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 us
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 playing
An Undeclared Mystic
Strange anything at all exists.
What is, is!
Profound tautology,
but I can’t find a curtain to pull
to let me see behind “is”
Wittgenstein snorts like an impatient horse,
“Haven’t you ever heard of getting snared in a language game?”
This is the form fashionable in the West
of what in Indo-Persian lore once was called a “tilism” *
a magical landscape that can pass for real and hold you
for a very long time, even your whole life.
A substantial part of the beam of my attention,
is always held in wonder that a pen can be, that I am,
that a green shirt can be, that light and robins can be…
I’m dazed by what other people take for granted.
I’m a child or a fool or both mixed up together.
The wonder of water and palm trees and the blue of sky
And dark and stars and the ever unrolling scroll of dreams.
I admit it: I’ve been lost all my life and this
is where I’ve lived and this is who I’ve been
An undeclared mystic
*See the “Adventures of Amir Hamza”
Bare Bones
too much to read,
much too much to read
I watch the leaves
falling from the trees
like words from the pages
of books the sun has written
I, too, am a book
that the sun has written
winter will be soon
and white and cold
I’ve lost track of what
I once may have known
I’m like that oak
becoming naked
I’ve lost track of most
of my questions
they’ve fallen from me
like leaves from a tree
I keep on reading
my way beyond me
I am the bare bones
of who I once was