petals and bees

When you look into her eyes,

Are you not in love with paradise?

You will fall one day, when her skin

Starts to fold and routine creeps in

Like a mildew, and paradise is now

The woman across the way –

Relegate memories to the past and you are finished.

To have had is still to have, just different –

Softer, a bit hazy, a little wiser yet altogether yours;

Count the times a memory proved more fruitful than the branch

So when you are bent to the ground with anxiety

And you long to be lifted like a cat by the hand of God

Know that it is happening when you put your sad mouth to the flute,

Or your broken hands to the harp,

Or you crash into the page like waves onto the beach

And your scrawling is like seaweed –

Just like that, the Eden of your imagination is opened

And you finally see paradise as the tremendous Awe;

Which is to say, we are slaves to desire and, accordingly, disappointment –

Even as we witness, mute with disbelief, those two factions

Making eternal love in our songs,

Is the quest ever over?

Maybe the state of desire

Is more satisfying than the

Desire to satiate.

A single, ringing image of

Reunited love! Allow it

To dangle like an unobstructed chime

Learn how to let the wanting

Fill you completely.

For nothing conjures magic

Like the honeyed heart of a woman

Whispering long after dark:

Come back to these benevolent arms.

The message sent forth as a spell

In the beak of imagination

To one very lost vagrant

Rambling the map-less

Tunnels of his own mind,

He is a cartographer of the dark,

Where others just play.

Certain things are made precious this way –

Waiting spins desire into a song

And songs walk us to the point of

A pulsating, glittering truth –

Have we not all dangled unobstructed, gazing?

Do good and love deep is one take.

But we interpret the ringing differently, which is why

Some arms remain empty and

Hearts lay bare, gleaming and

Ready to be stumbled upon –

A treasure for someone to claim

And safeguard.

We need a word for love that is now grief,

Which refuses to collect dust in the glare and

Lively clatter of the heart;

Love of what was, that still is

Because stillness is precisely the puzzle

For our grinding, mule hearts –

Heart like a catchment basin filling

To overflow then recede in accordance with the seasons –

Yet the heart is a walking vessel in search of rain –

Over and over we bolt from the discomfort of our

Agitated, unrestrained thirst that manages to

Eclipse us every time. Here it is, the skinned and meaty crux:

Love guides us intelligently, beyond our narrow rows of perception

To work the acres of our grief into mercy –

Stopping, of course, to chew on our words

And lap at the cold rainwater from last seasons storm.

Watch thirteen blackbirds flock

Like cracked peppercorns,

My planet, my colossal, ethylene ripened Tomato, its asphalt skin:

Now! More than ever before, we are

Salt of this earth.

First chance to write here,

The wind blows it all through:

Fog, Fir, dust, ideas, moods and do-over’s. 

            A place where personality is not rewarded,

Rather, the work finished. Haul, lift, stumble, bend, dig,

Grouch, curse, straighten, and letting

The breath pass through, smell of Clary Sage, its purple fountain

And furry leaves.

            Now, some quiet seconds of clarity

When the treetops are motionless.

These second and third chances at getting it right,

Are gifts to a beginner caught in the gusts of ego

Of passion, attitude, impatience and Dark

Moods, pulled like tides

Between hunger and sleep – sun and moon. 

These humble things we do over and over and over

Like gardening, apologizing and

Persevering for higher good.

Praise the fourth and fifth chances at getting it right.

Happiness is nothing – it is stopping

To let the world do its work around you.

It is shrugging off the ceaseless disappointments.

It is accepting our uselessness, but doing good.

It is holding one’s disabilities with reverent discernment.

Listen, you don’t have to know anything to be happy.

Just let the sun burn your back and

Let fear strangle your stomach.

Let love hammer you to the floor.

Permit all that appears good to go bad and become good again.

The guesswork that governs our days is the condition of our perplexity;

Life is in us, tasting one shapely distraction after another, and

Like the bees doing their business, we are doing ours

By groping at Beauty, calling it sadness and making of it our Loving,
It is saying there, there to the moon as it weeps on your lap.

You are the moon and I am alone, as we all are, all of the time.

Still we challenge that decree by making love, desperately.

Still I move towards the cold air, to the surprise of jasmine night

That delights, every time.

The teacher says,

“Beauty never possesses a me”.

So turning, poetically, to Wind River Range

And the oblong expanse of clouds

We stagger at the selfless view.

The student asks, with feigned humility,

To account for a chime, the melody,

An uncut emerald, the name of the one you love.

The amethyst at the center of a flame,

Desert homes of Mesa Verde,

A Plumeria, her sweet perfume.

No me in beauty, but in rhyme, metaphor and metonymy?

How you look out the window

At the tree that has always been there,

But today is the color of plum and port,

And you think, when did this happen?

That must be what old age is like;

Except the tree is a mirror, and the

Aged and barreled wine,

Is you.