February is like a phantom
Passing swiftly through the door.
It’s the soul-month of the year,
The snowdrop, the little month.
Love whom you love
With all the love you have
For time will not wait.
None of us are going home.
You won’t keep your name,
It’ll burn out like a flame.
Even the lamb that strayed
Will be found to be splayed.
Passengers on a ship of fools,
It’s for you I come to shrive.
February is like a ghost,
It glides across the floor.
What is any of it about?
You and I are all we have.
Happy birthday February!
From Imbolc soars a silver ball,
And then that will be all.

I saw a falcon today—a merlin
Rare I think
Too fast to turn and look again
A flash it was
Like an arrow on fire
With a magician’s name
And hunger’s aim
Look out pigeons
Look out waxwings
They attack from below
And profit from confusion
With rapid wings
And falcon speed
They climb for the skylarks
And bring down the moon

Old footballs limp into eternity,
Or they’re kicked by the wind
Into weedy fields and lost forever.
When they become deflated
Angels sleep on them
Like children sleep in their beds.
Every old ball, like me, thinks
Roundness is relativity in motion,
The essence of a ball
Is to put the earth in a child’s hands,
To round out the hard hours of living,
To bend space around happiness,
And to plant the seed
Of eternal recurrence in time.

Every December I reread Kenneth Patchen
His poems are like Christmas lights
On impoverished streets
I remember buying a signed edition
In a Las Vegas bookshop
I think it should have cost more
But so should roses and sunsets
My heart goes out to Kenneth Patchen
His broken back and silent anguish
His poems mused me into meditation
Fused me into the flowering of forever
How many of his poems
Were like gifts we opened at Christmas
When as children we could receive
Why is it every time I read Patchen
I’m awash in grief and gratitude
It’s like the resurrection of something
Comfort has lost in us an avowal
About our duality and ambivalence
How we love and hate
How we end our wars with tears of joy

Where was my son running with the ball?
Was it the ball he carried
That compelled him to run?
Did the ball say, “over here,” and “over here”
And off went my son
Cradling the flight in his hands.
Before he learned to throw, catch, bounce,
Or kick the ball,
It made him run, as if he were the son of all spheres,
Son of the air and sun.

My first reckoning with amazement,
One of my grandfather’s rain barrels
Overgrown with blue and white morning glories,
Rooted to the green height of summer.
A blossoming barrel, a flowering topiary,
Like a sleeping bear covered by sun petals,
Breathing and alive in a deeper life,
With rainwater rainbows and interlaced light,
With climbing, winding, twining vines,
Growing even from the barrel’s cavity,
Flowing up, out, and over,
Also floating on the waters at the rim.
A tropical boscage, soft to every sense,
A magical flowering of vision
For a child steeped in creation’s dream,  
Alive in the stillness of discovery,
With hummingbirds, a half-dozen bright,
Arriving to lift the barrel into light.