Clouds, Holy Water, Butter

How do we know when You are speaking to us?
You are something holy,
You keep us up at night.

I hang on your arms like a clingy dancer
apologizing repulsively -
I'm sorry.

This might be indigestion
or a league of angels outside my window,
faces turned full toward me like moons,
pale deer.

           Once I ran, I run, I wanderlust
I wait to be anesthetized. I ring my hands
or swish around in pantaloons, ripening
for the orphanage.

CGT GAA CCT

e = yes.

Antimatter.


Come by here and walk with me among the herbs
like some sophisticated gentleman,
discriminating lavender from lavender
who walks upstairs in slippers
and doesn't use the banister or a pool clad cape. A bag of sand.

Dementia. I will always be a helpless pea-weed, somewhere sending tendrils
out to the patronizing son. Take what I can get. Lick up
a frozen drop azalea, rhododendron.

Rubber buy, rubber buy beads. Rubber buy beads and coats. Old peat coats. Nanny goats
and sleep.

We Are

We are
bared tongue
to the ice

bared eyes
to the sun

bared arms to bared arms

bared arms to bared arms.

Trickle to the Sea

I am always afraid of mediocrity.
But if I say nothing, chance nothing,
sling nothing out into the air,

nothing will set forth
or turn colors,
peach and green and umber.

And so call, spread out, cast off silently on a river.
Earth itself needs to see
the things it grows while sleeping. 

While snipping a bowl of string beans...

While snipping a bowl of string beans,
I thought of
how your name tastes on my tongue -

- smoke and brick,
cedar chips
and coriander seed.

first love

how did i choose?
     i was so young
with you.

i opened my eyes

and yours was the first
face I saw

     it was over.



i loved you

from the day i was born



and the moment i saw your face
i knew you were true.

Easter 2013: Tallis Canon

All praise to Thee.

I am so thick with memories. It is as if
I'd never washed at all -

the mud and wet hay,
that soft fur, the kid goat's muzzle,
the gray bare trees
and cerulean sky.

Ducks guzzling in puddles,
chickens squawking,
the cow chewing stolidly,
the white mother nanny
hard and disinterested.

What happens when we grow -
do we blink in the light,
shy away, then go
and find the world too small?

Or can we somehow enter again
our mother, choose from the beginning
to give all burstingly?

To wait for months underground
and wake as freshly,
undaunted, lean and fasted,
singing greenly
what we lived for in our first undoing.

I am finding
it was safe under snow and
Almighty wings.






"All praise to Thee" and "Almighty wings" taken from the Thomas Tallis canon.

Spring Peepers

I have not looked at your face
this way in a long time.
I forgot that peaked chin,

those eyebrows asking questions,
infant delicate.

The water of your pond-brown eyes,
the slipped chisel on your nose, those
indented happy accidents.

Lips more resolute
than I remembered.



I have not heard spring peepers in so long
I almost did not notice. There are sounds now -

Red-winged blackbirds,
song sparrows, a raven picking bits

of sticks to nest with. I stopped to watch,
but he chid me, dropped them
innocently.

I left a trail of prints in the chilled mud,
spreading my toes,
hoping they'd be smiled at.