27 things

1. I must tell you I met someone.
2. Named Gold.
3. Fire burning tight in a small frame.
4. Birdcage, voice box, body.
5. Skin supple, subtle to the eye.
6. I want to, but do not.
7. So much age, so much youth.
8. She laughs and she says.
9. I step back and hold myself back.
10. Half a hundred smiles.
11. Three hundred times of waiting.
12. I search for something else instead.
13. Try again patience, the kind that sees through the last of the ripples so the liquid surface calms again into a mirror of sky.
14. Morning, afternoon, night, the chairs and tables by the streets are with people, warm temperature in the middle of winter.
15. Spark, spark, spark.
16. I dream of the outline of her.
17. Search for something else instead.
18. Is it possible to call it mirror? 
19. Translated into permutations: woman, night, flower, gold.
20. No one remains innocent, not after the wars folded in the years.
21. Are you spring cleaning?
22. I have two rugs and two wooden, folding chairs.
23. There is a list made into existence everyday and made to disappear everyday.
24. Am I waiting? Yes.
25. It is always the same woman.
26. In different translations.
27. The same.

(no essays) a long goodbye 4

In time, I will give in, finally
Into the overwhelming lake of words
Into the river of words flowing
Into sea, and eventually
Into the ocean of forgetfulness.

The reader (the world) (you) becomes 
Finally my faceless intimate friend
Sitting beside me on the cliff
Overlooking mists of distance,
Pasts, dreams, futures... our feet

Dangling on the edge and the sky
Forever with a silver still sun.
And I will tell in the way my father
Once told of his childhood stories,
My own childhood, misty with disuse

And untelling, kept too long in a room
Within a room, within a room barred
By hardwood door, by steel door, 
By brick wall meant as much to conceal
As to say, "Move on. It is done here."

Beside the wall, sometimes a table.
On the table, flowers from the yard.
By the flowers, tea.
Sometimes, beside the wall, a bed.
I knock on the wall. And sometimes

Tell a memory in that exact way
Telling fails to tell all the details:
Exact hue of the afternoon, exact
Feeling of the felt at the bottom
Of a chess piece I was playing,

Learning consequences and consequences
Long before a single move is made.
How did my own father failed to see?
He taught me the game. "Pensar. 
Pensar." Can a child see futures

When a decision is made? I inherited
Many things from my father, I'm afraid.
Including the older face on the mirror.
The same face my lovers see 
At night, in the morning, when I think

I am alone, placing palms on the wall 
Holding the flood of words into 
Becoming few and fewer still.  

after the party is better

After the party is better
at night when only empty glasses
remain crowding together
on tables being cleared

There, a few careless stains 
on tablecloths for what spilled
and broke of so much cheer

The band is done
all dancing, too, as guests 
gone
memory of a good night:

waiters making sounds
stacking plates etc. minutes.
They too, very soon gone.

How much conversation
is left, is to go on--is how much 
night we have left.

I think I will prefer now
after a brunch party

Still sunny, we still
can have rest of the day 
together yet. 
                  

                                     photo by A. Schneidt

dear friend

What of the American dream? Now that we all have achieved it.
We find a nomadic part remains. To take so less with us except
What matters in the long journey: feet to carry, body of joy.
Everything else, it seems, merely trappings we have come to
Be accustomed and could not let go. These we have now 
We only dreamed about half a lifetime ago. Something to learn
From the animals we keep: To have nothing else but love

Only so very difficult for us: bearing our simple joys.

shall we see each other eventually?

Easy to say since the news, anxiety has been breeding dreams fretting in my sleep. No balm to soothe. I replay, in spite myself, the exchange again and again. I could have done 

better. But why. Did it come across as entirely something else? How to. I think about the steam and the propel. And shall I get to see you again. Shall we meet in a cafe, maybe, by the end of some other year. I always do something else in the meantime. Other news arrive. Such as framed joy on other planes. A deadline. A knock. An impatience. And a distance that will have to be crossed by any means. Since when did I feel running out of time. The idea was to remain. And let time run by itself. They say, "in September." It is only becoming June. The last dream, I was somewhere in Malaysia, surrounded by bamboo beds. There is an image of you, your back towards me, on a kayak. Through the water. On your hands a paddle. And we were heading off to some other shore.                       photo by S. Kho Nervez

in keeping with silence

In keeping with silence, the idea of
another city is no longer the same.
There is an absence that was once
not there, a kind of empty in the air.
No else knows of this, even though
surely there are those who feel
a certain trace on their skin. A damp
weight of memory that memory has
already forgotten the name.  Some-

times, when enough of us has gather
into a circle of remembering, we can
string together the beads of stories
recollected from dampness in the air.
Re-creating the city from another time.
From the days when we were young
once immortal in love.

beginning at forty

This terrarium is called Night Walk with Mishima.  It has come to this.  Working earth in smaller quantities.  Taking things, perhaps, one pair of morning and night at a time.  The day she turned forty, she had a photo of herself among her terraria.  Face hidden by shadow, dancer's feet poised ready to dance in sunlight.  I am happy she is beginning to be happy.  How it was not so long ago when we met outside the hundreds-year-old wall and she was all in white.  Then, there was nothing else to offer for comfort--not even words--except the blunt presence of a listening warm body for which she could beat her grief on.  The words fled her, the writing, the poetry.  And yet, the art soul survived: in her home-made, hand-beaten memories-in-ice creams that she poured herself into.  This lady is cold, she said.  It has been awhile before it has come to this.  Finally growing gardens in smaller quantities as new beginnings.

white picket fence

it will take all of daylight to mend the fence.  a number of things has got to be moved away, like folders of paperwork calling from an upstairs tabletop.  but the sun is warm and inviting. the sky never been bluer 

for days.  the nip in the wind reminds of kite flying and childhood home.  where there was guitar and Sunday, eternal-hours and no talk of god.  the really big things we are resigned to ungrasp.  a praying 

mantis somewhere is in company with a newt.  and all is well in other worlds.  who will fix the fence and who will need mending.  who can keep company with the grass, the wind, the chimes, the open palmed

bush with its white jasmin flowers.

"imagine"

And because my wife is here, I would like to say I'm sorry for the times when I wasn't what I supposed to be, said Ray in words that in one way or another must have been like it.  He then took his saxophone and, beside two guitarists and a pianist, began.  No words, just music.  And the entire Solidarity affair held in abeyance.  I found myself finding the words:



Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world

You, you may say 
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one

waiting for our turn

How the young lives forever, not seeing
beyond an hour or two, seeing a year at most.

The years, at the onset, can stretch so long
every thing was possible.

Until father asked to keep away his white hair.
And mother made gentler by wear.

I look at the mirror and at the crow's lines
that appear even as I smile.

A weariness.  A heaviness.  This body
having lived and seen too many lives.

come in, june

"All grown-ups were once children...but only few of them remember it."
                                                                      Antoine de Saint Exuperry




Come, love, come.  already it is june and the rains have arrived.  the mornings are gray when we wake and they are promising.  more than dew, more than mist, more than.  sunlight is more golden this way, more precious.  we open the windows and part the curtains and the dogs, they try, to find their way in the gray light.  i have come home with a bag of mountain tea, you take a kettle and fill it with water, you put in the leaves.  you take a drink.  and marvel at its smoothness.  the memories of the mountains in the scent.  i have come home with a bag of sunflower seeds.  you open your palms and i pour.  the way sunflower springs in a june of some other time.  meanwhile, it rains, and i take your hand.  Come outside, love, come outside and play.  it is only rainwater and puddles, and here, let me make you a paper boat to sail and travel with me.

rain for our many kinds of loss

the season of rain is coming.  already it beats cold on rooftops, rough on pavements, and soft on grass, on mists, in the middle of nights or in the break of mornings.  a number of people are growing colds (myself included) and a number of plants bloom in this odd time of in between seasons.  some didn't make it past the scorch of summer.  some still trying to survive, holding on to this last stretch of distance between dry now and tomorrow's rain.  

for what ever it lets us, the rain, how it is both gift and loss.  also, an embrace and a promise of gentler things to come.  see, the softer earth, ripe for planting; see the buds beginning to hesitate, growing drowsy with the weight of its dreams of coming summers; birds migrating in numbers.  it's a loss, and a flight from it, towards gentler things to come.

if there is no other shore

On Prayer







You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the world is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice:  I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.








Czeslaw Milosz

Translated by Robert Hass 

foretelling

at any given time a conversation can turn dark.  mention malachy.  or catastrophe.  or asteriod.  cassandra heard, and no one believed her.  but the physicists.  and they make no secret of such things.

in the meantime, everyone's children grow.  

at times in the yard, i prune.   and even though the plants know this, mornings after the mist lifts, they spring.  green.  with a bud for flowering.

mist and green, early morning