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

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