In leaps dawn
Like impetuous whimsey
All dressed in fiery red
Eyes burning with mad ambition
A pox on sleep!
The fawning dead
Drifting endlessly into
Oblivion
Not for us!
Up like buttercups
Like spiky woven thistles
Up toward the solar apogee
Until finally, inevitably,
The long graceless glide
Begins again
In slips dusk
All dusky
I went down to the beach in sworls
Longing for sun-bound benediction,
The binding waves’ delight
I went down to the beach in fancy,
The souls of a billion stars
Shone in the sand-blown wind
I went down to the beach in breathless,
Red-green ancient charts
New sprung each forgotten day
I lost my footprints
Without a glance
Once upon a dreaming green
By the ocean’s clapping heart
Swayed full with thunder wonder
I saw the river flowing
Change course, dry up
Make islands, golden dreams
Drain fields, ambitions
Unmitigated, oblivious
Winging onward
Like crabgrass, Like dirt
Unbounded
Like winds unhinged
No rhythm so replete as days
Each different, all unchanging
Grief and joy alike
Turn to dross, cheap decoration
You, agent of emptiness, why
This running choice, this still
Cunning, this rumination
Of not ending, not beginning?
I read the universe arose from nothing,
So gone, so not
I try to keep it from slipping shut,
A splendid churl, eyes blinking
ONCE in summer-time the bear and the wolf were walking in the forest, and the bear heard a bird singing so beautifully that he said, “Brother wolf, what bird is it that sings so well?” “That is the King of the birds,” said the wolf, “before whom we must bow down.” – Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Ding, dong,
The king is dead!
Just beyond the eaves
Still warm, lay a wren,
Supple as a summer breeze,
Dead as yesterday’s fires
Had there been some unseen, unheard battle
Between the soaring and the squatting?
Or some settling
Of long forgotten scores?
In a long-ago wager, it’s said,
The wren outsoared the eagle.
She rode on his back
Until he tired, then pushed off
All pumped and proud
A fine example, the ancients thought,
Of brain over brawn.
The eagle was not amused
Surfing the faint, tireless breeze
Music from a distant park
The last half-hearted song
Of the sparrow
Fireflies like paper lanterns
In a far-away twilight
Long before conditioned air
In the hot, moist summer
Even clocks stopped running,
Too slow to mark
The interminable hours,
The memories, the sweat
Whole eternities passed
In the too long days
Of the too short summers
So entirely gone
There is no stylus so precise
As to record the passage of a soul
From one moment to the next
exiles child 