Out like a light

Last night at nine-thirty the birds were still singing.

By four-thirty this morning they were at it again.

Who was last? Who was first? Do they know?

Does it change from one night to the next?

Does it mean anything to them?

Or do they simply go out like lights?

And rise in the morning to relieve the stars?

And what of the man who is miserable and important, who is miserable because of his importance, and important in his mind because of his misery, which he wears like armor and is afraid to remove? Does he not also go out like a light? And make way for a sweet child to rush in?

Wild Flowers Imagine the Rain

While on

his journey,

a young man asks

how he should live.

A wise man replies,

live life the dream

not as dreamer,

but the dreamed.

Then he dies,

and from

the mountain

his spirit departs.

Comes the wind,

the rain, the snow,

the granite’s

ancient lust for stars.

Sings yearning

like an arrow

on its pathway

to the heart.

Upon the slope,

sunlight’s riddle

of sweetly

marrowed bones.

A field ripens

down below,

abundant grain

for empty palms.

Songs and Letters, February 6, 2006

Crow Bah

It’s so sunny and warm out this morning, even the crows are photosynthesizing. And it seems almost as if I’m not looking at them directly, but at their shimmering reflections in celestial waters.

My grandfather had a word for expressions like this. It was Bah.

Silence

Listening to the digestive processes at five in the morning,

and to the birds singing, and to the sound of traffic.

Are they one sound, or many?

Crows. Robins.

The flickers have been pulling up the drying moss

from the seams in the sidewalks and along the curbs by the street

to get at the ants.

Broken lines this morning.

Because everything is poetry?

But of course everything isn’t, the experts will say.

Or they will say, while stroking their imaginary beards,

Only in a sense.

This means they are wise,

and that, in all likelihood, I am not,

which is true, but not because

they say so.

With so many of us talking at once,

I wonder how there can be silence at all.

Or is silence the sum total of sound,

An infinite roar, a vessel rimmed with stars?

How quiet we are in the ground.

As if one needs an entire lifetime to learn the art,

when love is in, and out, and all around.

Lines

To be an old poet is to be young.

Youth is old poetry.

Birdsong.

Gray clouds on a locomotive’s back,

A cry at every crossing.

A penny on the track.

The price for what cannot be.

Warm, the scent of bare skin in summer.

Ripe peaches, whispering to each other on the table.

And that is how the first kiss came to be.

Old poetry.

Thomas Carlyle : a history of his life in London

Thomas Carlyle : a history of his life in London

1834-1881

In Two Volumes

by James Anthony Froude

(1898)

Canvas 1,219

Canvas 1,219

June 14, 2018