talking about truth

for G. Lloren



Thursday on a week that has the weight of years
you leave the office past seven.
Outside, the dark says both 
the day is old and the night young.
The crisp breeze blows the leaves a promise.

At the convention last night
everyone wrangled
about the word you summoned
afraid of its presence 
in midst of a tagline.

The word was a beast
giant and a phosphorescent green
reptilian and curled, 
legged and tailed.
"Too spiritual," someone said.

"Too dragooning," another said.
They all tried to poke it away.

You hail a cab and look for coffee
there are bills to pay.
And you are now past forty.
How the strange beast, last night
was queried by fools. 

"Is it sectarian?" someone asked.
"Measurable?" asked another.
"Vendible?"
"And does it fly?"

the sea calls

the sea calls and i wake early hearing
waters making their way to shore

the tangles in bed, the vines of sleep
they cannot keep me

i come down the stairs, out the red door
the pebbled path, the waiting sand

the sea calls and i wake early hearing
my self making its way to shore

In Blackwater Woods

In Blackwater Woods



Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.





- Mary Oliver

the displaced

it is difficult to love this country, i thought many times, one afternoon walking through the heat of molten air.  but the people are always warm, no matter the odds and flaws.  and that is why, maybe, not far away a foreigner has decided to stay.  carrying his toddler child, he points at a very clear blue sky and a bird and speaks his German, his child happy with him.  an other world fitting itself in.

burning

there must be a reason why, valentine
why

they all share the same
patron 

Oh!  of lovers
love, epilepsy, and plague!

the counsel of women

I sat hearing the counsel 
of women heads close

together 
feeling for the sense of

"right" justice
in the middle of dark

words in the middle of 
known procedures 

for discipline. 
The crime grave

the freshman too young
and remorseful. 

How much of heart 
must be involved.

The wisdom to know
when the "right" procedures

could be wrong.

stone turning

Stone turning after a year

There is a theory in stone collecting.  Collect only the ones that tell their stories.  Press your ear close 
to their heartbeat, close to the bone made heavy by the weight of restraint and the years

spent waiting underneath, underwater.  Only the sun and rain know the way of their travel, 
labyrinthine to the surface.  Collect only the ones that sigh over their long lost limbs that remain alive,

fragmented somewhere else, continents away, to dream just the same.  The same dream of origins and 
sky.  Collect the ones that continue to remember, in a fitful wakefulness possibly as old 

as stars.  How they still carry all shades of light and dark, blooming a softness sharp on your palm

you can only mistake it as warmth or pain.  Collect only the ones that call out to you, as if waving

for rescue; you, a gunwale now, remains of the small boat that used to be your self in a dream in 
dreams many lifetimes ago.  Before you, too, were once that very same stone chipped from

the broken shoulder of a universe, awakened by a tree in a garden by a lake, turned over and made 
part of a fire place, a house, a mausoleum, a cathedral, before finally taken to the edge of land

where a child casted you to the waters, saw you glide and fly

shane

edit

write drunk with passion, edit sober.  how often is this told.  to the beginners, this is still something new. when does a stone turn? when does a thing become old from being once new?

and how many times do we have to edit ourselves?  revise and revise to make something new.  out from the old.  consider a lizard shedding skin.  an animal from an egg, evolving.  everything always

turning gradually into something else.  although: sometimes it is not always the new that works.  grandmothers say if it's not broken, why fix it?  jim said a poem is only really done 

once you've given up on it.  not a surprise to this day he keeps revising and revising.  and he stops sometimes in the middle of conversations to think.  no one knows.  some may have lost count 

after all the revising.  simultaneous revisions, all.  the young ones tire of hearing the same old.  lines.  always moving for new.  but who is keeping tabs?  and does it even matter  given 

we are a community of forgetful.  see how everything repeats itself.  yesterday, in a discussion weaving literature and history, do you see a pattern? repetition in different forms. several 

editions.  all that changes:  our positions.  places and decks from where we view the stars.  see how ursula once wrote a story six different times, in six different versions of worlds existing 

as we must do now.  under this particular sky.  why not write a poem then about rebirth?because haven't we all been told:  you and i, stardust.  and if there really is a constant amount 

of energy in the universe, then at some point of these all, you and i must have had shared the same soul.  how we must have drunk ourselves in passion.  then we edit ourselves sober.