An act of kindness

Let's say you are the widow's middle child

still in Heide braids when you first hear 

goose steps in your town.

Let’s say fresh out of school the Luftwaffe 

offers you a good job, they mention travel. 

Let's say you ride in the back of the Mercedes-Benz

Transformable Torpedo, behind your boss

and his driver when the gates open

and transparent beings pour through the camp 

like rushing water, drenched as if they had risen

from the ocean floor.

Let's say sleep comes and goes that night and 

the next morning you place your breakfast

on the window sill and turn your back 

and when you look again the plate is gone 

and you feel relief that a ghost has eaten 

and you are not arrested, your 

giving hand not cut off. 

Let’s say the next day you repeat this act

of kindness and later when all is over, 

in the dark of night you grieve because

you did not do more. 

And let’s say what was not done 

becomes the story in your life

and your life is a protracted mourning 

for it, for what was not done. 

Sailing

Yes that's what life is like, isn't it?

Like sailing alone in a little boat, 

in fits and starts on a landless planet 

relying on luck and karma for aid,

sometimes our mind and mouth 
yanked open by (or in cheerful ignorance 

of) the killer tendencies all around,

sometimes sitting stilly under squalls 

with feet kicking the waves, 
lavishing our attention on beauty 
or on perils but soon time again to stand up--

the sails must be adjusted

to these ever-changing winds--and

sometimes we are delirious with 

all that physical effort 

(having to make our own wind so often,

so many lightening quick adjustments)

and sometimes lovely birds land on the hull, 

nervous and a bit shriveled, like us, 

singing under the same shower of stars 

because for them too this voyage 

sometimes seems unbearable, this hunger

for consolation their only constant. 

Letter to my body

Body, body, my beloved

from the moment, from that very instant one

invisible fish out-swam a hundred million 

others into that beautiful moon in the mother 

sea and in a dazzling burst made you, 

these coveted days of sleep and wakefulness

are being counted precisely in a secret clock 

and from the moment I knew it was I 

in the cradle I tried to crawl away from the clock, 

I have cried and begged for a world without time,

but you dear body are a ticking time bomb, 

because of you I will not sleep for a hundred years, 

I will not be restored by the kiss of a handsome prince.

You are moving me on a conveyor belt back

into that miracle of nothing-something. 

There is nothing because you are made from it,

you are the puppet of time-space-magic

but so are the stars, so is all matter--

time will ooze from all of it and then 

who knows? Another world remade

from your teeth and hair?

Every single atom rekindled?

Into other miracles I commend you, 

my body, myself.

Chill

I couldn’t take my eyes off her face

in the bed, that silent pre-death repose.

She looks more floral than human, 

her face white as the chill before the bloom,

the skin folding scion-like around her skull, 

protecting the still living root below.

Beside her in a hard chair I watch for hours, 

day after day, my own self now shrinking 

from my dread, from my shock that this force 

(my mother was a lion) can be so undone--

the same dazed astonishment when I saw the scaffold

of a great doomed whale belly up on the sand

of Santa Cruz--a skyscraper of white bones, 

picked clean by who knows what and yet 

still mighty in grace and history.

Flakes

Look, here shines the leaf

dropped from its mother’s arms

into the soft living muck to dry 

in gorgeous shades of death

--corn and saffron, ochre and brass--

and at my touch the crisp veins flake

into a mist of umber snow 

and I watch her demise with longing, 

seeking a bit of solace in it, 

seeking to make peace with it

before the night erases all trace of it.

Bright red

The light deep inside flashes red and you

begin to stop.

You want to keep going but the light is bright 

and your body obeys and begins

to wind down and life begins to let go 

of its foothold in you, 

(it was tenuous anyway)

and there you are, ailing and fatigued

but aware of what’s happening to you-- 

(if only you didn’t have to watch) 

the spiral outward into your final ordeal--

out into that stark bloodless desert, 

into that unwanted escape from self, 

from your pleasing intimacy with matter, 

out into that shower of sparkling eyes, 

into that bleakly beautiful blackness.

Solitary

A painter would pause this late afternoon 

on Alameda beach, glimpsing paradise, 

would be seized by insight and pull out 

the brushes and palette

and begin to work quickly 

because look how the clouds 

are fattening up, gulping the light 

right out of the sky, 

existing only in tones and lines 

but still there is a kind of diamond dazzle, 

at times unblended in how it falls 

on the buckwheat, the sticky monkey flowers. 

A painter would have to dab short 

quick strokes to show how this quickening 

breeze wraps around 

my shoulders, makes my hair fly up 

with the kites and the water skiers’ parachutes. 

I too sense a big moment, though my mind is blank,

fit only for hushed gazing 

yet I feel a sumptuous intimacy 

with gulls and wind and bay and buckwheat 

that is quite solitary, 

indeed can only be noticed

unattended.

Crowded

This room feels crowded 

even though there are just two of us.

His head on the pillow, mine in my hands.

I stand by his bed 

as if he were learning to lie in it, 

as if I were his teacher, the one

who walks alongside the bike 

the child is learning to ride.

All our feelings mull around us 

like munching cows, 

sometimes touching as they wait 

to be milked 

but the hours pass and nothing is spoken, 

everything abided.

Deep down

Deep down in the stem itself, 

in my body’s engine 

where energy becomes breath, pulse, 

where pores are forced to sweat 

and salt to move through me--

there, down there,

lies my terror. 

In the zenith of that day to come 

my eyes will close half way

and Ill be alone again 

as in that jiffy before my creation.

I'll be tossed into a cold
of no stars, 

melting 

as I fly, 

a wavering glow, 

my pieces 

bright points of light

that come and then go

like glitter from a lake 

and deep down 

I know 

no ghost 

will step out 

from that beautiful 

debris.

Stooping down

My face over his face, looking at him carefully, 
inspecting iris to iris, nose to nose, 
sniffing, counting seconds between breaths,
seeing a man’s body return to newborn form, 
legs more like arms, pink, hairless. 
Think how firmly these feet once held him
upright, thick as granite, inflexible.
Despite the tremors, the many naps, 
the many days and nights of murmurings, 
he is still handsome in that smart haircut, 
the ancient Yaqui bones contain the blight
and he really doesn't complain too much. 
He is a man who likes to act like a man. 
I stoop down to blow the heat off his face 
and in the house somewhere I hear Out of Africa 
on the radio, his favorite soundtrack, and my whole 
being feels decades drift away like clouds 
over the sharp edge of ancient white plains, 
the stark flatness of our fate, 
wide and bright to the end.

The journey

In the place where the temperature falls

when I step out of the sun

into the dark cyan

shade of the forrest,

when I listen to my shoes crunch flotsam, 

the panting of my lab, the squeaks of flying beings 

high in the crowns,

where trees old and young 

lay across the stream, 

the young ones dying on the backs of their elders

and stumps mourn in gowns of lime green moss

and all around lay fallen leaves in yellow,

burnt umber and brick, and changing colors still,

where even in that state of doom, beauty 

does not abandon them.

This is where I take my grief, 

which is the price of love,

and where in mercy I rest

and let go of fear 

and love the world.

If only

If only God Almighty were not so

insecure. 

What gruesome death that crucifixtion
of any son, of any blood and body 
and why must every soul be offered up?
If only God did not need hell on earth--
if only that everlasting hell could be enough
to satisfy His revenge.
If only He did not demand redemption
for all of humankind, the innocent beside
the evil, but most especially 
by horrific immolation.
If only God could be content.
Withdraw demands for victimhood,
for our extreme obedience.
If only He truly loved as father, mother, friend,
we would not be so afflicted by pestilence, war and famine,
and countless other terrors
by the Him who wants to be exalted
daily for all this misery.
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life.

If only.  If only God would come to this.

Dry

Then, one day it is completely gone, 
all the love,
the heart feels empty again, 
bloodless, 
beating barely just for one, 
just for itself alone, 
after all the love 
finally leached,
the heart dries and hardens
--the peach eaten, 
the pit spit out.

It's wrong

We watch it together, the way the sickness robs

his body’s surface, slackens and liquifies 

just as each year the fresh autumn pumpkins

extirpate in summer heat and sink

into grassland.

We have discussed it, we have seen the signs

of the deranging force and we have joked 

about how its witchy extortion hovers in no 

hurry for us, only drifting our way 

with starts and stops, and, we thought its 

descent would always be lethargic, 

we thought we had ample time 

and then late afternoon I was turning on TV

and glanced his way and there it was, kneeling 

by the bed, reaching for him, extorting him 

from the room. But he resists, holds on tightly

to his air, his thinning matter and I watch 

from the chair rocking all night, the extorting 

force crawling around my feet, climbing into 

the bed purring beside him who sweats in sleep 

and I rock and pray to Him I don’t see or know: 

Please do not deploy your power in this way. 

And my faith takes another blow.