Text | Poetry
Can't Step Twice…
“Can’t step twice into the same river, Professor Herakleitos said.” Robert Bringhurst
even the salmon, struggling upstream
find in their first bed a new tumble of stones
strange tangle of leaf and silt glitter of gravel
always the language of water alive always on the move
its carving glyphs and signs in walls
that will never fully contain
so we come to foreign places
find wreckage of what once was home
What the body remembers is not enough
Bruised bodies wait hovering over deep pools
feeling for clear currents
the rush and muscled surge to rise beneath our ragged flesh
so tired now nothing left but surrender
Breathe
Breathe through your open wound
be blessed by the source you swim in
retrieve the nourishing steam
taste your own dying
and leap
let the wonder the moving river
carry you on
No One Who Falls…
“No one who falls can rise without help from the ground” Robert Bringhurst
Green fold of the forest
silent temple of trees pliant cedar
alder pine and paper birch roots touching
the dead all the fallen laid to rest
in leaf mould loam and humus black
centuries underfoot
the loss
held in twining hands
this stitched weave whispering refuge
ground of being
what is cut and severed still will rise
every breath of the woods confirms
like a sigh in my own bones calling
remember
every wood you have been lost in
and how the ground always rises to meet you
The Heart Is A White…
“The heart is a white mountain” Robert Bringhust
before you a journey
begun before you were born
existing waiting flowing toward you
drawing your whole body upslope
because it is there
vanishing
the closer you arrive
to its immensity
a lifetime of walking growing quiet seeking the trackless
simply to feel
not separate
from this spine
of rock
to touch
emptiness
heart soaring
its hermitage of stone
Gratitude
I am listening
With the night falling I am emptying myself into silence
into the tide of darkness I am listening to gratitude
I am saying thank you
I am stopping to remember the slow downbeat of wings
as the great blue heron sailed above the cottonwood trees
I am saying thank you
as the frogs suffocate in the stench of polluted ponds
as CNN broadcasts the news of the dead
I am saying thank you standing by the river
that feeds the distant sea and me
I am bowing my head in gratitude to the indigo hearts of iris
and the man whose deep heart entrusted them to me
I am saying thank you within the noise of beatings
and the cries of the destitute and the lonely
I am giving thanks for bread and the ruby wine
for blood, and poetry of word and nature
the rhythmic arrangement of leaves and language
I go on giving thanks in the knowledge of hatred, cruelty
and the sorrow of what is lost
I give thanks for the kiss given that afternoon my heart was sad and you noticed
I am giving thanks for breath and giving thanks for death
in whose hands the forests are falling faster than the minutes of my life
I go on saying thank you thank you thank you for the transitory and the true
Thank you for the bittersweet beauty of days
dark though it is I thank you
thank you for the light that always comes.
after W.S. Merwin
The Sea Has No End
“The sea has no end, in spite of its edges.” Robert Bringhurst
Saltsour smell of the sea
kelp, fog and wet mists scour shoreline and skin
touching distant stirrings
of another salty cradle
opening me to this world of tides
Why do we never tire
of the cupped shell to the ear
speaking of the sea blood tide
everything passing through
spiraling gyre of plastic
light and stones
silences and ancestors bouquets of bone
and roses
her footfalls
floating seed
weave of earth and air and water
washing my feet
universe
waves without end
within without
Stretch Out Your Hand
I want to make you weep for the beauty of a line
I want your heart to break open with the ache of space
I want you to feel the absolute present entering through your skin
your breath, your eyes full of tears.
The way light suddenly streams forth and eternity reaches out its arms from the sky, the blue heaven and all its clouds.
I want you to know love.
I want you to know the secret
of your own life.
I want you to know the meaning and the mystery
and all the shining splendor of your existence.
But I need you.
I need you to abandon yourself to the mad purity of the living present.
I need you to open your heart.
I need you to stretch out your hand in the dark.
I Want To Say To You
I want to say to you
Let go of everything
Be like a ripe plum
thin-skinned and full
ready
to fall
I want to say
you need to lose a world
to know
nothing is ever lost
Like the wind
the heart holds everything
here, in the gift of your own life
in every mourning
rises the black winged bird of your liberation
Listen,
there is death
in the heart of every birth
be fearless
dance lightly as petals
returning to the earth
Most of all
I want you to know
you were always more beautiful
than you thought
I want to say to you
You are beloved
You are beloved of the earth
What I Thought About When I Thought About Drawing
I wanted to practice drawing blind
I wanted to step outside, to cross the tent’s threshold
like the young cartographer Twombly
surrender to night murmurs
draw in the dark simply to undo
but wild pigs were roaming and I was afraid
So I lay instead inside the yurt’s cave
looking up and out through the portal
of the tent’s glass ceiling and there
in the silent sphere of the night I saw you
half a hemisphere away across this wide
and glittering sea your luminous being
drawn close not separate from me
and I realized under the dome of our Southern sky
we are drawing blind undoing
unlearning the blackened pages
only the eye of the heart to guide us
to map our deep life wordless new
and untamed constellation
we are sparks wild stars sharp as flint
striking light together
we are returning to each other
our first vastness
of this I am certain
and I am not afraid
After O’Hara
Why I am not...
I am not a poet
I am a painter
Why? I think I would rather be
a poet, but I am not Well
as soon as I saw the yellow
lemons hanging plump as moons
shining out from their orbit of stilled
leaves all glossy with sun
I thought of Antonio Lopez Garcia
and his quince the courtyard and
the Spanish sun I was remembering how absorbed I was
in that slow-moving film
slow as paint drying I remember how Antonio
knocked two nails into the ground took his stance
centered himself on the tree
with plumb bob and horizontal line
how he laid down white marks crosses
carefully drawn on fruit and leaves
so he would know his path
Painter after painter ruin after ruin
age after age the painter’s gaze
faithfully receives the world surrenders
to the tree growing within to the ripening beauty
imperishable presence of lemons
quince or O’Hara’s SARDINES to the things
we vivid see that drop us into stillness
though the leaf curls the fruit darkens
and the flesh rots