I see a casket coming down the steps,
carried by two men.
A small and lonely church.
Then I realized who lay inside.

I always knew the day would come,
but I expected a larger gathering,
and a respectable line of cars,
not just a hearse, a driver and the extra man.

All my assets are listed in my Will.
Gone now to my heirs.
My wealth is nothing to me now
There’s a casket, these clothes and a small headstone.

But who is this standing by my grave?
The man I once saved from hunger
at no great cost to me;
certainly nothing I thought much of.

Now this friend’s my only treasure,
my true wealth discovered so late.
I’m a fool poorly graved,
my savior this poor man I saved.

John Hayes

Out of nowhere it came
in the night.
A thought unlike my own.
Like a ghost I would shun.
A frightful thought to be sure.
How could my mind conjure it?
Is there a demon in me
that would think such a thng?
Or am I a stranger to myself,
a cauldron of the vilest kind?
Oh rid me of
my unconscious mind!

John Hayes

When I looked out one morning
The world had changed.
My neighbor and I were at war.
The same was so for my brother.
My country was going mad.
The politicians were at war
and couldn’t agree on anything
that mattered,
The center was giving away.
Even the earth was in its death throes
but our own dying was more pressing.
I remembered our church days,
how we prayed for one another,
but the pews have thinned out.
Nietzsche was still raging from his grave:
“God is Dead”.
I yelled to God: “No!’
But I was still baffled
in the dead silence.
And I looked out on a world
my own soul could not
recognize.

You gave me a universe,
but I count myself poor.
You gave me the human race;
but I’m lonely.
You gave me Shakespeare;
but I’m jealous of his talent;
You gave me all you have;
but I feel deprived.
You gave me all the energies swerling in the heavens;
but I’m tired.
You gave me life;
but I’m preoccupied with death.
You hung on a cross for me;
      but all my mistakes were well-intentioned.
Why have you done so much for me
when you didn’t have to?
In my heart I know
        that your love surpasses everything.
If I dive into to the depths of myself
You are there, waiting for me.
I can’t understand your love.
It is so forgiving, so absolute.
There’s nothing like it in the world
I’m used to.
Your love violates everything I know.

I can’t dance.  
But you can dance for me!
I can’t compose a symphony.
But Beethoven composed many for us!
A sage discovered the wheel
and Shakespeare wrote plays
for us.
I’ll do everything I can for you
with my gifts,
and all things you do,
please do them for me.
Gifts seem random,
uneven and unfair.
But it only seems
that way,
since they are lessons
in sharing.
The best gift received of all
is the giving.

The telephone rings.
It’s the doctor’s office.
The nurse’s voice is soft
and sympathetic.
“Good morning,
we received the biopsy results.”
“I’m sorry, but the news
Isn’t good.”
“They’re positive for
invasive cancer.”
Silence….
“We have the name of a surgeon.”
“You should call this morning
and make an appointment.”
“We’re so sorry.”
Silence..,
“What’s that number again?”

To love the law is to love the just balance
where no one is more right for being strong,                    
rich or powerful.
It is knowing that the law
is grounded in human nature,
and that being right
is more important than being correct.                              
It is to face impossible odds
when all involved have agreed                                
that what is asked can’t be done.
It is striving to shift the tilt of the earth
from the status quo toward the steady sun of justice.
It is to take on the world and its powers
for the simple truth that will prevail                                
in the highest court of reason.
It is knowing that his client
is the essential man,                                
the child of the universe                                
whose misdeeds are forgivable mistakes.
It is knowing that his real power
is his word, and that his real wealth                      
is  his reputation.

I wrestle with her song
like a reservoir,
since it mocks the veritable sea.
Its mysteries, unconceived,
she’s robbed of their virginity.
I flew to a galaxy
near the beginning,
and she also found me there
beneath the surface, under the deep air.
Waiting before an impenetrable secret  
I couldn’t escape her song,
her Siren song.
Her sweet words  
enveloped and bound,
like chords wrapped around me
to tame and name.
An infinite darkness of mind vanished
wordless into the unknowing
womb of creation.
And I, banished to an inner wasteland,
heard a voice of genius singing
a base rhythm to her song.
It was plain and blue.
The words were formless but
rose from the bottom of the world.
I am enchanted by an old song
and an older place,
seeming enemies.
Whether by seduction or
will for words
I will be undone.
I must have both
or be without my song.

I wait for your words
as I wait for the dogwoods
in the spring,
and their buds to flower
chalky in the wild woods.

How charming he is
between rounds,
when civility doesn’t stop
the fight.
His charm keeps us engaged.
Once the fight is resumed
he thrusts wildly,
unable to see an open spot.
Why waste my fear?
His blindness is my friend.
By moving in
he only sees himself.
And it’s himself he beats.
I am only a witness,
to his self-defeat.

My footprints stretch
from here to the end of
the last beach.
But my tracks have smoothed away.
The sand is perpetually so.
But If the beaches have a memory
of all the passengers thereon
they could tell the history of the world.

The witness sits waiting
as he walks in, briefcase in hand,
the table lined with lawyers.
He sits, puts down a tablet and pen,
asks for the witness to be sworn in,
and begins.
The pecking order is established.
The questioner is boss
and all embark on the train of
his thought.
'Would you recount for us
the circumstances leading up to
the incident.'
She begins one more time
to recount thoughts and impressions,
superimposed on
dimly recollected facts
whose keen edges
have long dissolved.
Her preparation is as apparent
as a painted door
over the threshold of
the truth.
'You have taken an oath',
he reminds her,
but the lock on the door
clicks shut.
Carefully, then, he makes a small incision
in the web
of aggregated incompatibilities,
and the abscess behind
exudes a purulent glow
through cracks only apparent
to him.
Her lawyer blusters and roars,
attempting to blow out the flickering flame.
But the cover is cleft,
and enough of the truth can be seen
to tip the scale.

Do your best
when it looks impossible.
Show up
when the task appears overwhelming.
Say yes.
when saying no would be easy.
Step forward
when you could be anonymous.
Act
when it would be easy to do nothing.
Choices are inopportune,
and pass instantly.
So does life.
So, carpe diem
while it can be carped.

All the leaves are flying, fleeing, falling;
No more rustling, whistling, swerling.
They’ll rise no highbud till the spring,
Leaves without sound, but sense
they have not died. They’re only in suspense.

Leaves of air fall windsail to the ground
by year down, timefall to terms with God,
as every man and womankind is bound,
kindbound, freebound all, to worms downsod.

Begin your benediction,
In blazes of mother-tree glory,
and end the shame, the contradiction,
leave her stripped, wretched, hoary,
through the winter, blowing, snowing,
all her dark days unknowing.

Leavelost she bares her billion Y’s.
In a billion questions her form is laced.
The leaves had only told her lies
And by sprouting buds they are replaced.

Now rustle not, and rest till spring
When you shall rise from rooting
Seeds, all newness coming forth for good
from melting snow and living wood.
Let darkness fall, there will be light
to brew up morning from the night.

Who was this homely man?
So ugly, so beautiful.
His arms were so long,
and strong. Wasn’t he an ape?.
His jokes, abiding as they were,
had the metal
of science.
He was the saddest
and funniest sage
ever looked on
as a father.
Those lines and caverns in his face
and hollows of his eyes,
were everyone’s sorrows.

A cigar under the night sky
is a friend who listens,
and knows.
The power of a cigar
is its company.
When the smoke is finished
the essence remains
as life does.
If smoking a cigar does not inspire,
then the cigar is not a cigar.

How do I begin
to speak when words alone
cannot,
as noise comes from
lips accustomed to common lies,
to leap from my experience
to yours.
Our lives are foreign lands
and we are full strangers.
But I watch your eyes
and every gesture
to detect a clue
that I might take the risk
of speaking the truth to you.

I saw a feather lying on the snow
more incongruous
than a Picasso.
A delicate wind made its down ripple  
lightly.
There was a universe in its shaft
and fluffy plume,
too powerful,
for a poem.

The higher mind
is a highway to everywhere at once
to all beauty and truth
where peace and joy are constant
and everything is good.

It’s hidden in the lower mind
full of noisy obsessions
that slide along its syllogisms
like lazy snakes,
blind and fearful,
and thinks up a crazy world.

We hover in the dark between,
waiting for pain to cease
and time to end,
desiring a higher mind
or some compromise for less.

Like commiteemen on stick legs
they run about together
as if there were some issue,
some important question of the day.
They run up the beach
and down the beach.
They’re always just ahead of
some controversial wave.
One flies off
and the others follow.
But they land again on another issue,
pecking away at the sand,
their stick legs playing fast notes
to continue the meeting
as another wave comes in.

We first met at coffee and dessert:
“He is a fine poet, and an engineer by trade.”
In this morning’s paper I read one of his poems,
autobiographical, and one to remember.
I can see him in it, and also the rest of men
but for this:
He was the quiet one at the table,
yet his quietness had presence.
Attentiveness inclined his eyes and posture,
not necessarily as a learner.
He noted all that was said
but he didn’t often comment
and never intruded.
When he spoke, he was reserved, deliberate.
Here was authority
in his silence and his speech.
It comes out in his poem.
His are not the soft thoughts
of the speculative metaphysician.
They are irrelevantly relevant,
much as the metaphor is,
the unessential figure that becomes essential
resting finally on granite,
and as sturdy as a pyramid.

A crow’s frightened unsure eyes
look toward smaller black birds
chasing him
from one branch to another.
He flees, wishing he were a dove.

In autumn the trees sway low
and crickets sing bass.
My soul remembers something
old and cavernous.
The leaves fall like shrouds.
The birds are too occupied to sing
in the last summer days.
The earth whispers:
Now.

No single thing stands alone
but has a link, at least,
with something else.
The key is the connection.
But links can’t stand apart
except as clues of law.
That’s the beginning
not the end.
Without law there is no chaos

Which came first is the question
of questions
and depends on what is meant
by first.
Is it beginning, i.e., what precedes,
or the source, i.e., what determines?

Get out the dogmas.
All skeptics expect them.
Between knowlegde and belief
the will intrudes.
Make a choice
or avoid the question.
The world must have order
by force if not by mind.

The law need not precede chaos,
but it must stay it.
If there is a greater law than this,
a law of being
not of necessity,
it is in a grain of sand
rather than a book of statutes.

While the state trooper approached my car door from behind, a voice inside me whispered:
“Good morning fathead, have you had your donut yet?”
As I pushed the down window button, the trooper said,
“May I see your driver’s license, owner’s and insurance cards?”
“Certainly , officer”, I said, “Is there some problem?”
“I clocked you at 75 miles per hour. Do you know what the speed limit is?”
“The last time I checked, it was 65,” I offered.
“There’s a sign 500 feet back that says 55.  And do you see the sign ahead?”,
was his retort.
“Yes, I see it says 55, too”, I confessed.”
“You can read”, he asked?
I replied, “Yes, of course.”
He handed me a Bible and said, “Then read Psalm 90, verse 12.”
Astounded at his unexpected and strange behavior,
I opened the book and found the words: “Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
I looked up, but there was no trooper, or police car.
I then noticed that the book I was holding was my own, little used, Bible
with my license, owner’s and insurance cards tucked neatly inside.
I continued on my way to my appointment, arriving a little late.
Before arriving I noticed a horrible accident just ahead, involving a truck and two cars.
I later learned that the truck had gone out of control,
and that all occupants in the vehicles were killed.
As I passed the accident, the voice inside me thanked the trooper for his visit,
whoever he was.

Lord, let me have an independent spirit,
but nurture and form it.
Let my poems reconcile
my darkness and your light.

Let me only make what you create.
But let me be original like you.

Let my poems be new,
but old like your lilies.
Let them be hard surfaced,
but deep like your sapphires.
Let my poems be well crafted,
but truthful like your prophets.

Let my poems strike at what is wrong,
but let them heal the soul
like your grace.

A boy stands before the ocean
with a stick, and a hook on a string.
He casts his hook to catch a whale
a whale as big as the moon.

The ocean is great and dark.
It’s where the great whale lives
The boy waits for the whale to appear
in the heavy rolling waves

The whale sees the boy
standing on the shore,
a boy as small as the moon.
The whale laughs and asks:

Can you catch a whale with a hook?
He turns toward the deep.
The boy returns home
and dreams of the moon.

He looked downcast,
long face, sad eyes.
He said: “I’ve nothing to live for:
I take pills and sit,
Tell me a funny joke.”
I said: “I can’t tell a joke
very well.”
So he tells one,
in poor taste.
I laugh to be polite.
He looks downcast,
long face, sad eyes.
Cancer took him,
but smallness of heart never did.

He speaks of youth,
of a sky of wondrous clouds,
and eats from a blackberry bush.
He lives where grass is wild.
Time makes him rich.
He laughs at impotence.
He has seen great stones dissemble
and disappear as sand.
He is young like ocean spray,
Imperfect enough to laugh.

On a dock near St. Petersburg
they played “America the Beautiful”.
Old men in ill-fitting uniforms.
A cigar box for coins.
“How pathetic”, my teenage son said.
Was it their appearance,
their pandering,
the shame of Russia
toothlessly smiling,
loving *****?
Mighty Russia
in days gone?

From a far city
of little heart,
a beat begins.
Its heaviness moves
and unfolds in memos.
A blade cuts faceless names:
"There must be casualties
for the good of us all,
for the bottom line."
The unseen ax
is without malice,
without disruption.
Only bare offices,
and boxes of effects,
show the antisepsis.
Silence guards the halls.
Eyes fail to meet.
Only whispers and rumors
behind doors.

I roamed with nomads

on desert sand.

We lived with tents and sandalwood.

We were dark-skinned, and dark-eyed.

We sang and danced

to strings and drums  

ancient tales of love.

The stars at night

were our spirits.

We lived in a timeless way

on plateaus of horses and night fires.

We drank goat milk,

and ate wild meat.

And wisdom came at night

like a goat on young legs.

The sky seems near tonight
The stars don’t seem so far away
I lose my place in them.

The earth seems further away than the stars.
But the night and sky are one.
I’ll stay all night and have the whole of it.

I don’t really love the stars,
But we are farther apart than they.

The heirs of Cain and Abel
are brother against brother.
Between them there is ill will
and one is no better than the other.

I hope against  fate
that my vote will matter
and a good candidate
will emerge from the clatter.

"A 60 year old drunk",

the bus driver who dialed 911 called him.

At that point the Youghiogheny is deep enough for a boat livery.

Over an empty, riverside park, the sky is overcaste.

I tighten my coat and pull up the collar.

Firemen stand on the shore, hands in their pockets.

A fire truck, a van, a long-hooked pole, and a stretcher wait.

A boat  trolls under the bridge. One man holds a line.

Down a hill at the end of a street,

below the City of Mckeesport,

at a 50 feet leap,

a homeless man inhaled the polluted water.

He may have heard his own cry,  

but not the bridge traffic, the laughing school boys crossing,

or the white goose honking,

above his last jump.

I watch the boat a long time,

then walk to my car with inconclusive thoughts,

respecting what I hadn’t seen,

aflop like a rag doll in cold, dark water,

unknowing fish eyes passing,

maybe a friend somewhere unaware of the event

under the bridge that hovers over the river.

The daffodils sang a  
song in the churchyard.

So did the early robins
scratching among the graves.

I thought I  heard the wind say:
“It’s time! Rise!”

sublime pebbles beyond eyes
and mind thrown but falling
too near. My want of seeing what
I already guess, but still find
out of reach, certainty muted,
hinting at truth, recollecting
a sight as if blind, something
explosively central, but
receding like a name fused
into self but futilely grasped for.
Will I see it soon, again, or ever?

Saturdays with Marilyn  

We float on the pool all afternoon, weightless, reading,
our minds in other times and places,
a toe against a wall sending us off
in other directions in a world slowly turning,
the sun over our shoulders now, and again in our faces,
listening without attending to a pump that could be
the sound of the ocean, aware of time only as shade
moving across the pool, and the hungry dog barking.
We are worlds the ants find and we send them swimming.

We pass each other, gently bumping now and then,
a togetherness of sympathetic rest,
a pause in years of joint and several lives
like islands that are parts of a single country,
separate universes, contradictory in terms,
but united in a fate that could have ancient roots.
Nothing is certain, they say, but attraction beats science.
Momentum and a breeze, energies that seem pointless,
are saving mercies in the last weeks of August.

A short telephone message
came from the vet’s office:
“The ashes are ready.”
Two weeks before, “Wally” snapped
at my hand, frightened,
his hind legs paralyzed.
It was the end of a long illness.
I cradled him in a towel.
They were kind to us.
I told them he was a good dog;
that he was now in doggy heaven.
Their sympathy card is still on the refrigerator.

A wild boar colored mini-Daschund,
his ******* called him “Stormin’ Norman”
because he was the litter runt;
but we named him after
the wallaby he resembled,
and because he was a “soft” dog.

His sister, Wheedl, the alpha dog,
would try to steal his food.
She was the only one he ever growled at.
He never tilted his head, perplexed at humans,
like dogs who don’t understand us.
If we were leaving the house,  
he just looked away, resigned.
When a dropped biscuit flew under the refrigerator,
he knew where it would come out
if we hit it with a wooden spoon.
He would stand on that spot,
while his sister, a more typical dog,  
would stand where it went in.

Wheedl is now lost.
She can’t hear, and stays very close.

We have returned our gift to mother earth.

when the world is cold
and hills are high
there must be eyes
to see a sky

When I can’t see
you are my eyes

you see beauty
in empty spaces
you find treasures
in unlikely places

when mine are absent
you are my eyes

I always wanted freedom,
not being told what to do.
But I broke the law,
got caught and sent to jail.
My children were taken away.
And no one brings them to see me
while I serve time.
People I thought I knew
are now strangers.
My children have forgotten me,
but I haven’t forgotten them.
Catching up is the hardest thing
when you're in jail
and doors on the outside are still closed.
I want to push my daughter on a swing.
I want to hold my son’s hand
and walk down the street.
The law is a barbed wire
around my life,
a noose that uses the weight
of my past against me.

Standing beside this seagull
motionless in air and eyeing me,
I lean against the pilot’s cabin
and follow water lines, distant, silent and still
pouring down from mountain lakes.

From these narrow fiords, deep
as mountains, glacier-cut in eons,
I look for the Viking ship to round a bend,
loud and frightening;
or were they not long dead,
and their boats long decayed?
It was only ghosts.
But they were there.
Grieg could see them too.

He sounded like a prince.
But then like a beast alone with her.
His words sounded like a cracked mirror
each leaf a sliver of something dark,
like the casings of my father’s bullets
in the top dresser drawer.
We never spoke of it.
The curtain was over the doorway
but I knew.

Summoned by the Sabboth sun
I entered my church of habit,  
suspecting that Jesus came
to wake the world up.

But through the prism of life
religion was a hotchpot of refracted strains,
myth and motive, innocence and guilt,
forgiveness and condemnation,
not yet refined by real love.

The history of religion stormed through
my mind, and I was its foreigner
in my own church, a back-pew Presbyterian,
a circumstantial version of a final draft.

Yet a spirit within me was joyful.
Like a point in time
that wanted to last forever,
or like a universe contained in a shell.
And more than that, it seemed to remember God,
but only way before I attended church.

Waiting quietly in my back pew,
remembering something ancient and new,
the source of every question and answer.
I wasn’t sure what to expect,
but there was a hint,
                        a power there that could start
a revolution.
But it had little to do with the sermon.

She was manic before court that day.
I told her we only had five minute to wait,
but she said she had to leave.
That was before she used the bad bag.
At the mortuary they thought she had
a frown on her face.
Her family from out of town just came to see
that she was dead,
then they left.
Her teenage daughter couldn’t stay.
She left in a car full of friends.
I looked at the corpse.
It did frown.

You thought you wanted freedom,
so they took your children away
and gave them to your sister.
Your children forgot you
and found their own freedom.
All you found were closed doors
and too much time,
weighing you down
until a noose broke your neck.

The phone rings and it’s him.

  He’s in Colorado.

  I can’t forget the day he was born.

  It was at noon, and I had a final exam

  that morning.

  It didn’t matter, they held him up for us to see.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “How are you”, I ask.

  “Fine”, he answers.

           He wouldn’t remember that day.

The first man, the Bible says, had no mother
He’s the only exception to the rule
that everyone has a mom.
Not only the good daughter
who plans ahead,
but even the wandering, curious pup
the predator swallows,
and even millions of babies who die
of shadowy diseases in ignorance,
all have mothers

The dictator who sent millions
to gas showers had a mother,
someone to see and hear for him
when his eyes and ears could not,
to think before his small mind had a thought,
to tell him stories of the dark universe,
to turn on the light and open the world.

I’ve seen mothers in skirts and pants,
scrubs, fatigues and prison clothes.
I’ve seen them with cigarettes, *****,
crack and rosaries,
with and without rules,
smart, slow, some just children.
Then there’s Sarah, “beyond childbearing years.”

They’ll never unite since no two are alike
except in making men fathers, be they princes
or rogues, and giving everyone life.
But isn’t that the whole world?
Is there anything bigger than being a mother?

Who else can make a child special,
more a person than merely unique,
fully forgiven for the guilt of being born,
accepted as the essential child
by the responsible maker holding life
in her hands?  
Who else can be the face of the world first appearing?
Is cleaning your room the ultimate point,
or is it to love or not to love?
Ask any mother.

As I carried my jacket on a hot afternoon,
looking for relief from the heat,  
a thin woman I was walking past asked me for "food money".  
I wondered whether she was really poor,
or just a panhandler working the street.  
She was good at asking, really good.  
But I’m a skeptic where panhandling’s concerned,
because I work for a living, and always have.  
And I know a thing or two about conning,
so I’m not likely to be taken in.  
But I looked her in the eye and saw another universe.    
I put a dollar in her hand.
“God bless you, sir”, she said, as I walked away.  
I left her with that small investment to let it increase forever.  
But it felt like the increase was mine.

The sun blinding
sits on the river.
I descend to the valley.
I can’t escape,
I’ll l be lost.
I’m  gravity.
My outcome so sure
as the ocean where I head.  
So set on flowing,
and longing to break free
and return.