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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have become stronger
in my weakness.

I do not even pretend
to understand.

Some gifts,
you just accept.

Life has become closer, more precious,
bound by walls and doors and masks
and an unfamiliar fear.

This is not who you are.
But it is, right now.
Something weaker than you want to admit,
far more vulnerable,
your breathing labored and wheezy,
unsure. Each moment, each breath
both work and a celebration.

You remember your father like this,
his smoke ravaged lungs straining each breath
for the last years of his life,
no medicine,
no mechanics able to do more than making the next possible.
I watched the wearing away,
of body and mind, and will.

This will pass. Already the medicines are at work.
Already your wheeze has died down to a whisper.
You will heal. Doors will open.
Horizons will return,
and you will walk them, staring into the dusky sky
unafraid of death,
thankful you have been spared for a time,
the gratitude itself a kind of horizon,
a way of seeing past your vulnerability,
finding again the horizons once lost,
and finally, reclaiming each and every one.

Spanish moss hangs from the Live Oak,
a slow, beautiful murderer in the big city,
redolent of memories, blue music and smokey rooms,
drag queens crooning, a fight or two
late in the night while you sipped bourbon,
content in the corner,
listening less to the music than an internal dialogue,
devils and angels in your head
dancing a tattoo, making sultry peace with each other
as you scanned the crowd, seeking a distraction
as you courted oblivion at the stroke of midnight.

You sigh,
there is no glory in the memories. Life lived
and long ago discarded, without regrets
and without longing, happier to be in the light,
but parts of you were shaped by dark nights,
bluesy music and the grind of tinder before tinder,
a fire that never took in you,
a dead man in a plaid shirt in the corner of the bar
who somehow left more alive than he arrived.

It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.

You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.

Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Words matter.
Your mother taught you this
when you were a boy.

She lived it, taught it. It sank in,
a vital part of who and what
you would become.

Words create feelings.
They heal. They wound.
They inspire, inform, sell,

They should be
things of truth.

You think on this on the long drive home.
The GPS has changed its mind once again
and you are on a new road with new thoughts.

It is dark, late at night. Here and there,
lights twinkle. Cabins and houses in the forests.
You can smell the wood smoke.

Yes, it is February. And there is snow
and ice on the road.
You drive, as you generally do, too fast.

But it is warm outside. Over 40.
and the ice melts. You feel it give way
as you press the accelerator around the curve.

It is nearly spring. Oh yes, there will be more snow,
but you are aware of the change.
There is something new in the wind.

You sense, more than see, the bulbs stir.
It is time to change colors,
to let go of the greys and ***** whites

that are so familiar, but not quite true any longer.
You need a new vocabulary, a thing of color and sun,
the truth of you.

You have become too familiar with dark words.
They filled so much of your past
that they had become your mother tongue.

But you do not live there any longer.
To speak the truth, you must learn new words
to tell it.

You have always been bad at languages.
Words came hard. They still do.
You barely passed French in high school, college, grad school.

It is your nemesis.

But when you live in a place, you must learn
the new land’s words. To speak them
as if they were your own.

And so you struggle with this vocabulary of joy,
to tell your truth in words that feel odd
spilling out of your mouth and pen.

You must let go
your mother tongue.
The truth insists on it.

There are new paintings to create,
bright things, the colors of childhood,
a reclaiming of innocence,

and it awaits you at the end of the road,
in the place where your love lives.
You press the pedal.

The car moves faster through the night.

You cannot find it
on the most recent maps.
Once you could.
A tiny dot in small print.
But not any longer.
It is too small.
In the middle of nowhere,
a confluence of four farms,
two roads,
an ancient Methodist church
and a country store turned museum.
If you happen to be there,
there is a sign.
Just one,
To announce your arrival and departure,
all in a blink. The sort of place
we make fun of,
or worse,
miss altogether.

And yet, people live here.
No fewer than they did in the day
when they rated a dot on the map in four-point type.
They are born here,
Grow up and age here.
Die here.
There is drama. Love is discovered
and lost.
Faith is found and lost.
They suffer, no fewer and no more
than a generation ago.

Your grandfather lived
on one of the four corner farms.
Your father was born here
and lay in the small oak crib
that now lives in your upstairs bedroom.
Your house, in fact, is a museum of sorts,
artifacts of generations scattered about,
proof that this place exists
not just in geography
but in soul.

You shift in the bed. Light comes through the windows.
There are birds singing outside,
too early for spring, but singing nonetheless.

A full night’s sleep and you are still tired.
Your bones and soul both resist inertia.
The warmth, yours and hers, comingle.

Nearly three years since you exchanged vows.
None of them easy. None of them the stuff of fairy tales.
Times of death and loss and struggle,

Constant chaos.

You prefer peace. That is the truth of it.
it has been a long journey to capture it.
an old man’s journey to rebuild himself from the rubble.

She shifts slightly and settles back into her deep sleep.
You would prefer the fairy tale, but you have lived too long
to believe in them.

In its place is what you have, a different kind of love,
soft as flesh, strong as steel, A thing you wish
you had found as a young man.

But age has its value. Age is a treasure,
Wisdom, however it comes, is treasure. You smile, fully awake,
reaching your arm over the covers

and drawing her closer still.

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.

Ash Wednesday, and then it is Lent,
a season of sacrifice,
a reminder of Christ's own sacrifice 40 days hence.

The ashes have been wiped away
and the season begun,
barely noticed by some, for others,
it is at the heart of faith itself.

Your forehead is fresh and clean,
and your decisions made.
It is time to release the darkness,
to dance in the night,

and let your demons dance with you
before tossing them to the sky like dark balloons
for someone else to discover
after they are deflated.

Howl with the coyotes. Sing with the just arrived robins.
Wallow in the almost warm sun with the cats.
They know. Lent, for all its dour reputation,
is the almost spring, and worth celebrating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The house sits at the edge of the woods.
Long abandoned the forest has taken over.
Vines tendril through nooks and crannies.
The door hangs on one hinge.
In the center of it all, a tree has grown,
pushing its way through the roof,
The ironwork has rusted.
The floor has collapsed.
And the mortar between the bricks has fallen out.
Bricks litter the floor,

Evidence
of what happens, slowly,
from the first moment of surrender
to the last.

Early March in Vermont, and for a week now
the snow has slowly melted into the landscape.
The sap runs from the maples to the sugar houses.

It is easy to believe winter is done,
releasing its grip, softening the earth
with its promise of greening.

But I lived long enough to know winter
does not surrender so easily. It will come again
and hold the season hostage with ice and new snow.

And we will complain. We will whine.
Somehow forgetting this happens each year
and that spring comes in fits and starts

and false springs may bring more grey weather
and white, icy landscapes, but they too will pass,
for each false spring is a harbinger of the inevitable.

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.

The first flowers begin at the bottom,
New shoots of forsythia,
almost out of sight unless you look close.

The promise of spring
lies always near the roots.

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.

He sits on the small stage,
Long hair and mustaches,
costumed and dressed in his Renaissance finery.

Three women sit off to one side.
Madrigal singers, waiting
for his perfect rhythm, his perfect low notes
to begin.

Four strings.
Nothing more.
Four strings
and infinite possibilities.

Dreams.
Never ordinary.
Surreal landscapes.
Unrecognizable creatures.
Dead people dancing.

Voices.
Always voices.
Voices of the dead.
Of betrayers and lost loves.
Voices of strangers in the night.

Colors.
Impossibly vivid.
Bursts of light in the darkness.
often with music.
Full moon madness every night.

as if your mind rebels in the dark,
unwilling to allow you the peace you dream of
in the day.

You sip your coffee in a nearby diner.
The place is empty.
It is too cold outside for wandering,
even to familiar places.

Part of you is still numb,
Historic wounds still holding sway.
You sip your coffee in a strange kind of meditation,
waiting for the feelings to break like river ice.

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.

There are flowers on the window sill.
Wildflowers in a blue vase.
A small oasis
in a life that is anything but.

You release a sigh,
and with it, tension.
You focus, completely on the still life

and feel your own heart still,
your breath slow.
You fall into yourself,

You sip your coffee,
your morning slowed to the point
you control it. Not the other way around.

There is a small smile on your face.
Today will be a day of victories.
You know it, not even knowing the battles that await you.

Still. Slow. Aware,
you are invincible.

You have used the same palette for years,
mixing watercolors until they are indistinguishable,
one from the other, then washing it clean to begin again,

The plastic washes white each time, perfect and new,
bright and ready to start again, a new mix
of colors and texture, so easy

to save yourself
from yourself.

Dark, dank, it holds history.
It has risen, fallen, fallen into disrepair.
Stones have been carted off to build their frankenhouses.
Bandits have hovered in the night
waiting to separate their Victorian adventurers from their purses.
The homeless have huddled here,
tiny fires smudging the walls in the Roman night.
Today tourists come
to gape at the circus home of the famous and fallen.

You come too
and the grotto feels all too familiar.
The dampness seeps into your bones.
The broken statue feels eerily familiar,
eerily like yourself, not quite whole.

You wait for the demons.
They live here. They always have,
even the great Augustus had them,
creatures of the night, gentle and brutal,
capable of murdering marble,
the leavers of wounds.

There is an altar in the grotto.
You are tempted to pray,
to sprinkle the holy water that seeps down the wall
into the air like some pagan baptism.

But you do not.
This is what you have learned.
The demons live within
and that is where the battle is fought,
with or without tourists,
so you can see this grotto for what it is,
a thing of history,
incapable of holding you.

About this poem

Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.
A gallery with art on one wall,
a mix of truth and pain.
compelling whispers shout.
A place to learn what you say,
what you create,
matters less
than what is seen and heard.
Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.

Another cup of coffee.
Please.
I need to wake up.
The night’s dreaming has left me
disjointed.

surprised

to be alive.

It’s not the first time.
Not at all.
I’ve lived in the nightmarish dark
far too long,
far too often.
I am experienced in blindness,
swinging my sword at ghosts,
shieldless save for God.
Each day new wounds bleed.
Each day new wounds heal.

And so here I am.
A decade and more later,
a collector of scars,
a strange sort of warrior,
living in the half light.

There is perhaps,
a little guilt,
that in the midst of the plague year,
my heart still beats fastest
when you are near.

It sits at the foot of the leather chair in your living room.
A car, carved from a single piece of wood
when your father was just a boy.
Nothing recognizable, simply a design
in the mind of a child too sensitive for his time and place.

There is a ribbon taped to the bottom with old cellophane tape.
Third place. A national award from General Motors,
a contest created to awaken young designers,
and set them on a path of creativity and industrial design.
It took. You have the drawings your father made,
all swooping fenders and steel lines.

They beat much of his heart out of him in that time and place.
They made him tough and hard, his brokenness disguised
as strength and rough corners. He tended his wounds
with alcohol and anger.

But his desire to create never left him. Sober, he was brilliant,
an innate understanding of things and possibilities
punctuated his life and through him, mine.
He died just a few short years ago.

We have choices of what to remember. What to keep.
I choose things like this car that sits unobtrusively
at the foot of the leather chair. I choose made things
and they surround me like an aura, even
when they go unnoticed by those who merely come and go.

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.

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.

This is the view from where I sit.

Just to the right of me is the work table,
covered in brushes and paint
and half-finished paintings.
There are things that need to be framed,
and a plethora of pens.

There is no glamour to it.
A working space with good light
and more importantly, time,
set apart, for just this thing,
to get the rest of the world out of my way
and make room for the stuff that comes slowly,

the inspiration, the god-breath
that pulls things out of me no one knew
were there, much less me.

Some artist, me.
I spend far more time staring into space
than applying paint. Thinking you might call it
if you were generous and kind.
It is far less than that,
I am waiting with expectation,
trusting the universe will not leave me empty
for too long.

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.

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.

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.

Yours is the art of the broken.
Always patching. Always aware
that nothing and no one is perfect,
least of all you, that all things
are in a state of constant repair
and readjustment, never quite
and likely to never be quite, and so
you paint, you write, you stumble
in public, one of the broken masses
only louder than most,
less willing to hide the cracks,
or perhaps only, less able.

You have no plan.
An age of plans have blown up in your face
time and time again, mocking
your presumption, finally able
to simply be, simply do,
less a creature of inspiration
than a plugger, stuck with
your inability to surrender,
a construction worker building happiness
one mess at a time.

“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

The boat is tied neatly against the pier.
The teak gleams but you can see the wear,
the marks of decades of use.

The things that make it able
have been maintained. You can see that.
The hull lacks barnacles. The ropes are fresh

and if the cleats show pits of oxidation,
they are small. Nothing has been allowed
to weather far. It is a craft ready,

made for travel, to ride wind and wave
using no more than its own strength
and the wisdom of its sailor

to trim the sails just so, always adjusting
to the fickle shifts of the ocean.
A survivor, never allowing neglect

to stand in the way of journey.
Even now, in this strange season,
docked too long to the wooden pier,

its whole purpose, whole meaning,
put on hold by fate and laws,
there is work to be done.

For the West wind always returns. Always.
There will be new horizons and the secret
to meeting the new necessities the West wind brings

is to do the work, not of maintenance,
but preparation.

The studio has been closed for nearly two months.
It is cold there, and the paints are stiff and thick.
You turn on the heater, but it will take time
before your breath ceases to create clouds with each breath.

There are two half-finished paintings, so old
you have lost the inspiration that started them.
They look flat and lifeless and you cannot choose
between finishing, or whitewashing to start again.

There is a large frame on the floor awaiting new canvas.
but you are feeling small, diminished, not ready for boldness,
growing back into yourself one step at a time.
Forward. Back. Forward again.

You are uncertain. Your feelings have been overwhelmed
by your brush with death and you cannot even name the demons, if demons they are, that haunt you.
They are like ghosts, disappearing each time you draw near.

There is a chair in the middle of the floor. A garish thing,
full of bright magic. Half-finished, the color fighting
the original dark stain, the carvings crying for color.
A color you cannot feel.

But feelings are fleeting. As desirable as they are,
you learned long ago you can function without them,
and that it is the work that brings them back,
that allows you to overcome the things that overcome you.

And so you pick up a brush. With effort, you squeeze
the first bright color onto the palette. Red.
The color of passion reclaimed. The color of blood.
The color you lack.

And you paint.

The ball rolls, bounces and spins.
The crowd holds its breath,
anticipating, against the odds,
their magic number.

It stops. Money, in small plastic chits,
designed to lessen the loss,
changes hands.
And it begins again.

The wild card. The odd number,
the stacked odds when you play with fate,
all for the thrill, your mind lost
to passion and hope and the excitement

of beating the odds.

I do not gamble. I have lost enough
to set myself up for loss yet again.
There is no thrill in the game.
I have been drained of hope and pretense

that the fates favor me.
Better to run under their radar,
to deprive them of the chance to crush my hopes
and leave me broken.

I have become a student of the old ways.
Simple. True. Faithful.
I need less now than then, and with that less,
I have more to lose.

Leave others to play. They believe
in their place in the pantheon of gods and fates.
You watch, wondering how long they can lose
and still believe.