Wedding Party

late stages of multiple sclerosis   we lift the wheelchair up over the stone entry steps ruined queen still on her throne   we are her wheelchair bearers who will soon be her pall bearers   inside the celebration goes on full of sound…   does she open even an eye, mother of the...

Ambiguous Privacy

Ambiguous privacy of  poem   What no one knows is all mine   It shines in my quiet night   It stars in my inside sky   Song is made well before song   It pours out found and...

The Hordes

I understand very little but the hordes coming behind me know so much   I admire them and fear them perhaps a few have kinship to me are baffled as I was, as I am   I count myself fortunate to see the light that I see, to see by my own lights   The illusion of ownership barely lingers in me, I belong to my body, not the reverse   There is tenderness for what is and can be easily abolished. The dark of violence frightens me   The hordes coming behind me know so much, but do not yet know how little it is, we...

One Note

In the night he played the organ of sorrows whose vast pipes spanned continents and whose music was time, the sea in which he swam and dissolved to become a wail sounding the deep where beginning and end are one note...

You – Point Reyes, April 2015

This April we have brought you along with us hiking these headlands you never knew   you have been with us each step of the way, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, sometimes   a dance of variegated shapes in the fog’s sheen, sometimes transparent, sometimes a suggestion;   you have been here and you have been not here, both at once, so I have tried with each footfall   to reconcile the two, failing as I knew I would the wildflowers are out celebrating the first spring   after you and so many tule elk have gone to join you in this great drought and beauty   is everywhere all around including the black hawks that dot the fog and also my joy in each breath   we’ll walk some more, then more and then no more, but, while we walk, we’ll bring, sing you with...

All At Once

The cat licks her paw   to a Beethoven piano sonata   then lowers her cheek and goes to sleep   I sit and wrestle with my strangeness   I am and am not all at once   and the piano keeps on...