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Age Of The
Sun
Drop me.
This is what I think.
Camping, New Year's Eve 1999 with Cher
For Scott I. Day, who understands.
The White Birds.
Just Before Tucson.
Kanaio Ruins, Maui. 1/23/2000
They try to say the desert is empty.
Klukwan Village. August 2000
So Much Water.
Done.
Surfer. 4/3/00
Lee, 1/16/98
New Love Haiku
Climbing Jason, September 1997.
The night before the day.
100 Steps.
Your Goodbye Message.
Downstairs
Living Since 9/12/04
It Begins and Ends With Airports July 2005
The Lei.
Nearly May.
Oheo Stream.
On The Death of the Po’o'uli.
Peter’s Widow 1786
an ode to california boys
The Rattlesnake Collector.
The Young Lion.
The Kayak.
Heart Sonogram
Small Tsunami
Surface
The Dream Knows More Than I Do
Age Of The Sun
Ten billion years
and we are halfway there, they say:
Four point six billion years
consumed already,
and not a thing to do
about it.
The sun, eating itself, roaring
like nothing we can understand,
the kind of burning that inhales
worlds, should they stray close enough.
Our home world in a blissful spin,
our blues and greens so comforting,
for now.
The time will come. Our star
will fall into itself and
fall into itself again,
the howling, blinding mouth
become a diamond--
small and cold and bright.
Then gone.
Ten billion years,
what will we know by then?
Perhaps that nothing stays,
not even
light
Drop me.
drop me dear lord past this place
of keening and exquisite hurt where
everything cuts bright and sweet and
I’m too ready to break open
hurl me like a thunderbolt through
this big rip and tear and heaving
heavy biting open bleeding
draining place where there’s no mercy
pull me headfirst through the crushing
pull my by my wrists and ankles
understand that I own nothing
let me fall let me spin open
push me through myself and watch me
lose my mind inside my mind and
feel my heart dissolve like sugar
in the rain in some far country
This is what I think.
When you were born a song
came and slept in my ear.
When it awoke, I heard
you breathing.
When my childish hand chased
the moon’s trace between
housetops, somewhere you
stood in amazement, my finger on
your spine.
How can any world not fit
into our pockets? We formed
stars into block letters, so
long ago. We wrote:
“I am only just over here.
Look into the river for
my last love letter.”
Well, it’s only time, now,
that mistakes itself for golden.
We’ll laugh at that as galaxies
hang spinning from
our lashes. We will
laugh at universes
drifting in our wake.
Camping, New Year's Eve 1999 with Cher
By the time the tent was bent, stretched
arced against the wind and sky, it was
a sky of stars already
and Cher opened the wine.
The Milky Way wheeled
over a towel laden with basil, rich cheeses,
grains salads oranges vegetables
bread wine chocolate, and a candle
which flickered against the sea winds
and finally surrendered.
Two women and a scrap of nylon
perched on a crag above the surge,
and the salt wind taste-able
and the bulwarks of the old, old temple
like woven stone arms on three sides.
and the smooth water-worn pebbles
carefully laid as floor, there,
for a god, who, centuries later
would allow us our benign reclining.
The cove shone, below.
On our right the great slope rose.
Far away the cities rang, smoked, stank.
Morning came molten. The sun--
an orb like an archangel. It rose
like a statement, like a sword.
The ocean birthed a whale. In flight.
Upright. Emerging like a word in
the beginning--the word that commanded "whale",
and the whale came
formed of song and grace. It told me
to live.
And Cher laid out the coffee and the breads,
the tea and milk, pastry, the chocolates.
The candle now unqualified in the face of
the newest light in one thousand years.
Later, when the sea tease became
the siren song, I knelt
in shoulder-high water and let
the waves break over my gratefullness,
feeling the white sands shift against
my knees, as Cher took pictures.
As if that could ever explain it:
the night, the salt, the shining
shining world.
For Scott I. Day, who understands.
On his birthday, 1997
San Felipe, Mexico was a church once for us,
we two non-religious travellers in the hurtling blue car
the moment of beautitude, nothing sweeter than arrival
our flight into the sticky arms of coastal air
the holy ocean kissing the mountain's foot
the purification of the heat, the crazy pelicans
these are the markers of our pilgrimage
these were the blessings in the cups of our days
this is it, the love of the green ocean
coming home to forever at last
the slide of time over and over the fine sand
my seawater veins rocked this heart into motion
the curl and turn of the tide was the blood's music
everywhere the rhythm of the salt, the stones, the stars
everywhere the voice of the chameleon sky
and out beyond the surge and sift
suspended in the symphony, the grey whales slept
themselves all praise and grace, weightless
dreaming of the upward turn to the light
The White Birds.
How is it that today
on the highway home
I looked up to see the
tangerines and deep blush
of sunset light the undersides of
the flying white birds,
and my thoughts landed
light as light on birds,
light as birds on the breeze
on you?
The birds have nothing to do with you.
The highway has nothing to do with you.
You have never seen this life I live
and it is a world away from the world we had.
This craziness happens anyway.
Once the sun set and I stood behind you,
your long dark hair blown into my face
and my hands on your stomach.
Wrapped around you from behind
I watched over your shoulder
as the salt air lifted the sand
and lifted your hair
and lifted the light to the white throats of birds,
who kept flying and flying
as if they could get to
the heart of it, all that gold
just waiting to be claimed.
Just Before Tucson.
Driving south first, down, away
from Alaska, then east
across the desert flats.
Low sharp mountains ring the horizon,
their shapes like the back teeth
of wolves.
Farther still, ahead,
purple thunderclouds press
against heaven and earth,
then lightening--the communion
between those two kingdoms
of iron, and air.
Beyond, curtains of grey
with electric trim, the gift
of the late summer monsoon.
Suddenly this--confetti,
a soundless blizzard of
spring-yellow butterflies
straining south, uncountable
and dying hard against
grills mirrors windows.
Our new lanes bisect their ancient ones.
Still, they are everywhere, so many.
And me, just one, no wings,
also pushing and pushing my heart against
the rising wind.
Kanaio Ruins, Maui. 1/23/2000
Three miles over the lava fields and you find it--
the old village, the tidepools, the wind.
If the mountain heaves up
to the left, the ocean insists to
the right, and you think;
I would have loved it just fine here.
I would have rested easy.
But it’s hundreds of years too late for that.
When you look up from chasing
the brittle star,
when you look up from
the cowries crusted in
advantageous corals and
all the gobies that panic as
you loom over their tidepools at
the seam of the world;
when you look up the old
ruins just stand there,
just stand there like an answer.
If you are me you pick the burrs from
your socks. You find your water bottle
and lens cover.
You put the hermit crab back
and apologize. If
you are me you take your
21st century body back down
the coast, back to the car and go home;
and the old ruins and the tidepools,
they get to hum together
they get to chant and tremble
under the unchanging stars.
They try to say the desert is empty.
Jason, September 1998
smooth, and lean like
summer silk like tan sands
but more like sands of silk
if you can imagine that
when I travel you,
it's always with the sense of
sacred cleanliness,
the light that comes from you is just so
clear
up and over the curve of your chest
from below, and the sine of your
inner arm, that place on men where
the sublime and the strong become
indistinguishable
many times, I'm honored just
to be here. many times, I
forget the size of the world.
because--
all of dunes have become you
and all of sun rises in you and
all of the edge of the sky
sings and sifts in the wind
in the wind in the
caramel sky
Klukwan Village. August 2000
They said the bear was not that far behind us,
the three of us, detangling your netting.
You had just learned to weave that net in time for
the mighty river’s summer rain floodletting.
And silver silt was bleeding from the mountains,
the river was a soil and water wedding.
It ran like mercury behind your village.
It ran behind the houses of forgetting
where silver salmon hangs in crimson ribbons
enveloped in a smoke that’s always dreaming,
and in the village houses TVs mutter
while past their back doors liquid life goes streaming--
and time slides with it, chanting in a murmer
of how the People used to know the water
and how they celebrated in the summers
and thanked the fish that gave themselves to slaughter.
The parties--they went on for days, you tell me.
The wealthy clans made artful show of giving,
and all the time the river gave of herself;
the streams of dying fish flowed to the living.
I can imagine all the prideful dancing...
in that lost world, all eyes were on the giver
who stood to gain the more he gave his People.
We hold the net, your eyes are on the river.
for Cory.
So Much Water.
For Cory, January 2001
What I come back to is the time we wanted
to bundle up the bike and take the ferry
to Haines, and we spent most of that ride sleeping
except when I woke up to comb your hair through
--that river of black silk that in my dreams I
find myself swimming in, like a sea otter--
but anyway we came in late and brought wine
your friends gave us the waterbed to sleep in
and later we made love with such pure hunger
that I forgot myself in you completely.
We took the bike to Canada on your whim.
I felt so safe behind your padded shoulders
my feet were freezing but the mountains took me
to somewhere where my breath remained suspended.
The memory of that day can still undo me.
And either on that day or one just like it
we claimed each other's bodies by the river
--still standing up, and later nearly falling--
next to the bear track fresh in silty bank mud.
It rained on us and we were happy in it.
It seems as if that rainy trip was golden,
was lit with some sweet fire from the inside
--the urgency the smells the body hunger
combined with water light and earth to foster
some sort of dream where time was in suspension
and every touch was every skin cell dreaming
and every raindrop blended with your fingers
to dress my body down in perfect showers
that smell like river water in my memories.
It smells like river water, in my memories.
Done.
Your mate
is the woman who holds
that which you desire and
can not reach.
She can show you only
glimpses of her hidden,
fierce pearl, the
moonlight stone around
which she curls.
And, you will love her
forever for this, love
her for her gift of
an unbearable ache.
Surfer. 4/3/00
He is neat as a seal
and sleek like that,
sneaking slick head first
beneath the shorebreak
on his way out to
the waves that may
deliver.
Unlike a seal he will
paddle and stroke with arms
strong enough to duel
with the sea, and claim
a determined way
over her skin, despite
her intent, as spelled out
by the shoreward swell.
I watch him and know
how his hands span
the board behind the nose.
I know the breadth of that holding.
When the waves come they
throw themselves on the ground.
One and another. It is their
committment.
What, then, is a horizon?
I ask because the sand asks,
I ask because I know his hands,
and I am ankle-deep already.
And he sits waiting, patient
rising, falling
facing out to sea.
Lee, 1/16/98
I am already living with your memory.
The process of soaking up your body's truths
goes on all through the night, as
you make hymns and holy fires in
the sacred space between us.
Cell to eye to lip to hand goes the transmission.
Mercury and gold dust fill my fingertips, into
my mouth you place the unspeakable,
too huge and beautiful even to sing it.
Soon, I'll have to learn to manage this
somatic memory, find a way to store your
mind's imprint upon my mind.
You will go, and leave the Phoenix we created
in her nest of glinting ashes.
Dead and alive, her golden head will arch
forever in the direction of your retreating back.
In her wheeling opalescent eyes will be one
enourmous story, the one about the glory of
the perfect lick of flame.
If I stand close enough, she will remind me with
her crooning that this only lasts a lifetime. Then,
she'll bring her lovely head around, so fierce
and bright and dangerous, lock
her jaws around my neck and push
the burn into my bones.
New Love Haiku
sheets that sing of sweat
the curve of skin leading home
five thirty a.m.
Climbing Jason, September 1997.
pulling my self
hand over leg up
the golden silk expanse of
your languid swimmer's body
(you have become my tongue's business)
over the cusp of your caramel shoulder the
night sun is rising,
lighting my way to the heart of the matter the
best place to start my sliding first descent.
The night before the day.
I dreamed of burning buildings,
coming storms,
and woke to find you
miles across the bed,
holding tight to yourself,
curled, like you once were
inside your mother.
Dominick, I never knew
how best to pay the toll
to cross the sheets to you.
Knew only that your back
was eloquent, turned to me
like buddha's face,
impassive and serenely
closed.
100 Steps.
It may as well have been
a hundred miles,
I couldn't take them,
when you called
to say that last goodbye.
We were that close,
as close as we'll be
ever on this earth,
from here on out.
And still, I turned
the other way,
and ran from seeing you
surrounded by the light
of dying stars,
the sun that sets behind
departing ships,
the trembling gold
that shimmers from
a flame too weak
to stand.
And so I fled,
and fleeing knew
how small I was.
A hundred breaths,
a hundred little rips,
and you are gone.
Your Goodbye Message.
I called you back.
And the nice young woman
who answered the hostel phone
walked from door to door
with the phone at her side,
calling your name,
asking if anyone knew you,
knocking and knocking
and calling you again and again,
so that I felt she'd somehow
become me, calling for
the you I'd lost or the you
I didn't really know yet,
door after door, knocking
and asking, until
finally somebody asked her
if you were the one
with the long black hair,
and she asked me
if you were the one
with the long black hair,
and I said yes, although
what I wanted to say was
that you hadn't cut it because
I'd begged you not to,
but that now you
likely would.
Downstairs
the night-blooming jasmine is flowering so hard I can hear it.
The scent has become a solid thing inhabiting the air
shouldering aside the dark oxygen of this night.
Thousands of tiny trumpets waxy white on one shadowy bush
herald this fragrance singlemindedly.
You would think their lives depended on this,
this yelling that they are doing, so silently.
The night-blooming jasmine
trails its thousand scented fingers
down your head.
You are undone by something so good it hurts,
by a love song between a flower and a moth.
This night the seduced air
carries up memories
wrapped in the heedless ambition of flowers
who don’t care that it hurts to remember,
who can’t care,
who exist for the touch of the silver moth,
that will come if they work hard enough,
emitting.
It’s a gift they can’t stop themselves from giving, like a river.
They give like a river pouring upward.
What’s a little bit of human dying to a flower?
While my whole world is busy falling to its knees
a moth shakes free its wings, which gleam.
Ready,
and sure,
prepared to die for love.
Living Since 9/12/04
The selfish sun has risen
every damn day for seven long years,
dragging me behind it
like a conquered corpse behind a gold chariot.
Around this dusty earth it roars
while my broken mouth fills with red dirt.
There was too much I didn’t know.
I didn’t know the only sky could fall.
Was not prepared
for all the air to leave the stunned room.
I watched the steady shadows
track across the floor, the day you left,
and understood the deathless sun would be
a bastard king. Rising every bruised dawn
to grab me by the throat again
and chain me to the everlasting day.
It Begins and Ends With Airports July 2005
I know I don't imagine it,
this light. We pour it
back and forth,
my mouth to yours.
My hip--your hand.
Like webbing from the secret life
that pulses under
this one--it leaks,
and in the sifting shine
we blur. One star.
The light from which
enfolds a darkling world.
How does it happen, then,
that here we find ourselves
inside that poem again--
the one in which the poet notes:
"This way we stand,
forever taking leave."
The Lei.
Today I plucked
the last dried flowers
from the floor,
the place they’d fallen to
when I shook out
the sheets at last.
A month ago,
and still I hesitate
to clean it all away.
I’ve straightened out
the mats, as well,
which you’d displaced--pushing,
as it were, against the
bed and me.
It seems a shame.
The little purple petals
limp and dry.
At one time crushed
and bleeding sap
between your hips
and mine.
Nearly May.
The desert spring's
beginning, I note
signs that weren't there
a week ago--
limp leaves
so green they're
nearly clear
and insects,
fanning wings
on grainy stone
or filling whole oaks
with humming.
Cactus buds
between the spines
blush purple,
and in places
unfurl golden flame--
I am reminded
then, that even
spiky, well-protected things
must now and then,
despite their nature,
open themselves
to the sky.
Oheo Stream.
Gods weep with joy,
the lifted earth receives.
Each drop an embryo, each drop a kiss.
The pleated uplands open wide
their folds,
and water slips into a thousand
silver braids. Which seethe.
And rush. And find a million ways
between the roots of ferns.
Now down a glistening face of blueblack rock
it goes. In sheets. And carries in itself
a silver light. Which pools.
And when the slope allows
it pools again. And gathers.
Then falls through vaults of circulating winds.
The roar begins.
And now the channels, carved
and carved again,
run swift, so swift, and thrum
with hidden song.
They widen now, as water
calls to water, hurries home--
to join the pulsing of the waiting sea.
On The Death of the Po’o'uli.
“Like the canary in the coal mine …our birds are indicators of
environmental and human health...they…signal that we are at risk next.”
--John Flicker, National Audubon President.
Well. Close to midnight
on November 26th we lost
another one. The last of
three, maybe the Last.
The other two are missing
in the forest,
many months now.
How generous of Mr. Flicker
to suggest that we can frame
this tragedy as something only
relative to us.
We are the next at risk?
I submit that we might be
already lost. The mine collapsed,
or filled with something deadly
and invisible. We’re like
the miners, scraping hard
at that elusive vein of gold,
meanwhile,
the feathered bodies pile up
in the shaft.
It’s the cart before the horse.
The truth is that we started
dying first. Too dense to realize
the rot begins in us, then
spreads. It’s not
the other way around.
We opened up extinction’s cage,
it did not loose itself. Not
this time. So listen.
Do you hear that?
Me either. Just
the rain.
Peter’s Widow 1786
She kept the tiled
cast iron stove,
the cow called Nygards,
the little bull, too, and
the ewe with lamb.
The pewter pot
went where she went,
wherever widows went
in 1786, in northern Europe,
in summer.
The list is burgeoning
with things she left behind:
the drinking glasses, wooden
bucket, working harness, black
mare. When Lisa left,
she kissed goodbye the
coal bins, coal cart,
the old fire hooks.
We can’t know now
if she was sad to hitch
the cow to her good wagon,
and to lead the ewe and lamb
to greener pastures. Or,
what it felt like,
rolling through the town
with that displaced stove
high on the cart
in July sun.
I can imagine her,
hands on hips, surveying
the old water barrel,
cheese tubs and milk pot
(with ladle)--all left
in Peter's house.
Thinking
how the little bull will
bring good money
when he’s grown, and how
the warmth of that big stove
will feel when
winter comes
again.
an ode to california boys
who called the spicy canyon air into the room
and hung the bedroom walls with dried roses
who let their perfect hair go long at last
and filled my mouth with poppies
who bent my back upon a spiral shell
and left me dreaming dreams of seals
an ode to california boys
who closed the mission doors on santa anna winds
and smelled like sage
then turned and strode into the sea
The Rattlesnake Collector.
He tells me that just once,
a woman viewing one of his
rattlers in its tank
turned her back to go
and BAM,
the snake hit the glass.
I don't know,
he said, I think
she maybe was
a witch. And certain kids,
they just walk in,
and all the snakes
start buzzing-- I don't
understand it.
We look in on the largest
specimens, huge
eastern timber rattlers. Massive
coils entangled, sleeping.
I have to agree
the big male is larger
this year. I learn that he is
"sweet as a kitten",
easy to handle,
never rattles when
he must be moved.
A gentleman.
Outside, it's chilly,
spring is fickle,
and though the ridges glow
with amber light
the stone is cold.
I drive home thinking
of the many secret
lives of snakes,
in redrock caves,
who must be waiting,
like I am,
for that day when
the rock feels perfect,
warm against
the belly skin.
The Young Lion.
His frame is liquid gold. He knows
nothing about his strength.
It hurts to catch his eye
the way it hurts to look directly
at indifferent, deadly
angels.
He is a thing of unstrung silk
and lightening. Asleep.
Dreaming open-eyed of distant kingdoms,
and the tender flesh
of the fawns
the lionesses will
bring him.
9/13/03
The Kayak.
The kayak bellied low
beneath we two.
Built for one—
we straddled it,
legs dangling.
I paddled
and you worried,
gazing back,
afraid the waves
would sneak up,
tipping us onto
the reef—
the teeth of which
could lace the sea
with blood.
We should have known,
and maybe did—
because the way we went
is how we were:
Me, in the front
pulling our weight along.
You, always always
sure that we were lost.
Heart Sonogram
He closed the blinds,
extinguishing the view
of small neat houses,
picket fences, flowers
sleeping sweetly in the rain.
Turned to the task
of placing sensors
on my skin,
a thankless task
because it seems
my ribs are tight, white
slats too closely fitted.
No spaces left
for sound to flow
toward my heart.
My ribcage, once an open frame,
now working hard
to be a shield. As if I sensed
a battle would be coming,
having forgot
the army sleeps inside.
Small Tsunami
A very large convulsion,
planetary heart murmur,
something like that twitch
when you dream you're falling--
the shoulder of a continent shifts
and five thousand miles away
a wave begins to lean and yearn
and slide from one deep bed
toward this one.
Now here we stand
at water's edge
and watch the sea seep up and down
like some vast breathing
lung of glass. We know better
than to jump now,
something lawless is a-stir.
But neither one of us
can resist it when the ocean
pulses.
Surfacing.
When
the dream comes
it likes to tangle itself into lives I have
or haven’t lived:
holding my breath underwater
then breathing anyway,
always surprised.
Looking for something lost
in the house where I was a child,
storms, and whales hovering
in the sky. Demons--
and swords to defeat them, burning swords.
And dropping suddenly down from nowhere
into a sea as blue as it can be.
Red cliffs, and lovers dripping jewels
and honey. Asleep in the bed of a river,
water flowing over like light.
Sunrise and moonset at a crossroads.
I drift up and awake, find you
already around me like a nautilus.
Curled around my curl, breathing
your life into the back of my neck.
You twitch in your dream, a brief
convulsion, and I wonder if you,
like me, were swimming upward just then,
chasing the promise of light
as hard as you can.
The Dream
Knows More Than I Do
There's a small personal spacecraft
in the summerblue sky. Noiseless.
A man ejects, but instead of a parachute,
he has light supporting his shoulders. Wings?
An angel metaphor? Hard to say.
I go looking for him all over the neighborhood,
but he finds me first, standing behind me
on a leafy suburban lawn. Then,
we're in my dark apartment,
where there are three books I am reading,
and I am in all of them. The story lines tangle
and overlap. He tells me to keep reading,
to make sure I finish them. We make love,
and it is indescribably comforting, like
coming home, like he's from my future
and I know that, or from my past
and I can almost remember it,
but not quite, but he can.
He is dear and familiar
and beautiful--I have no doubt
that I love him, or what love feels like,
or is. But he will also be leaving.
This is all, somehow, happening
in the future. I wake up
with a sense of not being ready
to leave that place.
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