How odd, when teacher becomes pupil.
How startling, when a depth of meaning
Lay on the surface all along.
Wisdom, it’s said, is indistinguishable
From farce in the fullness of youth
Or unmitigated age, bent on redemption.
Could it be we’ve seen all of it?
No use adding footage to pore over
In search of cheap salvation.
There, written on a careless breeze
Was the whole of it,
Gone until the next moment.
Sometimes it seems like a good idea to let go of the strict syllable count, though not always.
At my doorstep
In the autumn chill
A dead bumblebee
Serenity falls
Into the open morning
Stifling a yawn
Life ain’t what I thought it was
All those years ago
In the end, all the pain and joy
Alike
Fell in a grand heap
And life, stripped bare
More like a humping walrus
Than a lame gazelle
A poet once told me
He’d rather write about
Cabbages
I try to find myself
Amidst the debris of living
The present is not now
The past is open to conjecture
The future a mere whimsy
A thin cloud composed of remembrance and hope
I know faith and philosophy
That’s not my point
Amidst the clatter of thinking
Emerging notions like stray photons
Almost grasped, almost seen
Only to wink away
Just at the moment of recognition
There still comes something familiar
Some pattern
Some wrinkle of repetition
Just enough to grab a flimsy hold —
As if on reality
Shall I say a thing
Hoping for some connection
Some proof of contingency?
All there is is is
I
They say time is a river
You can never step in twice
In the same place
But I know you can
If you wait long enough
Between steps
If you wait until it’s unrecognizable
Until you step on a dry patch of grass
Crunching underfoot just so
Until you taste the clay the color of dreams
Until you feel the sweat making canyons
In the soil on your forearm
Under the seeping sun
Unfiltered by knowing
I say you can, by being still and listening
To the strangely placid screaming
Of cicadas
Dying away into the night
II
Among the ghosts I saw
In a strange and fitful mirror
A young man, lean and early,
Sunlight stranded in his hair
Skin the color of baked earth
Heart like pierced leather
Eyes berserk with possibility
I saw myself, long ago
exiles child 