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 bride…?
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 lost
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 are
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