As If With A Bit
As if with a bit thrust into my mouth,
as if with a bit lodged deep in my mind,
a story takes me wherever it wants,
not rider but horse, not rider but horse
A story dissolves me and resolves me
into what I’m not by an alchemy
that discovers no philosopher’s stone
but finds instead a stoned philosopher
There is no way back, there is no way back,
a story is a chronic infection,
a story is a cosmic infection,
there’s no cure for its ravishing allure
Day after day I’m the story I tell
Myself, bit after bit, silver and gold
Fire
I am watching the fire take, listening
to oak kindling snap as first plumes
of white smoke thread their way up
through the logs of sweet cherry wood
that will be substance of this blaze
then come slight orange tongues of flame
that have no words and also no feet
but dance with phantasmagoric verve
without least inkling of what they do –
dead tree is its own funeral pyre
thick braids of smoke shade of cloud
rise to lose themselves in summer sky
and the fire clears, is more orange than
it has been, more fierce, more fixed
on the work of consuming the wood
I feel the heat that I have unleashed
warming my cheek from four paces
I find myself overcome with awe,
not that I have not done this same
incendiary act hundreds of times,
not that I have not felt this awe many
times before, even cherished it as a way
into the mystery of what is ordinary
and extraordinary all at once, how fire
is destructive and creative both
the wood wanders its way to ash,
past the flickering and glowing coals
that seem to have an inner life
as they have inner light and heat,
become coated with elegant gray
I watch the fire and know that I am
watching myself, that I can no more
tarry on the way than the wood can,
that I know as little as does the wood,
that where I’m woven, I’m consumed
Prime
I am in the prime of my life
because each instant is prime,
not reducible to any factors,
but simply stubbornly itself
I have accumulated age, carry
it now with me and within me
I’ve been through more than I
can say, although I try to speak
This instant of December near
the winter solstice, gray, twilight
coming down early, has a freshness,
even a sparkle, a way that I
am prime with myself within
the vessel that I take for myself –
I hear melodies I can not sing, frame
scene after scene I can not paint
I am with myself as darkness
descends, no stars tonight but
the scent of wood smoke mixed
with the scent of skunk, fading
No instant can pass for another
but each one passes for itself,
and is replaced by yet another,
incommensurable, vast and free
Always In Flux
Summer is becoming autumn.
Even before the equinox, the days have cooled
and become bright and breezy…
The ground is littered with acorns.
The squirrels are busy.
I see a bronzed praying mantis.
The first leaves, scouts for the coming armies,
slant down to land on the green of grass.
There is one red as a cardinal.
A new moon climbs up late behind a bank of oaks to the east.
The great blue heron is so still that it seems
a part of the half submerged branch on which it stands.
The monarchs have passed through.
My white beard prophesies snow and springs I will not see.
What has changed through my seasons?
Not so very much – same quality of attention, same quality
of intention, same quality of invention
Yet I’ve been always in flux.
I dance away from myself without malice
“At The Age I Am I Can Be Any Age”
Nymph of an oak slips from ring to ring,
dances from where the bark meets the air
to the central rings, which are the beginning
after the wild burst from acorn’s inspiration
and hold still the green joy and exuberance
Nymph is a changed nymph in each ring
where she lingers and does not so much
remember as recover, return to this ring’s
seasons, its spring and summer and fall,
winter snow and stillness and deep sleep
So many springs’ waking, so many red
buddings, so many tender new green
leafings out, so many leaves lifted up
to take in what the lordly sun spews out,
so many deep green leaves, sweet acorns