Finding Grace at Waikiki

Male and female,
a rib, a little dust.
I almost can not tell
the sound of your sleeping breath
from the sound the surf makes,
wave upon wave, outside our door.

A rib, a little dust, a lone gull on the beach,
and I know again, as i have known before,
that this bird and every bird
will someday lay his feathers down
in some secret place,  as will
the beachcomber who every morning
greets the sun with thanks, lay down
his rubber sandals, leaving
his ephemeral footprints on the shore,
as will the Ohio banker sipping coffee
by the pool, and the little Japanese girls,
who with joyful cries, chase the gull to flight:

every single one of us now breathing
in and out this fine salt air
of early morning
someday will lay ourselves down
in our own secret place.

7-2012

Night Traveler

Night Traveler


Something happens that
unravels me from myself, unties me,
sets me free.  I do not, in fact,
sleep.  I fly.

REM is absent, my brain alert.
My dream body lifts, and falls
with each breath.

Inhale.  Exhale.  

Beneath me in darkening pastures
flatulent cows chew and belch and fart.
Highways flow with automobile lights rushing
like red and white cells through arteries.
I fly over the rooftops of cities, I leave
this world I love behind.  I fly
until there is nothing but air.

Inhale.  Exhale. 

When the sun has set, stars appear
on my left and on my right, above me,
below me, and I pass a boundary.
On the other side, I am the only thing moving,
and the sun is just another star.

One Story

One Story

In our bed
my old cat purrs softly
in the bend of my body,
the sound coming
from some plaintive internal tunnel.
Her eyes are cancers.
They have shaved her to the skin.
Her sad pink body gives off
a kind of light.
She shudders with the explosions
of her own sound, claws working,
heart beating.  The wave of it
climbs and then plunges her
into cat-dreams.

In the white shimmer
of early morning we sleep,
my cat and I,
our heads together, filled
with winged things:

     slow, incautious sparrows,
     cabbage white moths,
     and archangels.

This is one story.
I hate knowing the ending.

Stone

Stone


My stone 
 Sleeps in the cradle
Of my hands
Drinking my fire
My stone grows hair
In wonderful curls
Down its mossy back
It loves the ice
That breaks me
More than it loves me
It sings of bare feet
Of blackbirds dying
Of the cracking of heaven
My stone knows black and white
Was there at the hour
Of my birth
My stone knows my name
Understands cemeteries
Knows grief
Talks to God

Genesis

Genesis

1
I am from light, yes, a spark
from the Great Intelligent Light
that set the universe afire,
from love, both spirit and matter, yes,
and from the green living body
of the earth:  oceans and saltgrass,
rain and roots.  I am from amoeba,
invertebrate to vertebrate,
from Lucy.

2
I am from Ephraim, from ancient Celts
breathing haze rising from peat bogs.
I am from tassled cornfields in Cornwall.
from the fires and peppered spices
of Spain, from El Cid.
I am from salt miners on salt barges of Cheshire,
I am from their empty bellies, and of
the porridge and buttermilk that filled them.

3
I am from sailing ships and steamboats.
I am from children walking behind handcarts
crossing the vast American prarie.
I am from their frozen feet wrapped in
gunnysacks, from weary feet dancing polkas or
Fylde waltzes and Virginia reels.  I am from
fiddles and string bands.
I am sego lily and lumpy dick and
bread 'n with it, from white salamanders
and the Three Nephites, and funeral potatoes.

4
I am from gold miners and lumberjacks.
I am from red-headed women.
I am white beans and pot roast,
macaroni and cheese.
I am from books, from the  undying omniscience
of Wordsworth and Keats, from Burns and
Steinbeck and Bradbury,  I am from pleasure
and pain.  I am paper and ink,  and a perfect
brightness of hope.  I am from wings.

A Kinship with Water

A Kinship with Water

"If the millions of women who haul water
 for long distances had a faucet by their door,
 whole societies could be transformed."
                   -- Tina Rosenberg


There are poems that tell us how water rises
as mist, and returns again to rivers and rooftops
as music, or as a white calligraphy of snow.

Shapeshifter, water  fills our glassware
and our gutters alike, disguising itself as birds,
or dogs, or elephants and tigers drinking

from the same shallow pool.  It manifests
as boys on a soccer field, as coffee in cups,
in wadis and in gardens.

There are words that say: sweet water,
bad water, holy water, words that whisper of
water flowing into baptismal fonts, where our sins

 float away like fat turds, or where hidden water
 runs under cities in sewers, or as ice-sheets
 melting at 0.7 millimeters per year, warming

the currents of our rising oceans.
Are we not, ourselves, made of water,
our cells swollen and wet, our blood

a red tide that follows the moon, knowing
kinship with  desert women hauling water
long distances, thirsting, measuring, each drop?



jed 6-2-12

My Brother's Blindness

My Brother's Blindness

"When I consider how my light is spent..."
                            --John Milton, On His Blindness

I think of that first morning
when you wake blind,
that one short moment, a split-
second that will linger for years,
and everything in me softens to tears.
I see how my closed eyelids are a wash
of moving color,
and lose focus.
Although the sun still rises,
the splintered stars still come out, and
each night street lamps are lit,
this world will never again be
a place you can visit.
You will be patient.  Like Milton,
you will only stand and wait.
Wherever you are now, even though
you've stepped away from your body,
a ghost of yourself, I hope
in some other galaxy, in another
dimension,  you may yet see
the light of other suns, other stars,
illuminating everything.

The Earth as Body

The Earth As Body

More than stone and mortar will be found
in the process of excavation, retrieval of evidence,
and recovery: a restoration of loss—

    a half-cent piece, a toy dog, a hinge,
    buttons of many shapes and colors,
    a hair-pin, a glove, a shoe...
    
from top to bottom, from known to unknown.

    a wall, a bone needle, a horn spoon,
    a hatchet, a fish hook, ground water.
   
 When all this detritus of hunger, thirst, lust, pulse,
and breath is squeezed out, wrestled away, evaporated,
and finally re-invented, once all the grubbing's
done, what's the prize?  New obsessions:

    the rare stillness, the perfect freedom,
    the lighted window. Life.
    

    
            —Joyce Ellen Davis

To Catch a Young Moon

To Catch a Young Moon

"If you live in Northern Hemisphere...you might
 be able to catch an exceedingly young lunar crescent..."
 -- EarthSky, April 22, 2012


The almanac portends weather, seed-time and harvest,
and all phases of the moon like a book of poetry.
But there will be no catching of a young moon.
Time counts.  And the moon never looks away.

Night after night after night in its never-looking-away,
its not-so-young face is counterfeit in all earth's mirrors.
It was matched on the waves of ancient seas, before
the swarming ammonites perished, before
the herds of hadrosaurs were lost.  It was there
in the dew of Cretaceous forests, when mammoths
roamed the grasslands of Colorado.
Its dry seas were reflected upon the farther shores
of the Colosseum, in the drowning eyes of
Naiumachiari in their sinking battleships,
and in the dream-blinded eyes of Jeanne d'Arc
crying Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

The same moon.  The same moon broken in the
moving ripples of Bull Run.  The same moon
luminous as a spotlight over the naked bodies
of a million Jews who died in ditches, with their
eyes open.  The same moon caught in the sleepless
eyes of lovers, lustrous on their naked shoulders
and thighs, their long limbs touching.  The same moon
flashing on their smiles.  The band plays,
Pink Floyd breathes: If your head explodes
with dark forebodings I'll see you on the dark side 
of the moon. Their lips whisper in it's fettered light,
Jesus.  Jesus.  Jesus.


JED 5-1-12

the wonderful syncopated robot pig

is born in the basement, birthed
of brother allred's restless dreams

his pig iron heart opens wide
when his master calls

the great man who framed him
moves him forward

with a wave of his thumb
the merest flick of a switch

he waits for the electric circuit
that completes him

some invisible beam of joy
he stirs, lurches, shuffles

and spins, his shoulders and
hind quarters of fasteners

sockets and set-screws
gyrate and whine and his fine

metal bones begin to meander
with an electric grace

in a semblance of life itself
here boy, brother allred calls

come! and the pig comes
knowing in the marrow of his

riveted bones that of all the rare
creatures brother allred has made

with all their bright voltaic
tesla bolts and ball-bearings

brother allred loves him best
and deep in his soul of

threaded gauges and clamps
he knows that he will dwell

in the tender mercies of
his maker forever and forever

amen

.

Unraveling the Magic

Unraveling the Magic: Lift, Drag, & Gravity

"There are books that describe all this
and they are useless" ~ Adrienne Rich

1
Do fish dream of safety in numbers,
a synchronized clockwork?
Do they sleep, eyes wide,
moving in a telepathy of group soul?
In their fishy dreams, do they always
elude the shark in his oblivious hunger,
his machine of death, turning
in their shoals and shadows,
a watery chorus line recital of
swim left now, swim right, lift, drag,
repeat, repeat, repeat?

2
And those black swarms of birds
we watched on video, turning over
olive groves in early autumn evenings,
wave upon wave, casting
their dark nets now left, now right,
expanding and contracting, diving into
some place of knowing,
loving one another, their gregarious chatter
loud enough to drive kings mad.

3
We dream of dark matter, of the knowing silence
of fishes. We dream of flight. Then we thank God,
measuring our maneuvers and aerobics against
what there is, and why there is anything,
saying, Imagine that!

Om mani padme hmm

.

The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now

"Time is what clocks measure." ~ A. Einstein

"Time...is what keeps everything from happening at once." ~ Ray Cummings


but there are those who'd have you believe
everything does happen at once,
that time is incarnate and of one substance, Divine Trinity,
Past, Present, and Future, Maker
of all things visible and invisible.
The world grows old by a series of geologic
accretion of facts. Time is a cyclical event
powered by gravity.

The scripture of numbers is large,
the seconds and minutes adding up to years,
to thousands of years, ticking away like
frames in a film strip, and what you must remember
always, is what you have left behind.

What you learn is holy. It is bread and sleep. It will rise like dough
to wonder, as if its words were stored
like names in a mountain vault, kept dry, accessible
for ten thousand years, waiting to be called forth
like Lazarus, each by his own ineffable tag.

And that thing you must remember from dreams
each millenium when the cuckoo (the last great voice)
calls, is this: the little boat you came in on;
the river becoming a sea; the undertow; the taste
of salt on your tongue; the sweet ache
of that apple, the soft fruit that fell
into your still-young throat as knowledge,

it's seeds and skins (what you must leave behind)
discarded with your uninhabited and mostly irreducible
mortal bones. Remember:

Lazarus.

.JED 3-9-12

Behold the Jumping Spider

CIRCLE OF BEING

"Come into my parlor," said the spider...


Knowing how these things happen, she
drops a lifeline, and carpets the bare floor
of her parlor with a fine gauze
of her own making. Sometimes,

she lies in wait all morning for
her breakfast, the bacon and eggs,
the warm croissants and jam of flies.
Knowing these things must happen

before the dusty zodiacal light of dusk,
the flies forgive her broken promise
of a quick death. She is so beautiful,
with her eight hydraulic limbs, her colors,

her droll little four-eyed face,
her chelicerae, as she leaps forward
and forward into one long
anointed circle of being.

ECLIPSE

Eclipse

So it was, the fallen
Samael, from the dark fringe of heaven
would have eaten the moon for lunch, like a leg of lamb,
with a side dish of stars, but for the holy
army of its queen Asariel, who rules it.

Deep in the river of battlement, she spread her
banners in a bright sheet of splendor across
its deep gutters and ditches.
Asariel, the watchdog, before Samael
with his sassy lips watering for just one more
bite, and another, and still one last morsel,

told himself so everyone's a critic now, saying
it would've tasted like ragweed.

And soon invited the seven sisters
of the Pleaides to feast with him for dinner
upon the the sun's warm brew.





words: fringe, moon, leg, loud, river, sheet, critic, ragweed, dinner, lunch

Grace

Grace is


the night that is light upon us
the world that is spared
the firstborn of everything

the sum of specified order
flawless in every moment
the excellence and beauty of chance

the immanent reconciliation
of power and glory
the bitter experience

the urgent agenda of the elements
and the four forces of nature
the hiding place

the nearness of green pastures
the unified field
the flute by itself

the holiness of wild things
the short list of mortal entitlements
the humane door of sleep

a pardoned death

Old Oranges

Old Oranges


And so it was

on a Sunday before sunrise
with the moon in the Lion's House,
the Maker of Moons watched the world,
told a story: In the beginning
were old oranges
round as moons, thick skins waxy and pitted
as the thick hides of pigs
that squeal and roll among
acorns and table scraps,
curled peelings of potatoes
bread ends
and carrot tops --
soft, decaying moons,
secondaries, rolling
like the nine moons of Saturn,
the twelve moons of Jupiter,
the two moons of Mars,
in the beneficent slops
where their primaries, the pigs
did paw and root.

And they saw
that it was good.

Saint Francis Preaches to the Rats

for they are the fastidious Brotherhood
of Long-tailed Rodents of the genus Rattus.
He gathers them in a social equivalent
of Congregation. He speaks

but words do not matter. He leaves them
a simple message of breathing: Noble Brothers,
Blessed Sisters, you Nation of Rats,
Give thanks.

And he walks among them, touching
their heads and their tails
with his tunic. He leaves them
his testimony of fallibility, commitment,

and co-operative behavior.
He asks nothing for his sermon. In return
they give him nothing.
On occasion they look back upon

their vulnerable selves
with no clue what is going on but
a wish: escape and a quick lunch
of malt from the miller's bags.

For the Holy Spirit Loves the Rat

UNEARTHING
This raw
wild beast that pants
and prowls unleashed
and roars
in me, and leaves
clawed footprints
on my soul
does not know
that somewhere
between the convulsive howls,
soft in this foul and dark
and hairy den, within
this pile of bones
I grow unseen
newfledged and untried
wings.

LIST

Don't ask, "Are you afraid?"--
everyone is afraid. Ask, Where
can we find to run?"


-William Stafford
More than Words Can Tell



"Where to run?" Stuck here
in our five-dimensional lives

enfolded in a multi-dimensional universe
we run, eat, sleep, make love,

and wonder. We lie in our beds
and watch the light creep in

illuminating cracks on the walls and the
maculate ceilings as continents, faces,

emblems, and chronicles, interpreting them
as Signs. We hear dogs barking,

touch one another, cry, say goodbye, run, pray,
write poems, ask questions, make lists,

and run, as if any of these things might suggest
true exploration of what really is,
 
as if they might be messages
from some far star

that will help us understand Where?
And Why?
.