Darker still

The Scoured Coast

Charred raddled oak, bark peeled by lightning where we once
walked. This poem a gate rusted shut between us, a path
choked with ripgut grass bristling through dune and scree.

Handed off, hands empty where I reach and touch as if
touch became theory and I untouchable, as if concepts of
touch sufficed and warmed the bitter air.

Two cups, one broken, one empty, this poem a thirst I can’t
say or slake through brine and sharp sand between us, sea full
of dark shapes rolling under breakers, near land’s edge, near
tidepool and blown hollowed oak on the edge of a colder season.

Turning darker

Ivy, reaching

Green textures

I love a curve in a road, part II

Ongoing random hermeticism

Creative energy manifests itself in the continued war on gravity.

Disorientreed

Further up the street, the war on gravity

Near where the gate was...(see earlier post)

Another true story

In Alpine

In the no-name café higgledy-piggledy packed with bread,
grapefruit, patio furniture, recovered Queen Anne loveseats
and a second-hand office chair or two, waiting for a cinnamon
roll and the spider-bite of another song sung by Sinatra
Ella or Bobby Darin (so I had no choice) I grabbed a book
off the bowed shelves – Mythology – and dared the muse to
tickle me with a random dive. Yellowed leaves parted and
opened to “Orpheus.” I laughed and dared the muse again,
slid my hand in for another gift but when I opened to the
page with those shamans singing what came before the Kalevala,
singing to create the world, I knew it was past time to go.

More geometry

I dreamt I wrote this -- so I had to for real

Hypotenuse

I.
That string in me scraped by beauty’s brass pick –
callused fingers stop and slide a ratio of threadbare
blues wringing tears in time past measure.

II.
That string in me plucked by beauty’s tortoise-shell pick –
hypotenuse of wabi-sabi and to-kalon singing all things
perfect, and perfect in their imperfection.

III.
That string in me strummed by beauty’s green nylon pick –
my body the tuning fork, gut-feeling every hum and shiver
arms akimbo, curled line of my waist opposite that angle and
you, the resonator.

What I found when I went looking for color

Open house

The little red-and-white sign in the image says "Open House".
(More poems to come later, they just take a while to bake.)

And more from that same spot

And then I saw the gate...

The end effect

Traveler

The monarchs strung in a skittering
line kite-tail ribboning trailing
all towards home.

My long quiet exile from “from here” –
even butterflies know what I lost.

Bright sun long shadows

X marked the...

Two Blue Jays

Two blue jays led me by teasing calls,
can’t-touch-me clatter into thin woods.
Blue motion just beyond reach, rasping
laughing at me, the hot sun bleached
as they climbed then perched. I looked
up – jays haloed, corona’d from sweat,
two jay sunspots against searing light –
looked down, blinked at the perfect X
of two blue jay feathers crossed. A sign
but no clues to why X marked that spot.
The birds now quiet. No clouds, no wind.
Two jays, two feathers, one X.

So many thoughts about that X.
At last I’m almost empty and yet,
and yet the koan catches me.

Yellow tangle