Pandora’s Moon

Let’s forget the echoes
of my thirtieth year
for there’s refuge
in the night and the moon.

Moonlit night
where imagination stretches starward.
Moonlit night
where my name falls off like an autumn leaf.
Moonlit night
where I’m a sapling attune to winter wind.
Moonlit night
where my past hibernates, ant-sized.

Left of Gandhi

Sittin’ to the left of Gandhi
Peaceful intentions and all

Honolulu Zoo behind me
Girls playing volleyball
Beautiful ocean

Yet, the world burns in more ways than one

My wife in the water, with beautiful fish

Day Job

After a night of therapeutic bottle and blunt passing
He wakes on earth at 5AM
In a lumpy bed
He goes to the airport in his overalls
Brandishing a handkerchief
He scrubs the thick plastic windows
With long handles bruises
He watches the jets take off
They move hot through the endless sky
With purpose

February

We only say it correctly when we’re learning to spell it, a hint of brew, this month more soft-spoken than the last, and short – though Valentine roses’ petals fall before ice melts. Oh, some whisper it as a synonym for claustrophobia, closing down or slamming doors so fast that cold lurks abandoned out there where invisibles moan and something smelly hides under the front steps.

Mother

this humo ludens collaborans
has many plans
renewing vows
supporting plants
saving bees
down on my knees

with every breath
we take in oxygen
gifts from forests, meadows, mosses & ferns

The Red Gate

Can you see us through the gate? the Tutelo ask.

I sprayed it apple red last winter, aerosol in my lungs.
Must be more careful in the time of masks.
But the red. The red! You can see it a quarter mile away, walking up the lane.
Crooked door opening to a wide mossy bed of poplar and walnut.
Shadows bend into each other. Locust limbs rest on the lazy fence.
An old wooden coop, emptied years back by the fox, sits where the home place was.

One hundred years and one thousand acres: apple orchard.
The caretaker’s house, rows of seven sisters’ roses wild and pink still push out
At the spring house. Into the north pasture.
A cemetery of pushed grey stones at the corner.

Without, Within

Tiny round-faced vaquita porpoises,
dark-eyed mountain gorillas,
intricately striped Sumatran tigers,
so many species disappearing
under greed’s heavy boots
although the loss seems abstract
as we stop at Costco for groceries,
fill up the car before heading home.

Last Chance Road

A light rain washes clean the leaves, the green melody of freedom from the city’s nightmares. Time rolls past, fast or slow, no one knows, like the mists that rise up and settle down upon the Smoky Mountains. Days lose their distinctions, their names. Dust, thick and heavy in the sun, embraces the rain like new love refusing to let go and calms the road down, clearing the air, the sky, the pathway love must travel to embrace a new rain.

38 Dollar Store Candles

Pessimism is natural, like Type-1 Diabetes, liver, heart disease. The Caddy, Miata, they’re not there because you’re now half-full or half alive, but -dead. Drive.

Flight

Now all I hear is my own hum so turn again to the window where a broken line of parked cars dots the whitening sidewalk, as the sun englobes the street in crisp detail and vivifies the skeletal oaks that scratch against the sky, implying the chimes of birds about to arrive. I lean against my window, note the dust motes pillowed on the glass like a moleculed yawn, so grab a rag and spot, on the ledge, two piebald pigeons strutting and pulsing back and forth as they peck along the sill in sync.

Visitant

Literary pilgrims welcome

Month: February 2021