On my retirement

 

I’ve done a lot, and left undone the rest,

I lost some races, but I won the rest.

The day-sky fades to twilight castle-clouds,

Even the tireless sun must come to rest.

I sang this song through every verse I knew.

The tune goes on. I guess I’ll hum the rest.

The breeze tears cobwebs from my window-ledge,

who knows which spider there outspun the rest?

Seven days of work, and it was good,

and even God, whose Name is One, did rest.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Mockingbird

 

Hush, little baby, don't say a word

Papa's asylum case will not be heard.

And if asylum won't be given

Papa’s gonna go to detention prison.

And if detention’s not forever

Papa'll be deported when it's over.

And if he’s deported to the place we fled

In a year or so, papa will be dead.

And if he’s dead, they'll come for me

We’ll live in jail in the land of the free.

Hush, little baby, don't you cry

Papa will be with you by and by.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Change

Well, you know

that every castle’s built on shifting sand.

Your certainties must turn to melting snow

and spill like water from your empty hands

And well you know

this world is not a solid place to stand

every kingdom’s waiting for its overthrow

and the future never will be what we planned.

But also know

that only rust remembers every battle

that only dust knows all it’s smoothed away.

The lucky man rides high in a golden saddle

for just one day

for just one day.

And well you know

the past has left you feeling abandoned

the present time just seems to go so slow

the future’s like a rock on which you’re stranded.

It may be so.

Remember though

that every lie in full of time will be unspoken

and every scar with passing years will fade away.

All your chains and prison bars, they will be broken

And we shall see

(oh, we shall see)

a brighter day.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Cat Hotel

 

My baby left me, I can’t break her spell

She moved in down at the Cat Hotel.

My baby left me, everyone knows

She made her home at the Catio.

She was led astray by a ginger tom

who sang in the backyard all night long.

He walked our fence on a moonlit night

Swore he’d be faithful until daylight.

My baby left me and now my spouse

Makes me sleep in the old doghouse.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Give Warning to the World

You have vacated the watchtowers

on the walls of the world.

And out there in the gulf

you renamed “America”

you know there is

a monster storm spinning up

Katrina’s bigger, angrier friend

swollen on carbon-fueled heat,

veins laced with leaking crude. No-one

will see it coming until

it makes landfall, stomping the coastline

into giant flood-filled craters.

Then staggers inland, stumble-drunk

spitting tornadoes like a bar-fight loser spitting teeth.

Crumples prostrate against some piedmont,

pisses out a billion gallons of Gulf condensate

like cheap beer, washing out roads, dams, towns

and in its final spasms clutches the mountainside

crumpling it like a stained sheet, pulls down

mud to drown small cities. And from the fresh

and unmarked graves the ghosts cry Why?

Why were we not warned?

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

New April Moon

The moon’s cup, brimming

with the fragrance of lilacs--

let it spill over!

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Why We’re Leaving

This is what we inherit:

a broken planet, desperate people, the corpse of a nation-state raddled with corporate leeches.

And so, like every orphan

we gather a few possessions in a sack

and hit the road.

 

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Blue Riddles

What is the taste of moonlight, flat stare of a lake?

What is the star at the heart of a stone, the sound of salt, a field-hand’s song?

What is the crown of night and the depth of day?

What is the wolf’s tooth, beat of a jay’s wing, curve of a cornflower petal?

What is the flame on the stove, the butterfly named sleep, the dog-named star, what is the spark inside my hand on the switch?

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Zoonoses

Every night in 2020

I dreamed of Pestilence on his pale horse.

Sometimes just its hoofbeats--

ta-tump, ta-tump, heartbeats

on a monitor in the ICU.

Sometimes its whinny, harsh

as the wheeze of laboring lungs.

Some nights he turned and showed me

the plague doctor’s mask, long beak

stuffed with aromatic herbs.

Sometimes he shows me a skull.

Sometimes the face of someone I love.

It’s never really over, he says.

Next time instead of horse’s hooves

we’ll hear swine-hooves, a bird-cry, monkey chatter

and we’ll recognize the rider

when he’s standing at the bedside

and he says Too late.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Wy'East Watching Shadows

Old man, white-haired warrior

you’ve sheltered me from both fire and ice,

the East Wind’s breath breaking on your stony shoulders

while a city huddled at your forested feet.

Now shadows rise within your shelter.

I’d swim upstream like a salmon, cling to you

like child to father. But at your side the river flows and fills

with whispers of war and hate.

If I pray for protection now

it’s human foes I fear. Dear friend,

you can’t guard me from my own kin.

Wy’East, it’s wings I need,

you are guardian, not guide

and I am fugitive, not foster-child.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Love Poem for Chiang Mai

I shelter in the shade of your ruined wall.

I rest at the rim of the old canal.

Your crooked streets comfort me,

a maze surrounding sanctuary

and webbed with waterways. At every gate

a little shrine. Each public place,

an altar live with incense, fruit, or flowers.

Every street ends in a temple spire.

Under Buddha’s serene and golden gaze.

I shed my shoes on the temple stairs,

bow, kneel, bow forehead to floor.

Something’s always lost when a new door

opens. Something else is found.

My roots grow slowly into foreign ground.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Temple and Town

Temple courtyard

Village square

Place of commerce

House of prayer.

House of worship

Marketplace

Daily life in

Sacred space.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Chiang Mai's Canals

Little dragons, sleeping in the sun

you seem so tame. What works of hands,

what years of labor shaped this land?

Who knew when to call it done?

Do these sleeping dragons dream

of flowing free across the valleys

where now wind crooked streets and alleys?

Do canals remember they were streams?

Little dragons, sleeping in the mud,

caged in canals cut to human shape

do you hold a long longing for escape?

Do you dream thunder and wake in flood?

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

New adventure, redux

 So we are back from Thailand and I have re-published a few posts that I had hidden (so as not to advertise too widely that we were out of the country). Also added some more thoughts, pictures, and a couple of poems.

For completeness I'll also post those poems here. "Luminous ghost" is actually one of them, written (composed) on the way to a temple in the mountains north of Chiang Mai.

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Luminous ghost

a luminous ghost

rides low at my right shoulder

sun in morning fog

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

A new adventure

 Details here

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Crow Commute

These mornings, I can see the crows commute

but backward. From downtown, a storm of wings

heads east across the river. Raucous things,

on sky of lavender, they’re black as boots.

 

They forage in the suburbs—so we’re told—

and gather, midday, to exchange the news

of morning work. We wonder at their views

on traffic, building work, the rain and cold.

 

I see them sometimes on our water tower,

enjoying what the crows call happy hour.

With day's work done, they chatter and they shout—

of corvine sports and politics, no doubt—

then rise by thousands, headed into town

at evening, when the sun is going down.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside