue is the blast of bold dream,
Of the future and of the past
The innocence in her eyes.

White was the colour of her
Soul, her skin, the brash divinity
Within, without, removed, set
And vibrating like swirls, flash,
Particles, parsed, dark matters
In superpositions of quantum flux.

I wonder what spins around that star
That one up there, the one up far
Part of the glories of the universe,
Another golden purse, beautifully diverse,
Does its gravity warmly embrace
An intelligent race or just empty rocks in space?
Or is it there for us to admire,
Another signal fire, the blackness perspires,
Like a woman who can’t have kids,
But showers loving fits on her friends’ misfits,
However, I hope, she is a mother,
To sons and daughters, sisters and brothers,
Where beings love and live and lie,
Things cry and fly and hope never dies,
I hope they gaze at night at our own mother,
And their hearts flutter, and wonder, like we wonder

Unshaven, old, and nearly spent,
He slouched in his kitchen chair,
Lungs rattling each wheezing breath,
Radiation doing little then,
To control the mass within, or
To prevent the Mass he knew
Would soon begin.

Hard to believe a man
So tough as Rubin always was
Sat stubble-faced and wan
In that early morning sun.

Two years ago,
At 65,
He and his son
Put a ****** on,
Fought a cop,
Nearly won,
Stayed a week in jail,
Paid a $7000.00 fine,
Then bragged it all
Was worth the time
And memories.

I saw him jump,
At 66,
From a moving van,
Six feet up
Like a younger man,
Hell bent to take his fill,
Shovel hard, cursing still,
Cigarette hanging loose
Even with a rattling cough
(He shrugged it off),

And stop.
Always 67,
His last remains crave no nicotine,
No *****, wayward fights,
No carousing old man libertine
Out with his son at night,
And we who watched Old Rubin's days,
Paid our respects and went our ways.

I want to be the stream of light in your life
That awakens laughter
And starves uncertainty.
That steals you from disaster
And gives you courage
To travel to the ends of the earth
For the sake of discovery.
I want to be the place
Where you hide your secrets
And pour out your defeats.
Where regret is swallowed up in ecstasy
Ever-present,
Translucent and pure.
Where deity does not run,
But holds us:
Holds us together.
Together we rise.