A Strange Place

When will the pretty thoughts return?

Empty,
Aimlessly content.
Being here, now is easy
like biking down a gentle hill
amid pastures and potato plots
Accelerating, but not too much,
Rolling.

Torment comes and goes
An old friend with whom
I pick up where we left off
whose shape changes with the years
but whose heart is always the same and
whose cold calloused hands clasp my face
as that mouth reaches for my ears
with its urgent whisperings
of the time we've lost but perhaps
it's best that I go alone sometimes
but I'm so dear and bright:
beloved!

Peace is a strange place
I only find by stumbling
among the birches and berry bushes
tripping inside myself
on glacial boulders face-up in the sun
leaping the fissures and ravines
of earth's trickling tap,
my worn in ways of going
toward the end, or the beginning.

The Well

Pinhole to the sky -
Dry spaces lit by fire suddenly struck
by fits of weeping into me:
I shall hold it all.
My stomach ever-expanding
bloated, gaunt
For want of things non-existent,
Since ice ages ever the same
Heaving and sighing of seasons.

Be not awakened to these plummeting
Cavernous depths all streaked with algae,
But return to me with desires those
Pieces of earth-core etched with lost grandeur
And your longing will dissolve with centuries
Into iron. 

Boston

A city of ghosts.
Now, for me
Hovering just out of reach
I paid them in grief
Wept and wore ashes
the allotted days, but
They do not rest.

Lie in peace!
For you have found the
Promised Land
the citrus blooming
quaking dust-hills of
All that cannot survive here.
That land is your land,
and this is not mine,
As it takes your shape.

Who could have guessed
Your spiritual strength -
the way your soul could
Span an entire continent

I came here
but for the magnificent un-reason
you awakened in me.
Those three years of long madness
Grateful when you granted me
Ground to stand on.

All around, desire of my heart,
Your orchids bloom
a dark sweet taste melts on my tongue
and music clusters away silence

More than a year, now,
Since you
Breathed this air
Why do you refuse admittance
to forgetfulness?

Once, I feared to be alone but here,
in the company of specters
I envy the flowers
Content to return to the
Dust to which they are already rooted.

A Wish

My desire to know you unbounded,
I seek
a dwelling where I know the
Ground before the air
to curl my hands, Dearest,
around the broken
Places in your line of vision and
The Hunter in me tracking
rippled waters, tracing
your scent still warm along my ribcage.

I am not the healer, the Savior
Merely the muddy acceptance
of a shallow grave in the
field of wildflowers:
decaying matter, lifeblood
of possibility.

Petition

O Lord,
Let me not mistake
the blindly groping after a
Candle to shine into the mirror
for Love.

Nor let me think
any consummation
be completion on this
unfinished Earth.

Gloucester Revisited

We perch on the rocks,
Our feet gentle sparrow claws curled
around the grooves,
In the summer that will not die:
Slanting spear-light on water
Small smooth stones skipping out to sea
As our feet across the stony gaps.
Joyful, free, until in the shade:

A goose, long neck wrapped around its body
At rest, swarmed with flies
Suffering that does not suffer.

Your stones skipping so far
Nimble, precise, 
Past the edge of vision into the sun.
Then, the glistening black otter
Stretched out beneath my feet
Shining, swimming towards a shore
It never knew it reached.

These prophecies of decay, their signs
and symbols, must all come true:
This world will never come again.

Migratory, I return there
to the summer that would not die,
the warm rocks that hold back the sea
and frame the sky's chandelier -
What nature foretold, is realized.
The sun slants over the water
as the evenings grow short
in a rush of wind, the
hushed breath telling me tales,
Winter without your warmth
As the sun slips deeply
and those still-smooth stones grow cool beneath me:
In darkness, loss.

Not long away, perhaps on a day like this
of strange brightness,
I will cede you to the West, while
The tide rises forever and
Joy's long struggle
Washes over all that was a
Warm birdsong of hope,
Freedom of solid ground, and
The patience of a twisted tree.

Nature

she whom we call Mother
destroys us all:
even as we call out her name,
she crushes us.

beneath the sun's broad gaze,
she kills her offspring
if not with time,
with fields of ice,
or hot ravenous tears.

with roaring, rattling bones 
and the red hot blood of her core.