Measured

With everyone asleep, the sun and I measure morning – which is to say, nothing is measured. Toast with coffee and a slightly snoring dog. The heat kicks on and off and I am grateful. Yet my madness creeps along the warming floorboards; my heavenly incarnate taps the carefully constructed chapel in the woods. I'm letting love have its way because in it, I feel the total process of the world. How else can I lean towards concordance? The quieting sun allows me to see unsettled dust motes and time travel and the way the outside longs to reunite with the inside. I am allowing who I am.

Your skillful pedagogy lifts the mask. Flakes of ash artfully become a stunning jewel and that is why we write, isn't it? There are no monsters to slay – no mountains to overcome. We simply leak the truth that arises from a disciplined aptitude. The honed skill of pleasure keeps us in touch with society's reality after the scales fall away.

Morning says I must play the part in order to dance with dust or dogs or life. Not until your river babbled the words did I understand the purpose of illusion: to play. Our play is that of the cosmos – a sacrament of ultimate being – and love, an art of pleasure opening that highway of the unknowable known.

If it is otherwise, then I cannot live here; I've seen too much and not enough.

we are god

and goddess

without worlds

at home in the applause

of our play

Writer: you teach and point and love and leave and mourn and heal through this art. The finale awaits our manuscript - the collaborative work everything we've always known.

Ending Syncopation

Tonight's moon, low and too far west of summer. Sitting beneath is to examine every single thought in all directions. Open, close, and open again – a heartbeat growing weary of unnecessary contemplation. And moonbeams move onward. A paper soul stays behind, mourning a lost word in the deeper night. Winter whittles towards the shapeless shape, inviting space and silence. The clean, white expanse never begs but quietly extracts with an open-mouthed kiss. November tossed the unfoldable blankets before I was ready. And so what? This is the trek of Now.

So in this way, I haven't packed my bags yet.

I've not lamented the string of gray pearls strung across the sun for a week.

And there is no keening on the moony 3 a.m. trail.

The heart of why I was made will thaw here in the icy tomb. It will touch your chest to end the syncopation of lack. Nature herself gives way.

Winter, even you will gain the power to solace the almost. And with this yes I will not fall asleep.

my blaze your shiver peace therein

Sainted Sea Dream

In a fog of dreaming I drift towards the day I fell asleep, hidden on the sloping dune of The Great Lake's face. Before the slip of consciousness, a cross of seagrass planted at my feet. The sand, my cradle. Sky, my spread. And in my hands, a chaplet of shells and stones. How watery hymns loosen the knots!

untangled in front of the sea - rosary hands

Waking does not mean a fading of the sea. Nor does it lessen the salty sting in the eyes. Instead, the currents of the world pass through as they must, taking only what is ready to go. My sorrow has ripened. Now shame is on its way passed. Past?

As a certain clarity threatens to settle the matter, dreaming need not quarrel for life or truth or endings. Wake and dream. Sea and stone. It is the “or” that slips away into the holy flame of sunset.

parlay wagered on infinite waves

a tendered soul to dream and wake

The Sound of Light

Through the night, a hard rain spoke. Everyone else slept as if hypnotized by an incessant conversation. But I listened to my inseparable brother. He asked for no pardon, so I offered none. This is IT, Watery Way. I am hearing things these days. Murmurs move from weightless echoes into tangible clarity. Teacher, your dust falls upon my crown and I will never not be grateful for the way you held my hand – wordy and fierce. Now there is walking for movement's sake, for I have nowhere else to be. The thievery of dreamfall surrenders to justice.

Now I know what a smile is – an elegant light, spreading recognition.

A smile into the toddler's curiosity at the market. A smile through steamy brown rice. A smile when I dropped the day's clothing for bed sheets . . .

Naked now, laughter borders the cosmic play.

Then silence – a transparent skirt spreading from the sounds of life. Emptied and quiet, the heart accepts it all.

And Love allows me to fall into It, as if I had gone somewhere, so that “I” might hear, over and over again: the Beloved is in love with You.

I am in Love with . . . [Y]ou.

Dawn arrives, splitting the rain, and light is all I can hear.

Train, Rain, the Sea and Me

Perhaps the train . . . To make love on a train, never being in one place, moving to the rhythm of each available now and in that way, there would be no particular state to keep us, no hotel imperfection or forest floor forced to keep the memory of our betrayal in hungry mosses, only a series of moments, escaping homeless breaths, passing by with the landscape at 150 mph.

The train could announce our passage through village and farm and canyon and mountain – a hundred places on one ticket. A hundred faces looking back at one. The steam trumpet alive with mimicry. Who is at the helm? The whistle lets you know.

Or the rain . . .

It drives with an endless purpose, all day and all night, to the point where one struggles to hear anything else. The brook swells with the runoff it cannot swallow. It writhes towards the river, collecting bits of the world as it goes – souvenirs for later gifting. The lake, risen. An arching dam, dutifully holding for now. This cadence keeps nothing for itself as it plays for gravity, a sold-out venue every time.

And the sea . . .

How could any lover not speak of the sea? She is never rushed in her power, nor neglectful in her gentle lapping. Her baptisms sustain the repentant and her anger stirs the complacent from their hazy lull. And when one finally falls into her bed in sublime surrender, one finds room for the entire world.

In all these places and none of them, I finish what never began.

On the Blushing Ridge

I move furniture to follow sunlight across elderly floorboards. From here I can watch October move its borders from sky to land. My mental fringe falls into a slow, floating cadence and like this, stillness is quilted. The overlapping saffron and siennas mute the bald sun for now, but soon there will be only bare branches – trees reaching for hugs. October barely arrives before it leaves. I'm at home on this high ledge of autumn's pinnacle, looking down into the steep descent of frigid expressions. Perhaps I do cling to what is beautiful. But my favorites fade so quickly and in the wake of long dark months, I want to celebrate them while I can. Embrace. And kiss. A Libra and her scales; which is heavier, justice or desire?

Apple slices and tea. Bread and honey. Soup and cider. The table speaks of harvested time. We sit together for now knowing that soon we will need to keep moving for warmth.

But not now. Today is marigold chairs pushed into golden beams. It is red, fleecy blankets pulled up to armpits, tucking in quiet legs and toes. Today is still October and I want you to sit with me on the blushing ridge of fall's most spectacular being.

It's Not Her Decision

Still, the writing only goes in one direction. It's not my decision. Every effort to dig at the fertile places barely releases dusty remnants – specks polluting the deep breaths that deliver your name. Sentences, poetry, jots, hey you . . .

a yes to what leads me - our prescription: Be!

Your eddy, my sun, play in coherence. There's the moon, too. Maybe I love the moon for its emptiness. Its beams alight on all the same, causing the question: do I reflect too much? Yet it all is . . . fueling this orbit for now.

The forest shifts color unto the earth, and the grey vault of winter begins to adhere. It is time to listen more closely to what has always been here. The babbling brook . . .  too long I have called it this or that, without listening to the name it always returns. In my wakefulness and in my sleep Beloved, I love you the same. So before ice demands your laughter, perhaps we will get this right.

I am listening now. Your smooth stones worn by motion settle into the soft portion of my open hands. Accept these letters until they disappear in perfection. This one who tends can do nothing more.

“ I am the vine, you are the branches . . .”

October 9

The river moves without legs and is not diluted by lovers walking downstream. Instead, it laps the impoverished feet of travelers, baptizing along the way. That is rain in October. That is the cold shroud on my birth day. That is.

I press into this day with an expectation that takes me by surprise. Love is here, like every other day. Yet, also, a childlike sense of play. . . and specialness. Mom takes me to breakfast and we talk about family, red lentil chili, and the ways in which aging bodies change aging homes.

And all day, friends send blessings and warm encouragements. My children hug me a few extra times and K. keeps checking my eyes to make sure that I know that today is distinct.

But the dog cries at my feet. She waits for the walk, but in my exclusiveness, she suffers. All threads are not included and so there is a sort of imbalance – missing notes in a song gathering towards harmony. My Libra ways tilt, and the difference changes the tune.

I'll make it back to the river tomorrow. The dog and I. But then who suffers?

the creek's threshold moving stones of broken backs and homes - take me with you

A Slower Gait

Today's walk had teeth. The hunger to feel my legs from the inside out was startling. For so long I have bounced my eyes away from the purple tracks marring what used to be my favorite countryside. But not today. Leaving home in the dark, I pressed my feet hard into pavement for distance and heat and to feel the muscles pull against the scars I have avoided for months. My pace confused the dog, or maybe it was the occasional whimpering and whining of old baggage whose time has come.

Eventually I walked straight into sunup – and not just the bruised sky healing itself towards light. I marched into the full orbing hemorrhage, searing my eyes and dropping my jaw. Reaching down to rub the scars, I felt the mottled tissue and thought about tattoos and cancer and the idea of physical healing and suffering. And I exhaled. Maybe for the first in weeks.

A slower gait for the woods; my presence is disturbing enough. The milkweed and corn on the fringes are mixing yellow and green, breaking in the same places like siblings sometimes do. I raise my arms above my shoulders and pretend that the dying weeds are the onlookers of a race, high-fiving my efforts to go further and deeper.

But as soon as I enter the coolness of the forest's throat, there is no more make-believe. My language forgets itself in favor of nothing. Here, I am no longer confined to the narrow band between birth and death. I am fed unto the ordinary, and digested whole. My scarred legs and bloodied knees drop the pretenses that carried me here. For I am only grateful that you waited forever for the healed me, hungry walker.

Oh . . . Just a Love Letter

Enshrouded in the dense dawn, the dog and I went, step by step. Past the thistle.

Over the low bridge.

Threading benevolent arms and gulping autumn perfume.

We stopped to celebrate pine cones atop ginger blankets and sip from the creek's donation. Only the chickadee sang. And my heart became voluptuous, spilling all the sentiments I meant to save. In a single moment, the lips of our ground and sky did not touch, extending the horizon beyond that which is knowable. The past refused acknowledgement and the future waits undetected behind the unraveling veil. There was only now.

and I was embedded in the individual notes of love's whispering breeze

How does one return from the threshold of eternity . . . the silence of perfection, the integration of all outliers? I have all day to live the answer.

At home, the candle burns and with it, words become flesh as I utter and scribe and reach and hold.

my endlessness exposed - the thin places beg and we arrive

We are the source. Joined to the ineffable. And the invisible hand is implicated as we awaken one another. Verily, verily. . . we are enveloped in a sensuous world – Our Home.

Okay. Okay?

Okay.Serendipity on repeat. The dragonfly I never mentioned. Coffee in front of the empty cafe chair. Bees and chickadees. And so much blue.

I look at leaf litter piling on the porch and I see dead bodies. The fall out. Yet also, fertilizer. Only the mind is at odds with this path. Is and is not; can and can not. The way around the paradox is to crave the dagger. That is, straight through.

Because as it turns out, existence is inclusive.

Sharing the way, we become the oral tradition that lives on in a song, unrestricted by text or meaning or interpretation. The humming chant settles the ripples that our letters have sent ahead, and we remember everything the trees and the hawks and the moon had to say. We are not a part or apart. We are. Just here. Okay?

The Tallest Migrant

  I was the tallest migrant on the trail this morning, catching webs on my cheek every few feet. Across the meadow, the pheasant were dancing so I rested and watched awhile. Wet grasses. Still air. My chest rose in this full moon hangover.

Walking is a work that undoes the work and thinking about that is work, so I just walk. Mostly.

unfastening I find room off the trail already prepared

A new flame rises from old wood. Or is the blaze always recycling, burning and dying just out of linear reach? The ash is easier to process. It blackens my hands and scatters in the breathy night. Tangible. Knowable. Inert?

Walking can be a meandering.

A mending.

Or it can be the way to get somewhere else.

And it can be the surest course reducing the me that exists without.

You.

Orphaned Blooms

Earlier, I prepared the rose bush for winter, cutting back stalks to a shape more fitting of burlap. Yet from the lacerations, three orphaned blooms.

Late. Soft. Sublime.

Roses so far into September are an unexpected gift. Fog settles over the muck fields each dawn, but no frost means the Indian Summer is yet at large. But I don't care anymore, really. I'm ready for autumn and its winter wake. The language of the land has rewritten the story I thought I knew by heart.

Today the sun warmed my westerly bedroom back to summer's inviting hand. Blanket to my lips, I slept into the heart of afternoon.

Enfolded. Tended. Held.

The time for truth has slipped beyond. And text eclipses the moon. What I mean is, the effortless breeze sweeps mountain peaks and valley lakes the same. It brushes the belated rose and moves my autumn curtains to reveal the gentle grace of what is always invited.

Love.

Vanishing With You

Talk turns lately to bonfires and bones. Goodbyes mix with greetings and it all seems quite fitting given my apple-toned flourish before the winter withering. Yet there is love.

I always fall hard in autumn's liminal beauty – a sort of tip-toeing along the threshold of October's ecstasy and December's torpid drowze. Shoulders shrug for warmth and words become visible as the very soul-breath freezes and hangs in the chilly air. Evergreen remains, and that is always so attractive against the backdrop of gargoyle grey.

So much grey.

Twenty sentences are too many today. The cardinals are chatty just beyond my windowsill and that should be enough. Yet the divine urge to translate desire curls me up in the writing chair.

Take me on a walk -

metaphors relegated to foot-printed grounding and the perfecting presence of heartship

The last few days, I have walked in the rain. The squirrels and birds and deer all did their thing: some hiding, some foraging, some calling to their mates. And their thing is part of the whole, with no beginning or end. No boundaries. And I do my thing, only . . . there is no just me.

The mindful attention to the storied universe suggests that the very words one writes causes an expression and autonomy of one's self, thereby deflecting our awareness of how you and me and she and he and they and ze are really just the manifestations of one, eternal, thing.

Maybe that's why holding hands on an autumn walk, noticing decay and pinecones and creek babble and bird drama is true object of my desire; I vanish that way.

Together.

Nothing Hinders, Nothing Gives

In the barn, time hangs. Other than motes swimming in light from broken peaks and illicit gaps, nothing hinders. Nothing gives. The smell of hay stings my eyes and in one inhalation, I remember a life I was never meant to keep. How small one can be in a barn-sized past.

It's the old beams that get me. Squared timbers, slivered.  Weathered, yet intent.  Our magnetic whispers call and respond: touch me – yes – familiar friend – looking well.

firsts and lasts fit to frame the always what is

I've thought about the ways in which the beams shelter. Yet also, the slavery they have seen. My recognition speaks of age and purpose and protection and decomposition and a sort of mounted beauty. They are something out of place, holding the world together.

And I have love for things like that. A bending moment?

arms of exaltation support and prison - either or both the path

Under Tented Beliefs

We split an elephant ear and talked about draft horses as rain muttered from the corners of the tent. I hate the fair. Too many people paying too much money to eat too much crap and watch too many animals pant and sweat in too many cages. How strange the places we find ourselves when trading discipline for the decadence of impulse! Though, somehow this was better, the drizzled twist of a dampened chaos.

Later from the back room, I watch an apricot grin fight through the gunmetal sky. A fiercely guarded aloneness means marking territory with warnings and “do not disturb” signs and snarling teeth if one must. The world is living me without my permission, and it's taking a toll. Not until the day is carefully folded and put away do I tend to remember the easy path through the borderlands. Even a citizen can be an immigrant from time to time.

But how grateful I was this morning for her talk of visiting birds and then again, with the aching poetry of chirps and presence! There is mystery in this stricken chord. And for an eternal moment I am perfectly content to listen without the accompaniment of why why why.

under tented beliefs I crawl for a song - cardinals in the rain

Widening in the Vase

The usefulness of pronouns wavers like summer's wane - minutes convert away from long lasting light towards the growing hunger of night. Tender grasses are serenaded by that silver-tongued iceman making his way ever closer.

Manifold forms of the earth say it better than even the most lyrical landscape of the rhapsode bard. Sunflowers bow and nod. Blackbirds carry their song to a more appreciative crowd. And all the while, humans keep filling the conversation with words that dull the improvisation of nature's incessant interrelation.

Even me. I know better. You do too. See? They want more than the pen can bare.

I keep setting aside the end that locks down my gaze. The one thing that makes me feel special must dissolve into the babbling current that fills space with every thing that ever needed to be heard.

If I am not an author, then I am not “I.” If there is only listening, then I become a conduit of home-cooked meals and clean floors and thank-you notes. Perhaps like this, a fade into the ancient and always chorus arrives, whereby language returns to its unspoken, unbroken origin.

The last rose bloom of the season widens in the vase. Yet the hearts I have tended, less so.

How much longer will I resist the lessening of me? Cicadas say: l7 years or in an instant; it makes no difference, you see.

In the Language of Flowers

I still climb the ladder. How strange that words maintain the lift towards a better view. Is it more than that? After the raw moment of newness, everything else only offers a dull walk around managed wilds. The lack settles, like the golden dust of summer's wane.

you be you and hold my hand - it's how goldenrod is harvested

Lately, I meander. The trail has changed so much since spring that the way seems heavy and foreign. Lace brushes elbow-high and the dog no longer fits beneath brambles. Too soon the twigged skeletons of the departed season will bear witness to autumn. October makes me a Libra but it is also the last possible boundary before that familiar canopy of darkness.

There is a certain self-loathing to speak of winter in August. But honesty is now requiring an ending to half-way touchstones. Maybe it's not clear because I can't know what I mean. In that way, it seems that with the yielding of meaning comes the end of writing. For what need would there be of a translator if all of this is transient? For whom do I even exist?

desire in the language of flowers - silence

Soft in Mine

Golden shades of day flutter in the arms of pine and oak. A bee throws itself against what looks like freedom, but instead remains trapped. Or is it a house fly? All I know for sure is that today is ending. Please be quiet. Living is patient work, I've decided. The person I want to be sits beyond, shaking. For what purpose is life, Teacher? A boy the same age as my son died today, and his sister vomits in grief behind the wheel. The path has been given, yet I see death. I witness the watchful land of splintered men.

It's not possible to speak of love anymore. There is only the moon with its lost appetite, waiting for the cycles to change.

I hear you asking about what I mean. I'm saying that it is foolish to announce life and death and love and grief and hope. It only leads to suffering. My son's hand, soft in mine, will only lead to bloodletting; tucking my daughter's hair behind her ear is the same as throwing dirt onto a rose-colored casket.

The freedom to be free gets us no closer to the place we already are. And the heaviest chain of all is the one that insinuates that I am so much more than this.

so and yet a deepening sigh I let it be

The Armless Midwife

Words. Our human artifacts. Letters linking an image insist on grasping for that which is leaving. Or already gone. If I write about fireflies mingling after the storm, my glass-jar mind holds them for a moment's joy until they can't breathe. Freedom means I will let them go. You know that is what is happening here, don't you?

weeds and chicory wait on the fringes of wind peace be with us

Words. The ones about a one-day future are most treacherous when they impregnate the mind with that which cannot be known. Hope is born into the armless midwife of now. So it is that we should bury and mourn the manuscript, the pages of poetry, and the letters to pen-pals in the thin places, too far removed to keep for ourselves.

Words. Muddled again. Do you think I'm hiding behind fonts, peering between spaces and calling it art? In the end, (which is anytime, really) I believe that the landscape of language will be plowed under in favor of the silence growing without caution next to the tracks.

Deliverance. Un-worded. All along.