It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.

A Constant Temptation

It is a constant temptation,
to get in the boat that brought you
and row again, not home
but to the river, to the sea,
to take this vessel, small as it is
and take it to places it was not created for,
foreign places with baroque towers
and ancient marbles, strange trees
and words you can not understand,
but left there long enough, will.

The thing is, the lesson is, I survived.
Never mind the rust or the abandonment
or the sabotage or the self sabotage,
or the wandering in the wilderness,
bars and hitchhiking in the night,
the wrong turns and the right turns unrecognized,
or the helpers and healers, the jacklegs,
quacks, shamen and priests.
Never mind the things that came undone,
and the constant rearranging of fate
or God’s insistence in letting me stew
in my own juices. Never mind
the arrows or thorns or innocent bystanders
content to watch me bleed, those who
see me as entertainment or suspect.
Never mind the constant need for maintenance,
the broken parts, the ones I could fix
and the ones I could not,
the depression, the fear, the fight,
the checkered past, a perfect target
for any who care to shoot.
Never mind all of it. The parts that recovered
and the parts that never will.
The blood shed! So much of it.
So many tears. So much lostness,
darkness and fire. The wars. The surety
that you were never made for the world you live in,
the anger
I felt, uncomfortable with it every time it rises, and
the anger
aimed at me, a thing more comfortable to you,
more familiar,
but no less weaponized,
Never mind all of it.

I survived.
I found love. I gave love.
Some things I did, mattered.
At times, there is joy.

Don’t tell me there is no God.
I know better.
I survived.

It is a strange thing, brass, half compass, half sextant.
No one in the antique shop knows exactly what it is.
A fascination, surely an instrument of navigation,
it belongs on the deck of wooden ships,
not here in the byways of a small town in a small state.

It has made its own journey, certainly.
Was it stolen, lost, moved?
Did it come here of its own intention,
or is it the debris of a life come undone?
Your mind is full of questions
and there is no one to answer.

You sigh. Its polished brass curves sing to you
and it is a sad song, a mournful song of lostness,
of too much time spent floundering in a sea
far more kind than you deserved, for you survived
as you were cast from wave to wave,
from foreign land to foreign land, and in the end

it was grace that brought you here, not navigation.
Time and currents and wind, conspired to bring you home
when you could not find the way yourself.

Sun cuts through the slats of the fences,
light and shadow on the sand.

The ocean is calm today.
Soft waves wash against the shore.

A serenade. A lullaby.
A hymn of thanksgiving.

It is enough to sit here. To feel the sun.
Time disappears. You disappear in the landscape.

You have come to understand what you are
and a few of the whys. It is enough.

You are content to know less, feel more.
Know less, experience more

without the luggage of a life lived spottily, strangely,
too often lacking answers.

In the distance, gulls cry out.
In the distance, clouds nudge the horizon.

Wind ruffles your hair. You smell the salt.
And you wonder at how long it took you

to lose yourself. To find yourself.
To understand the meaning of enough.

In the markets of Venice, snails writhe,
not merely fresh but alive, clambering
one over the others as if they know
their garlic and oil-infused future.

Fish lay on the tables, tails whipping,
eyes open and aware. Shrimp, legs dancing
a jitterbug in wooden bins in the morning light.
It is all a bit disturbing and fascinating

to someone like you accustomed
to shrink-wrapped perfection, every thing you eat
packaged and perfect, safely dead and cleaned,
no momentary discomfort in the actual act of dying.

Ah, but the taste that night! as you sip your white wine
and dine on scallops freshly pried from their shells,
the snails sauteed. As if the rawness itself
drew created a whole new perfection.

This is what you have learned in your years
of allowing strangers into your life. Broken strangers.
The dying. The inconsolable. They are less pretty,
none destined to be a perfect Instagram vision.

They die. They struggle.
They flail like snails in the market, determined to live
when the world around them prefers shrink-wrapped perfection.
They are uncomfortable to be around

and yet, strangely beautiful, Real. Raw.
The few who survive are always scarred.
And yet, you feel a strange allure, somehow made more
in their brief flicker of survival.

Outside the rail car is untouched.
Seventy years old and it appears ready
for the next journey
as it languishes in this graveyard
of steel and aluminum.

Inside it is different.
Graffiti and abuse.
Seats ripped from the floor
and piled one on the other.
An old mattress lays at one end.

This is what happens
to travelers like yourself,
left too long in a single place.

When you dated the woman you love, you would drive
two and a half hours for coffee and conversation.
Folks thought you were mad. Perhaps so,
but it is a madness that has plagued you all your life,
this hunger to go, the place never mattering
as much as the journey

Not made of steel and aluminum,
the stillness has left you rotting from inside.
It is worse and more deadly than rust.

It is time to leave this place. To go
before your weaknesses and demons write graffiti,
break the windows and crawl out
of the darkest recesses of your mind.

It is time,
to travel east, towards the sun,
towards the sea, the destination a second thought,
the flight towards light the first.

Poetry fails you.
A season of too much sameness
has left you flat, a creature more of habit
than enthusiasm, pushing through,
spitting your words out helter-skelter,
lacking grace and light,
You have little to say. Waiting for inspiration.
You need roads, strange walls and windows,
new light, the roar and rustle of waves,
museums and mansions
and strange hotel rooms in new cities.

You have spent the year plunging your own depths
and there is little new there to discover.
You are thinner than you believed. Simpler.
Your needs for survival more than met,
you need new food. You need to get lost for a while
and find your way back, always looking for fire escapes,
not to flee, but to enter through windows like a thief,
somewhere, anywhere, new.

It has been so long. So fast.
Images blur the windows in the early morning.
A glimpse, a flicker to grab your interest
and then it is gone. Towns. Factories.
Stairs to….. you know not where.
It is already gone. The whole ride a tease.

You were made for slower travel,
to see things in depth,
never trusting the flicker of them,
with the ability to stop and see the details,
the grain of the wood and the nails and pegs
that hold things together, or the rot
teetering on the edge of coming undone.

You wonder how much you missed in faster times,
what you lost in the journey, in the blur
of airplanes and hotels and what city is this today.
A lot. You are sure of it.

But you do not fret. You have become poor
at self recrimination. It is a fruitless task
full of weight and chains. Somewhere between
the self loathing and the blur of travel
is the life you lead now, journeys made
at a speed that allows you to see the landscape
and seasons change before your eyes.

It is that in-between place,
between dusk and dark,
dark and dawn,
when the streetlamps are suddenly uncertain,
on the edge of change.

You have slept so long,
that waking in this moment,
you too, are uncertain
which way the light is traveling.

The Back Roads

Somehow, you always take the back roads.
Narrow. Twisty. The long way around.
Supposedly slow.

And yet, not. That habit you have
of driving too fast for the road
gets you there fast as the highways,

dangerous and exhilarating
both.

About this poem

A bit of history. A bit of now. Some of it has to do with roads.

The picture I used on my blog (www.quarryhouse.us) with this was taken just down the road from my home in West Pawlet, VT.

Tom

It is something out of a Wyeth painting,
the old life saving station at the end of the world,
a museum now, as if no one needed saving any longer.

Maybe they do not, at least not here.
Most who come here are tourists.
They walk the shoreline,
content to go no more than ankle deep,
content with the illusion of the sea
and being there, at the edges.

There are fewer fishermen in deep waters,
those who know the ocean intimately.
Today they have instruments that predate the old station;
instruments that warn them of coming weather,
and bring them in to shore before the worst of it.

And so the old station has become a museum,
a place to remember simpler, more dangerous times,
with oilskins hanging on the walls
and rubber boots on the floors below them.
Photos of rescues past line the wall
for tourists to “oooh” and “ahhhh” over
as if no one needed rescuing today,
a beautiful lie, history. ignored at our own peril.

You stumble on the picture, one of the cats,
the one who started feral,
skinny and covered with sores, crying out
from across two yards, hiding in the brush
and underneath the carcasses of old cars,
until slowly, oh so slowly he came closer
to your outstretched hand. Days. Weeks.
A month. More. But he came.

And here he is, fat and fluffy,
owning his house and yards to both sides,
thoroughly domesticated, hardly remembering
his time of sores, bleeding and hunger,
sure of his place in a world that loves him
unconditionally.

You stumble on the picture,
and think less of the cat than your own life,
and the woman who reminded you that love is
what you believed it could be
later in life than you imagined possible.
If you were a cat, you’d purr.

Mostly, I preach to my self. Talk to myself.
I write what I need to to hear. Self talk,
out loud. So often painting colors
like emotions, spilling out,
water from a dam overrun by storms I cannot name
in the normal scheme of things.

I sit with them, the storms,
longer than more sensible people.
I get wet. Disheveled.
The wind blows me like a scarecrow in July.
I sit with them. Madman in the rain.
But how else do I know if it is a storm
or a shower?

The colors are a bit garish.
No two quite the same.
Not refined. Strong. Loud.
A bit of madness thrown in.
All the makings of a masterpiece.

The snow is soft in the morning light,
soft in the morning fog.
A line of trees cuts the fields in front of you.
Steam rises off the creek.

You have built a still life,
simple. Peaceful, still moving,
like creek waters under the ice.
Unseen and relentless,

a strange combination
that has become natural to you,
comfortably invisible,
happy in the January light,

happy to wait for the change in seasons,
walking, seeing the signs,
the willows turning yellow, almost green,
new growth in the wood briars, sharp and red,

color in unexpected places.

Unexpected unless you have lived
through many winters,
growing stronger and wiser in each one,
learning finally that time is not king,

Effort,
vision,
love and persistence rule
the secret life of winter.

Many of the tools you wield were your father’s,
and his father’s before him.
Old steel and wood with the patina of age and sweat.
When you palm any of them,
more than work passes through your hands.
Lives lived. Generations of repair, knowledge
passed down with callouses and sweat,
the kind of wisdom that knows no age or era,
slow work, a recognition of the soul of things,
that those same things were not made for impermanence,
nor were the lives that made them.

You own nothing.
The houses and things that surround you,
the people who live in your circumference
are your companions and friends,
Never yours to own. You do your work.
Choose your colors, use your old tools
to help them through their time with you,
and then, they are gone. Someone else’s.
Or someone else. Never you. Never yours.

Your contentment is in the restoration. In the repair.
Without expectation, always surprised.
Doing the best you are able with what you know
and these old tools you carry.
They have served you well.

But it is a new time and there is a temptation to believe
you need new tools.
The temptation is strong. It is powerful, that belief
that time has made the old ones obsolete.
From time to time you have succumbed,
but always you have been proved wrong.
The old tools work just fine. They are slower, true,
and more work is needed, a bit more understanding
of the wood you work, the iron you forge, true,
but these tools were themselves crafted
to create, repair and restore things that last.
There is nothing temporary in them,
and your faithfulness in their use has a strange power,
hand hewn eternity, full of history, and promise both.

The first time I visited, I walked the streets at night,
past closed stores and brightly lit restaurants
with their specials proudly displayed in the street.
The smell of onions, meat and seafood grilling
wafted into the street. Temptation.

I could hear the bay, soft waves and wind.
In one dark corner, a bar, the Grotto.
Faintly, I heard music, raucus Southern rock,
out of place at this end of the world New England spot.
I smiled at the dichotomy. Temptation.

There was a time, long ago,
when bars were my second home,
much as diners and dives are today.
I would sit in the corner, and listen,
and watch people through the smoke.
I don’t think I ever picked up a woman in a bar.
I never got quite drunk. but I loved the atmosphere,
loose and sad and unrestrained, for better or worse,
an alcohol fueled honesty.
As I walked by, someone opens the door to leave
and you can smell the smoke. Temptation.

I made my way through the town. And back again,
giving each temptation a second chance to lure me in.
And why not? Why not surrender?
There is nothing in any of these doorways
that would reduce me to sinner status.
Well, maybe a little gluttony, but momentary, no more.
My soul would survive that.

But I am not here for these things. I am here for peace,
and I turn away from the noise and walk towards the pier.
Most of the fishing boats are gone, at work during the night.
The ones left bob on the waves.
Work lights flood the decks. Ropes are deftly coiled.
I breath in the air, A mix of salt
and the remnants of yesterday’s catch.
In one of the smaller boats an old man mends nets.
He nods. I nod back.

It has been a good trip. Tomorrow I drive home.
There is the one last temptation. To stay.
But I will pass by this one as well.
Living at the end of the world has its charm
but those I love and those that love me
live five hours away. My life is not my own
and I would not want it to be.
As beautiful a temptation solitude can be,
in the end, isolation is the enemy.

You have learned this the hard way,
and dense as you are, you rarely make the same mistake twice,
no matter the temptation.

It snowed again last night, just enough
to cover the ground, not enough
to slow life in any way. You drove right through it,

past the fields and barns, past the forests
with limbs lined with white. Feathers falling.

It is more than a post card. These are working farms.
Cows are being fed and milked.
Steam rises from piles of manure.
Goats too, are milked, Cheese is being made.
Early mornings and late nights. The work continues
no matter the weather.

Here, life is defined by seasons. By weather.
Sun and rain and snow and drought have meaning
beyond the soft contours of the ground,
beyond colors or the lack of colors.

You did not know it, but you needed that reminder,
that return to your summer roots, summers spent
on your grandfather’s farm, feeding pigs
and hoeing peanuts with black men who sang hymns.
My grandfather and I sang along.

In the heat of the day, we would all disperse.
He and I would go to the mill pond deep in the woods
and fish. He used bait. I did not.
It was the being there that mattered.

I spent my lifetime working in cities,
It was a good life and it was part of what has formed me.
but distance and time have a cost. Things get lost.
I had no idea what coming here, to Nowhere, Vermont,
would do to restore my connection to the dirt
that birthed us all.

Slow down.
Press forward.
Throw out a few things.
Stand outside in the storms.
Slow down
Be more aware. Of everything.
Look upward more. Look beyond.
Tell fear
to *******.
Throw away a few more things.

Remember
the value of real things,
the cost of false things.
Pet the cats.
Hold your wife
more.
Let the lost things stay lost.
Find new things.
Dance more.
Listen to more music.

Understand
you are enough.

It is raining. A January rain come early
on the cusp of a new year. Cold,
but not cold enough for snow.
Everything is mud.

It has not been the year you wished for.
So much ground to a stop, to a broken crawl.
A year dedicated to survival and fighting
of new fears. A lost year.

Children have grown up without you seeing them.
Friends have died, alone. The church lies empty.
There have been no journeys,
too few explorations.

Too much of your time this year has been spent in mourning
and you are tired. Plague, Cancer
and the worst cancer of all, isolation,
have left your mind muddled, and yet….

And yet… it has not been a wasted year.
Around you, you have seen a shift. an appreciation
of true value, of each other, of the precious things that matter
and the things that do not.

You have remained in love.
Your faith has grown stronger as your body has grown weaker.
Your demons are more polite. At times, the battles
turn to afternoon tea and crumpets.

“This too shall pass” has become our mantra,
and it is beginning. You can just see it, the light, the hope.
It is a vague thing. Vague as mud. But it is there,
snippets and shots and whispers.

It is as if we have been asleep, in a bad dream,
and we wake to the same dream, foggy and cold.
Vague. Uncertain.
The ground is slippery.

But it is the cusp of the new year.
The days grow longer. There is change in the air,
sweet as lilac in the night. A thing you cannot see
but you know is there.

And you, tired and worn, are piling the wood.
It is time for a bonfire. For warmth.
To become a beacon, calling the lost home,
including yourself.

I have become stronger
in my weakness.

I do not even pretend
to understand.

Some gifts,
you just accept.

Outside it is snowing, just a bit.
Twelve years in and it still seems odd
Vermont, cold and with its ethereal light
feels more like home than the hills and mountains
you spent your first 54 years immersed in.

It seems odd that you were nearly sixty
before rediscovering the ocean,
Maine and Cape Cod, wild, often rugged,
nothing like the sprawling sands
where you were raised. And yet, it is these seas,
not the seas of your first half century
that calm your soul and raise it
from it’s gloom.

It seems odd that the place
that sings its siren song,
calls to you, makes you yearn like a lovesick boy,
lies in a foreign land,
with a foreign language,
nothing familiar, nothing, and yet
the first time you arrived,
sitting in Saint Mark’s square,
cappuccino in hand,
the Adriatic light and salt water filling your senses
you felt more at home
than you have ever felt in your long fractured life.

It seems odd, that you are so in love
with a woman so different than the southern sirens
that surrounded you most of your life.
Darker. More direct. Challenging, yet gentle,
Struggling strong, real.
She enflames you. She calms you.
She protects you. Even from yourself.
You have never known a woman like her.
And yet, in her arms, you feel that most unusual of things,
safe.

It seems odd that at this age, you look at the places
you called home, and the places you feel home,
that make your soul feel whole, complete, possible,
and you question so much of the place and time
and people who raised you.
But only for a few moments
before realizing home has never changed.
Truth has never changed.
You have.

Maybe Remembered

Some call it art. Some do not.
Prattle perhaps. Scribble.
It shows up in the night.
It is read by strangers and friends.
Passers by.
Bits of it resound. Maybe remembered.

It fades with the weather.
That is the nature of it.
Circumstances that resonated a week, a season,
moments that made it all resonate
before it fades.

In time, someone will paint over it.
Maybe you. New words. New poems.

Every day you do it. Every day.
Grateful anyone reads. Always surprised.
Still. Still surprised.

There was a time you wanted to be famous.
Not that poets and artists from obscure places
end up on the Tonight Show. You never were
the most realistic crayon out there.
But you had dreams, some of them borrowed.

The odd thing is how many you made happen.
not yours. Yours got lost. Your grafitti painted over
with billboards and a need to be loved.

You broke of course.
It’s what happens when the best of you
is painted over.

And that brokeness was the best thing,
the darkness made you real.
Made you, you. That child you remembered,
gleefully painting mindless color,
capturing what was lost.
Capturing what was found
picking up the scattered words
and re-arranging, a happy puzzle,
and angry puzzle. Everything immediate
or poor history. Feelings. Nothing more.

Graffiti.
You make it.
And walk to the next wall.
Never famous.
And happier for it.
The moment is enough.

You sip your coffee.
You take a bite of the sausage gravy, thick and salty.

The music playing in the diner is strange.
If music could be danish modern, this would be it,
streamlines and bleached, oddly pure,
in a language you cannot understand and yet somehow, do.

In a flash you are young and old,
moments of the journey like a roller coaster,
a madman’s collage with tunes.

And the words. Like a bad flashback scene, they come,
a B movie, or worse, lurid and darkly humorous,
other people’s words, each one a memory and a trigger,
leading to another and yet another.

Were I not so vibrant, it would be an end of life montage,
and you sit sipping, taking it all in, aware that no matter what happens
from here on out, you have survived the wreckages,
landing like a cat thrown out the window
so often you almost laugh when you fly,
knowing somehow, your feet are awaiting you below.

The Squeaking of Hinges

It is cloudy with a spit of unexpected rain
as you make your way to the barn,
unhooking the latch pulling the door. Open.

It creaks. The hinges are old and iron,
They rust without care, and need to be used
to stay limber. You have been gone a time

and they are stiff with neglect.
Still, they open. And as the week of your presence
falls back into the routine of letting animals in and out,

the hinges will fall back into their comfortable habits.
They will grow quiet as you oil them and use them,
until you no longer notice them in the morning

and nothing is left but you
and the wildstock.

Empty and Armed.

Early in the morning and you walk in the sand.
Near the shore it undulates, God’s art,
renewed each morning at the whim of weather and tides.

You walk in the sand. Your foot prints leave divots.
Water seeps in. Tiny ***** scurry, almost invisible.
If you look carefully, you can see their tracks
before they disappear into their tiny burrows.

You walk. The waves whisper. It is a quiet morning.
No one else is on the beach.
Just you, your God and your demons.

The demons disperse like dandelion seeds,
unable to hold on in the vast emptiness.
They become as lost as you once were.
lost in the horizon, their claws rendered useless

as you ignore them.

You become lost too. Lost in the wash of the waves.
In the long stretches of sand, in the place you walk
beyond foodprints.

It is worth the walk. Worth the ache in your aging legs.
to empty yourself. To find yourself.
To find what is left when you let everything else go
and join the demons on the wind.

It is worth the walk.
And too, worth the walk back.
For that is part of it.
You cannot live here forever.
You were not made to be a monk in the desert,
only a pilgrim.
There is a world that needs your meger talents,
and you come back to it
both empty
and armed.

Sometimes
the biggest step forward
is a step back,

to find the place
you left the path,
following someone else’s journey
instead of your own.

Dust on the Clocks

Three clocks stand on the mantle.
Four generations of time keepers
stand still.

The mantle clock with it’s graceful wooden arch
reminiscent of cathedrals, complete
with hand painted dial and brass pendulum
belonged to your great grandparents,
one of two things in your home
that came from the plantation they once owned
before the civil war swept through
and began their long, slow decline.
It chimed the hour when you were growing up,
it’s strand spring driven mechanism
sonorous when it rang, and yet somehow
almost tinny.

There is another, from your grandfather’s house.
Faux marble, a bit too bright and gaudy for it’s time,
a tiny arched gravestone, you wind it
and the clock ticks annoyingly, steadily,
never quite keeping perfect time.
According to your grandfather, it never did,
It came from a world’s fair, he once told you,
one of only a couple trips he made
that took him far from his little farm villiage,
His wanderlust never quite fit in there,
and though rarely fed, it was a memory worth having
despite the clock’s being terrible at its job.

The last clock is small. A tilted block. More recent.
A gift you brought back to your parents
from your first trip overseas. A thank you
for feeding your own wanderlust early,
of making you a traveler and wanderer,
willing to be uncomfortable in another’s world for a time
in exchange for the growth each journey brings.
It sat on the desk in their den
until the day the last of them died,
before coming back to you, this small reminder
silent with its electric motor. Almost invisible
except for the mark it left on your soul.

The clocks have dust on them.
You are not the best housekeeper
and time means less to you now than it once did.
Painfully you have learned the lesson
of deadlines and plans destroyed again and again.
There is only now. Here. This moment.
The rest is illusion. A beautiful construction,
artful as the clocks. Full of memories.
Full of promise. And nothing more.

“Put it out there.” she said,
that first therapist, the one who saw you
at your blackest, every sin and flaw
laid out to this perfect stranger in some blind faith,
or more truthfully,
in your desperate need for confession.

You learned the hard way the corrosion
of pretending perfection. It’s corrosion
on you and all you touched. But the whole idea
of peeling the layers off, one by one, in public,
when you could barely admit your boils and brokenness yourself
seemed a whole new kind of madness
before you had cured the first kind.

“Put it out there.” she said.
“You are a creature of discipline,
and you feel a responsibility, even if only one or two reads
to continue writing.
The bloodletting will be your cure
and to do it in the market square
will help your healing. Trust me.”

I didn’t of course. Trust that is.
I was far from a place where I could trust anyone,
but too, I was desperate,
and so I began that slow strip tease
I continue today,

unwrapping layer after layer where anyone can watch,
never knowing where to stop exactly,
when enough is enough and when perhaps
I have moved to something too close to the flesh
where I will burn for my perfidy of truth telling
and when I do not strip enough away that no one cares.
It’s a strange game, poetry as therapy,
poetry as strip teases, but who knew,
fifteen years later,
that there were still layers left

You sit down with your coffee.
The short order cook is busy at the grill.
Things you cannot see sizzle.

There is music here. There is always musc here.
Eclectic and sometimes strange, rarely
what you would think of as morning music,
quirky and boppy with a bass beat you feel,
one of the benefits of a place run by musicians
instead of accountants.

The coffee is good. Rich. Almost, but not quite harsh.
Alive. A tonic for the past night’s dreams.
They were joyous things, your dreams,
full of blue skies and Abba,
interiours out of Architectural Digest,
beautiful and simple and white.
But always interrupted by betrayal.
You would wake, and insist on sleeping again,
hoping for a different ending that never bore fruit.

Better to wake. Better to shake off the lies of the night,
a power that rises only when you wake,
and like a soldier before battle, prepare yourself
for what is real.

Build me a house with many windows.
A house with many doors
to let the air waft through on an autumn morning,
to let the light in, to let me see the world outside.

Do not hang any curtains.
Set the furniture looking out.
and if strangers look in, fine.
They will see what they will see,
what is there, not all of it Better Homes and Gardens.

I am done hiding in the dark. It does not suit me.
I am too old for such foolishness.
Too old for hide and seek.
So build me a house. A new house.
A place bright and open.
Let the dusty corners show.
Let the leftover coffee linger on the kitchen table.
Breathe in the air like a monk
learning to dance.

A single door in the brick building.
A host of windows to let in light.
A place to live and worship and work,
all three, your soul built in red clay, wood and glass.

A place to look out. To see the light,
the green of gardens, the crowds at a distance.
birds, at least until winter,
to revel in the sun, the heat of it

without going out.

A place for others to peer in,
curious wanderers, strangers,
the invited and uninvited,
It is the price and privilege of so much glass

that they can see you in sacred times
and the profane, that layer by layer
your secrets are revealed,
your scars and sins as bright as the curtains that waft in the wind.

A place to prepare. To see what is out there,
The ugly and the beautiful, A place to pretend
you can choose which to live among.
You cannot.

It is all real, and with you or without you,
the things beyond your doors will go one.
You can stay, here behind you thick walls,
or go out and plant, choose what you will get to eat

at the end of the season.

Someone lived here once.
Families were raised.
Gardens were grown.
Animals, pets and livestock, wandered about.
Clothes hung on the line.
There were children and lovers and hopes,
bright as sunflowers.

Once. Not now.

Now, the neglect has driven them all away.
What was it? Poverty?
What was it? Broken hearts and trauma?
Too much to survive?
Greener grass waved in front of them,
a temptress,
and no one left to fill the walls anew.
Eventually, always, an abandonment.

It’s a cute little house, well situated
in a post card colored field.
Still savable, but you have lived here long enough
to know how this story goes.

You have restored a few homes in your day,
brought then back from the brink,
none of them a perfect restoration. Few are.
But enough that there was life in them again.
Gardens and hopes bloomed anew
and the paint shown bright. The rot removed.
They became homes again,
not merely houses, waiting to fall.

But you cannot save them all.

It is the lesson you learned in your own restoration.
There is only so much of you
and you will use it as well as you are able.
restoring those closest to you
as you work on yourself.
It should be enough,

but still, you mourn.

Sand. Seagrass. Wind.
You are fed.
Solitude for breakfast.

The scaffolding stands next to the stucco wall.
A maze of pipe and connectors, splattered
with a barrage of old paint.
Thick boards span the space from brace to brace,
strong enough to hold you
as you do the work.

There is nothing glamorous in it,
the scraping of old paint,
the replacement of rot,
it is hard, sweaty work.
Slow. It is slow.
It takes a long time
before you can celebrate the results.

It gets worse before it gets better.
That is part of it.
Each step, particularly at the beginning,
is an act of faith.

There will be surprises.
Any place with history will have them,
buried under the paint and plaster.
And each surprise will take more work,
detours. No need to plan or schedule.
You just do the work.
Day by day,
until it is done.

The faithful are always rewarded.
The old can, indeed, become new.
To an outsider, it seems like magic,
but you know the truth:
it is work.

It tilts. It moves.
The floor falls out underneath you.
The rules change. The light shifts and flickers.
Somewhere, someone is laughing
maniacally.
Somewhere, too often, someone is crying.
Faces leap out at you,
implacable and unfeeling,
somehow worse than
the monsters we were taught to fear,
blind to blood.
There is music. Here and there a note rings
false, as if the music itself is a lie.
In the distance, where the light lives,
there is another song,
a weeping anthem of hope and revolution.
You were not prepared to be so unsettled,
so unsure which way your safety lies.
A scream fills the air. Not a shriek to scare,
but of pain. Somewhere in the dark.
There is no one to lead you. Each ghoul
beckons you in dark corners,
sinister in their suits. Blood on their cuffs.
In the end, you fall back on your faith.
John calls you in a faint whisper.
“Forward.”  Always forward.
Through the darkness, toward the light.
Leave the ghouls behind to whither
in their own darkness.
You will not allow it to be yours.

Some things you just sit on.
You let the anger flame high and bright,
but you wait, lest the fire consume you
as it has done so often in the past.

In the configuration you have learned the power of silence,
how it protects you from the worst of yourself,
how it prevents flammable words
that burn everyone they touch.
Deserved or not, you have lived as anger’s roadkill
too often.
You will forever bear the scars,
and the silence is your protection,

Silence is also the enemy. It isolates. It does nothing.
There is no healing in it. Left in place too often
it becomes a weapon.

Somewhere in between it the simmering.
A righteous anger of promises unkept,
lies more common than truth, faith
abandoned in the name of fear and someone to blame.

How is it we are still fighting these battles?
How is it that we, a nation capable of the impossible
cannot heal the rifts and illnesses of spirit
to live up to the promises we declare
on our holidays and sacred places?

I cannot quench this anger. No longer.
There is work to do and even unsure what it is and how,
the simmer burns. Even with the wet balm of time,
the simmer burns.

As you have aged, you have slowly lost your fear of fire.
It still lives but you have learned you will survive it,
that despite what your emotions tell you,
you will not be consumed.

So bring on the fire.
This can no longer be a thing that flashes
and is forgotten.
Let it burn, and I will burn with it,
light in the night, living with an aggressive love
that too many will hate.

Selah

The tide is low and you can see most of the boat’s ladder,
slimy and green below the high tide mark,
dry and growing brittle above,
subject to sun and salt each day, no matter the weather.

The ladder is the way up, the way out
from the fishing boats that populate this pier.
No matter the undertow below,
no matter the direction.

There are other materials that might last longer
than the locust wood used to make the rungs and stringers,
materials less susceptible to the slow death
of the seaside docks,

But the wood ladder remains. When it fails,
another one will take its place,
new wood gleaming for a week or two
before turning grey,
the persistence of weather taking its toll.

But the wood has a certain feel. A realness
that resonates to these men of the sea,
a trueness to who they are, and the all too real
world they live in.

It will remain their material of choice,
a thing you can run your hand over
and feel the truth of life, that it comes
and goes, that age takes its toll,

and maintenance is everything.

Just on the other side, the path disintegrates.
The clear border fences stop
and you are forced to face the chaos
without the clarity of those who have gone before you,

forced to fall back on your ancient teaching
of sunfall and internal compasses,
trusting the lichen on trees and sharp shadows
to lead you, if not to your destination,

at least to safety

It’s not very pretty, this old fishing boat.
Paint is peeled and the brass is pitted.
There is rust on the anchor
and the porthole glass is glazed with salt.

But each day it leaves the harbor
and finds its way to deep waters.
Nets are dropped and fish are caught.
And each night it returns.

There is always that chance
that you have forgotten;
that the week of neglect,
of pretending to be a vegetable,
and putting your spiritual disciplines aside
have rendered you mute.

It has happened before.

But then the tide comes in
and the tide goes out,
and a new miracle parades in front of you,
ripples in the sand, abstract art
from a playful creator,

and you remember.
again.
And begin
again,
knowing that no matter what is erased,
something is created.

Early in the morning, I breathe you in.
The energy of your skin fills me.
And I wake before I wake,
Every nerve awake,
my once dead heart beating,
wild and alive.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
The air here is still pure.
You can smell the forests.
You can smell the mock orange in the garden,
successor to the lilacs, now faded and brown.

You breathe out. Slowly, with purpose.
Spittles of poison leave you.
The anger. The fear. The uncertainty.
A part of you relaxes. Not enough,
but a start.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
There is peace in the Vermont air.
This is why you came, though you did not know it at the time.
For the peace. Unable to find your own,
you came to a place where peace is the natural state,
a place where you could breathe it in
with each swelling of your lungs.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
This is what you have learned,
violence in anything, even breath,
is a form of ******. Of spirit, Of your spirit at least.
You have seen enough of it in your lifetime,
and your tolerance is low. The pain and the anger
always lies near the surface. It is an act of will
to keep it at bay.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
The mountain air fills you.
“I look to the mountains from whence cometh my help”
declares the Psalmist and you breathe his words,
knowing your only real power comes in love,
in peace, no matter the world’s penchant for anger.
You refuse to make that anger your own, and so
you breathe in the morning peace
as you clutch the cross around your neck.

You breathe out. slowly, with purpose.
This time, this breathing, is a girding of arms,
for the anger still lives beneath the surface,
and you will never **** it. It has a life beyond your own.
Your own pain and experiences will never leave you.
No amount of breathing will expel it,
so the trick is to breathe it out, just enough
that it can become a thing controlled,
put to work, harnessed by love, power
to wrestle the darkness around you.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
Unsure of the battle, but sure of the cause,
sure of the value of every soul you encounter,
even those who weld their swords seeking
submission and blood, blended by their own anger,
unfamiliar with history and gospel. You breathe in strength,
the power of sunshine over the quarry.
You breath in the words of your youth
and they become sinew and muscle.
God in you. finally. Again.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
You need this renewal. Every day you need it.
and that is in ordinary times. Today
you need it more. Your weakness,
your easy anger is not a thing to be purged,
only a thing to be controlled. There is work to be done
and work needs its fuel, it’s passion,
a flame fed, but not too much. You breathe more of it out,
feeling your soul calm, knowing when to stop,
in that place between peace and war inside yourself
where change without carnage becomes possible.

I am thankful for the trespassers.
for those who dared breach my walls
gently but firmly, who passed through
my locked doorways carrying candles,
determined to do no harm, determined
to raise me from the dead.

A black man dies on a city street,
the policeman’s knee on his neck,
breath, life taken from him.

There are riots. Of course there are.
A people ignored too long will erupt sooner or later.
A people not heard too long with erupt sooner or later.

This is a truth we ignore,
an ugly truth.
A universal truth we should understand

from our holy books
and the history repeating itself
again and again and again.

People are made to be loved and cared for,
and when we are not, we either die, or erupt.
too often both.

We know this from our holy books.
We preach it from our pulpits.
and yet we are content to ignore it,

avoiding discomfort, a bit here and there.
avoiding conversation, and listening,
hoping somehow we can deny the truth of neglect.

But the poets and the prophets agree with history.
We can continue it ignore them only so long
before the roof falls in.

A storm blows in from the east. You can smell the rain.

In an hour or less, it will be here
and unpredictability will reign. The seas will roil
and flotsam, so well hidden by the water
will be tossed on the beach like ragdolls.
And the driftwood around you, dry
from yesterday’s sun, will drift once again.
The landscape will change.

It has been a season of storms,
the kind of storms that rattle windows
and leaves behind damage, ripping at roofs,
tearing away foundations, unrelenting, terrible storms,
one after another. You have survived them all,
but just barely, your faith and those you love,
have not let you flail for more than a moment,
when the winds were at their worst.
Your landscape has changed. And changed again.

The earth is a solid thing, so they say, but
that has not been your experience.
It is a wild thing, uncontrollable, a raging mix
of beauty and betrayal, a seething sea of madness,
waiting for the next wave, the next gust of wind
to tear at you and test you and see
whether you hold fast or fall, A test
of your ability to not walk, but dance on the water.

A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.

It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.

The house is built
on posts and beams.

Thick, hand-hewn posts of local cedar,
the beams as big crossing space,
held together by a single peg
since the early nineteenth century.

You’d not know it’s age to look at it.
Windows have been replaced.
Walls torn asunder and replaced.
There is plaster and electricity,
all the modern conveniences.

But in the end,
it is post and beam.
Incredibly, solidly constructed
in such a way that space is spanned
and everything between and underneath
can be ripped out and replaced,
renewed and reworked,
becoming new again
without losing its strength.

The sanctuary is empty, cleared by fear
that has sent us each into our temples
seeking solace and safety.

The holy elements gather dust that shows
in the sun that pours through the stained glass windows.
The ***** is silent.

It is not the only place. Temples are empty.
Mosques are empty. The vast caverns
of the mega churches are empty.

Still, you come. A solitary pilgrim.
You sit in a back pew and pray.

It is hard, praying at such a time.
There is too much, too many, you are overwhelmed
by the vastness of loss and pain and fears.
There are too many to be grateful for,
too many helpers, too many blessings that remain.
You are fine until you begin to pray,
and then suddenly, you feel small.  Overwhelmed.
Your helplessness in the vast world of need
seems infinite.

And so, your prayers lack words,
They are what the bible calls, “a prayer of moaning”.
And that is enough. It has to be. It is all you have to offer.

In the day to day, you are fine.
There are dishes to wash. Poems to write.
The cats need to be fed.
Books to be read.
You can pretend it is normal, until you bend your head
and call on your God.

But then, that is why we pray, is it not?
Because we understand this is beyond us.
It always was, but suddenly our weakness has become real.
We can no longer pretend that we hold the answers,
that we have the strength, that we are enough.

We are not.

Perhaps that is not entirely true.
We are indeed enough.
We are enough to be loved.
We are all we were made to be,
but not all we aspire to be, never content
to be merely human,
we want to be more,
to pretend we are God,
when in the end we are children playing at it,
suddenly overwhelmed and frightened
when things go wrong, looking to our father to save us
when our humanness proves its limits.

You pray in the stained glass light.
There is wind outside and the bones of the church moan with you.
The building creaks, as if God is restless.
When you are done, you leave.
You go back to your home, a different kind of sanctuary now.

The cats greet you at the door.
The woman you love hugs you as you hang your coat.
This is your sanctuary now.
Here you can pray more coherently,
for the neighbors, for the farmers at the edge of town,
for the children next door playing basketball in the afternoon sun.
You feel more sane here. Less overwhelmed,
able to far better accept what you can and cannot be.
There are things you can do here. Now. Small things,
but, as you always say, they add up.

You sip coffee. You make a call. You write a card.
You prepare for the next days work.
God is with you. You believe this.
It allows you to do, when there is not enough of you,
a power beyond your own.

If there is greatness to be had, .
if there is humbleness, this is where it lies,
in knowing what you are and are not,
and living in faith that there is more,
both in the world, and in you,
than you can see,
that your truest sanctuary has no walls
to hold God in,
or let him out.