This Dog

This dog, he don't like no brushing, this dog
This dog, he don't like no brushing, this dog
This dog, he don't like no brushing, when he start to bark, well there ain't no hushing
This dog, good little puppy, this dog.

This dog, he won't play no fetching, this dog
This dog, he won't play no fetching, this dog
This dog, he won't play no fetching but Lord you know he is good at stretching
This dog, sweet honey-canine, this dog.

This dog, he loves to wrestle, this dog
This dog, he loves to wrestle, this dog
This dog, he loves to wrestle, he come when I call but not when I whistle
This dog, mutt to the bone, well this dog.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

These are

the signposts along the way.
You must meet each one correctly.
Wind catching your coat like blackberry brambles: tear free.
The shriek of a fire alam: proceed without panic
to the nearest entrance.
Darkness. Light your lamp
and press forward.
Crowds of the restless dead. Offer comfort. You will receive
a guide or companion.
Smell of jasmine and hot copper. It is
a new country's border.
Flooded roads. Don't trust the boats. Rescue a giant fish
from a net; he will carry you safely.
If you have met no obstacles, change your path.

The surest sign of all:
your own footprints. Follow them
backward.
Into the zone where air
thickens against your movement. At the heart
of resistance is
your goal.

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Cold weather

It ain't over.

Last year the first camellias in our yard broke bud in December; right at solstice, which fell on the 23d. This year, not a sign of red yet.

Update: Saw the first blossom over the weekend!

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At Latourelle Falls

the plunge pool's thunder is blinding.
The whiteness of the foam
rings in my ears. The cold spray
is metal in my mouth, clean
smell of fir forest
tingles my skin. Every window
of my body opens wide
and the world dances
through them all. What I hear
I see. What I feel, I taste.

My body is all windows
and all are open.
My body is windows
without glass
without frames
the world winds through them like a silver ribbon
through needle's eyes
through openness
without frames
windows without glass
open

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Relative Motion

The Red Queen thinks
you can keep up with the world. She thinks
if you run fast enough, it's just
like standing still.

Breath is life
only when in motion. Motion
is relative. Hold your breath
too long, and die. Stay in one place
too long-- The world lives only
when changing.

The secret is to invite, not command
to be open, not to clutch
to breathe, not hold breath.
Let the world turn.

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Acacias

Rain, rain, rain; rain soaks the soil, runs down the streets, overflows the gutters. Rain soaks through my skin and saturates my tissues. I've grown soft and water-plump as the worms that crawl the sidewalks, flooded out of their dark homes.

Men dying in the desert hallucinate from thirst; I hallucinate from water-intoxication. I see acacia branches scribbling thorny blackness against the swift furious dawn. There is no dew. In an hour, the dust will be hot enough to smell and the resting lions will search for shade. The ground will burn my feet under the leafless trees.

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Sacred and Profane

These lines in sand, these rings of sidewalk chalk
supposed to set off sacred and profane,
separate the holy? I maintain
that all such boundaries are only talk.
All things are God's: bright bird and rotting mold,
towering pine, dull dirt and shining sea,
carrion maggot and glittering gold.
My tender flesh is kin to solid stone.
The sisters of the sap in every tree
are blood and breath that flow through living bone.
Come down the beach and read our history where
a broken wave reshapes the rocky land.
Salt water merges into golden sand
and at the edge, a popeyed fish gulps air.

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Dragon Year

"So what's your sign?" My kinship is: with boats
that race to scarlet drums, their oars like legs
on water-centipedes; with kites afloat
above forbidden cities; pearls or eggs
encysting essence; rulers of the flood;
warden of temples and pavilions;
source of a pigment that resembles blood
which painters use, and call vermilion.

The zodiac's a bracelet hung with cryptic
charms called constellations, symbols worn
like ruts into the path of the ecliptic,
to which Western horoscopes adhere.
My heritage is elsewhere. I was born
in nineteen sixty-four: a dragon year.

Happy New Year!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

RIP

Etta James passed away.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Let Me Write

Let me write in many books.
Let me write my pages in the Book of Love
Oh, let me write
let me fill many pages in the Book of Love.

Let me write in the Book of Truth
let me write what is true
let me not damage my pages
in the Book of Truth.

Let me write in the Book of Emptiness
in the Book of Silence
Let me write emptiness
let me be silent
let me be silence
empty

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Hermitages

The Card
Carrying a lantern, he looks
sadly down from the height
where once a young man danced
with a white dog. Age
regards the folly of youth. Solar joy
has shrunk to lantern light.

The Thrush
all winter
quiet under the bushes
waiting for spring
and brief solitary song

The Crab
Heavy, heavy the house
only big enough for one. Big enough
to cover one rear.
But it never lasts-- every year
a new one must be found.
Bigger, better
heavier weight to drag.

A humble nest, a stolen shell, a rude
hut in remote locale: is solitude
defined by contents or container? Don't
these images of isolation shunt
the seeker down a dead-end track? It's true,
it's difficult to hear the silence through
the noise and jostle of the "madding crowd."
Or so we claim. God's voice is just as loud
in city alleys as in desert sands.
His face is written large by human hands.

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Leafy Branches

I walk away and leave my cares behind
me, drifting on the surface of a stream
like leaves that fall from branches. In my mind,

the water-song is solitude defined:
the perfect peace I touched once in a dream,
once walking. Could I leave my cares behind

and live, a desert anchorite? A kind
of hermit (thrush or crab), I'd seem,
a leaf upon a fallen branch. Remind

me: what's the answer that I hoped to find?
Was this the way I purposed to redeem
myself: to walk away and leave behind

the things that burdened me, an empty rind
from which I'd sucked the juice? The gentle gleam
of water leaving, falling, undermined

the banks between which I had felt confined,
dissolved the weight and murmured a new theme.
I walked on, carrying my cares behind,
the shade of leafy branches in my mind.

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Help, Listening

I can't help listening
to the upstairs voices.
I can't help hearing--
she says it was all a mistake,
a gorgeous mistake
with ugly consequences.
I can't help listening.
A blockbuster went off
in her sugar-baby uterus.
It was like a molasses flood,
brown and sticky, she says.
I can't help hearing.
I stop my ears.
I can't stop listening.

--another word salad poem
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Finding the Beloved

At the top of a steeple
At the bottom of a well
In the hearts of people
In the tongue of a bell.

In a dreaming ocean
In a dying land
At a railway station
In the palm of my hand.

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Jewel

The brightest jewel I have ever worn--
a dragonfly that settled on my foot--
was redder than a rose upon a thorn.
The brightest jewel I have ever worn
was red as matador's blood on a horn,
more brilliant gem than any pirate's loot.
The brightest jewel I have ever worn,
a dragonfly that perched upon my foot.

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One Thing, All Things

If you knew this river
truly knew every fish
from egg to fingerling to hook of white bone
every iridescent scale
every bubble white over rocks
every rock
the history of every rock
from fire to salt
every boat broken
on every rock
every jewelbox of a dragonfly
If you knew this river
from spring to sea
every rapid, every calm pool
If you could describe the motion
and the reflections
and the stillness
you would know
one thing
If you knew God
you would know
all things.

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Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

I walk out into clinging fog--
I'm wearing it like second skin.
In obscurity, be vigilant
in clarity, be mindful.
Sounds like something from the Art
of War. I'm on my guard

against self-appointed guardians
who like to keep us in a fog
about what constitutes Art.
Beauty may be only skin
deep, but in your bones and mind--
wherever it is your soul is on vigil--

you know the truth. These invigilators,
enquirers, inquisitors, purport to guard
us from corruption of mind.
Exactly what that means is foggy
but I'm convinced the real skinny
comes from the horse's mouth. Art

is no-one's sole possession. Art
belongs to those who keep vigil
in the deep watches, when the skin
crawls with intensity of self-regard.
When dew falls and freezing fog
surrounds the watchtower. Who don't mind

the chill and damp. Whose minds
are focused on the rising moon, heart-
shot by arrows of silver fog.
Whose eyes shine with vigilance.
They are standing guard,
not against, but for truths beneath skin.

If in danger, save your skin.
If ignorant, feed your mind.
In the first case, be on guard,
in the second, study the Art
that is longer than life. Your vigilance
must first pierce your own fogs.

Guardianship or vigilance,
words for the mind, words for the heart.
Fog bites bone-deep, but spares the skin.

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January Reflections

This morning's light was so intensely blue
it was like walking underwater. Each
day now sees a little more of day.

I found myself incapable of speech,
half-dazzled and half-drowned, a fish on land
this morning's light was so intensely blue.

As I lay gasping on the daylight strand
a dreamer hauled from sleep too fast to wake
I found myself incapable of speech.

What hook had caught me, what strange sportsman's take
I was, I could not know or even guess
as I lay gasping on the daylight strand.

The days grow longer now. I wake and bless
the sun's return, the promise of the year.
What hook had caught me, what strange sportsman's take--

awake, I laugh at dreamers and their fears.
This morning's light was so intensely blue
with sun's return, the promise of the year.
Each day now sees a little more of day.

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Severance

"A Hair perhaps divides the False and True." -- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat, Fitzgerald trans.

A hair; the thinnest thread, a strand
of silver spider-silk; a line of thought;
a deep imaginary scalpel-slice
across the meat of everyday. Believe,
the world is not impeccably precise
and doesn't draw the lines a surgeon's hand
should trace. Dividing false from true must leave
some ragged scar, a foot chewed off when caught
in metaphysic ankle-trap.
And still
you see them pass, the seekers. They know well
what cost they'll pay-- the sacrifice of all
illusions, scalpel, scar and fleshy veil
alike. Tightrope across the great divide,
sever that stretched-out hair and step-- outside.

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Solstice Light

All night I tossed and turned with dreams of light
and woke with early morning's gleams of light.

Remember how, in summer's darkless days
we woke and slept in blazing streams of light?

But winter swallowed up my memories
of light, digested them to memes of light

that sparkle in my tumbled-blanket thoughts
as dust motes dance in falling beams of light.

Solstices suspend the year, a crown
of days that hang between extremes of light.

Basso profundo, treble flute: the tones
that frame a symphony on themes of light.

The year falls ragged from my windowsill.
God hems the sky with silver seams of light.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Solstice

Arrived at work late this morning: it was 8 AM and the sun, the first sunrise after solstice, was just lighting up the downtown skyscrapers and the upper slopes of the West Hills. I went upstairs to the cafeteria, whose picture windows face east, and soaked up a few minutes of light. Now it's uphill all the way to Midsummer.

Last night we went to see Tintin. Tintin wasn't a huge feature of my childhood (not like Lord of the Rings: yes, I've been swooning over the new Hobbit trailer, and yes, we saw it on the big screen last night), but I'm fond of it nonetheless. And what an excellent movie! Can't remember the last time I had that much fun. I always suspected Snowy was really the Brains of the Outfit, and it seems Spielberg agrees with me.

Wandering around Lloyd Center before and after, we ran into not one but two former co-workers of mine; one was attending the same movie. Much as I'm not fond of malls in general and indoor malls in particular, Lloyd is a good place to run into people.

December has been almost completely dry, foggy at night and frosty in the mornings. Our quince saplings have finally, grudgingly, condescended to allow their leaves to yellow. I suspect they're responding to the daylength rather than to the actual weather: after all, they're native to Central Asia and officially cold-hardy to some ridiculous figure like 20 below zero. Put your ear to their slender trunks and you can hear the howl of Kazakh wolves racing the December winds across the frozen steppe.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside