Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

Are you full tonight,
my white rising dark-sided moon?
How full she looks,
this sister of this brother...

I will catch it with a fishing net.
Rock and dust and craters.
Then I will stand and reach reaching
through the Holy of holies,
the circling barren star-gazing drifter,
Cardinal Bellarmine.

Oh Orsini forgive me the soul of a man
who has followed the fading heavens,
roamlight blinded,
and afford me a final
wordless silent moment here.


2012

A Meditation on Enlightenment

If these eyes could look inside they would see
the one who watches, the one called me. And then
those inward eyes would look behind where stands
the one with a thousand faces, who is everyone.
Or behind us all where hangs the curtain of
a thousand colours, which is everything.
In the back of a room so large
all time fits neatly inside.

And there I would sit,
spinning wildly through
the ages, skin glowing
with fire and light.

From my mind would rise a bowl to be emptied.
From my heart would rise a bowl to be filled.
And this is when the two awake to each other,
in the air and space of our making.


2012

In Memory (or, The Third Man)

We four in the wake of the rock
that fell in the night in the dark
went searching for Emily Carr's home
in the ground this day (surrounded
by crayons and flowers they say)

Blind as a pair of eyes we entered
into her rest as I took the steps,
walking the grass pushing up daisies
Easter Saturday in the cool sun ("Ah,
I should have brought a paintbrush!")

And she was the waves that crashed
but did not fall, or fell but did then lift
after soaking three days -- Emily Carr!
Artist and Lover, the smallest stone in
the corner, just where we left her

past Douglas and Margaret Helmcken
(they named the hospital after him)
Charlie Moss whose soul is like the
wings of his beloved birds. Norman
Kirk, may your stone tree grow strong.

The bay twinkles with their souls,
bright red sails and rainbow kites.
Your mum pulls weeds, stooped, around
her daffodils. "So pretty," she mutters,
"mmm, there were tulips at one time."

Later we clear the boxes of old frames
and all the devastating, disgusting things.
Journal in arm, knuckles smudged with ink,
a firm, open hand, perfect for a heart:
Don't fall today, I longed, and agreed

Carol Reed's The Fallen Angel did show
a lack of integrity, a happy ending that
did not belong, wasn't right -- not the
mad twinkle of Orson's mysterious smile:
"We're like crows. Anything that glitters."


2012

The Journey

The late afternoon star does not compete: snatches of her
orange haze hatch the edge of the gathering clouds,
rendering the earth a pale, worn grey where once
there seemed lush greenery, recently; or has my memory,
deceived, grown as large as those trees ever were?

I remember a stream through here of quiet horsemen
on four wheels in festival colours at all hours
down the one lane, with quieter boats like mine
set fast at the harbour. Do we heed them all?
I say let the sailless whales overtake us.

We left to the yellow darkness of a storm setting in,
first the sky's bright blue brightening the field's
light yellow, then the space between the darkness
and the brightness. For my soul knows we're going
to the junction of these two highways, the junction
of this and that, to wait for a message.

Ahead, set aside on the shallow-bellied bay and up the
wide tree-lined lane of grass on the hill still lies
the sign: Christ, Scientist, for all to either beware
or mourn beneath, silently or for the world to see.

A million monkeys in the church, each typing a
thousand forgotten genius's lost works
that you've just GOT to read.
And I say write more.

For what more pleasure could a day bring than a day's worth
of pleasure, and what more could we wish for than so many
days like that? Sometimes it's obnoxious how beautiful
it is, the sun through the trees through the window
of our car through the clouds over the mountains,
and the frogs in the fields beside the road.


2011

On Eating Flowers

And what keeps me
from eating flowers?
was posed to me
by e.e. cummings
alone on the lawn
in the straight sun
this afternoon.
and I thought
well bees I guess
(is the first thought:
wasps, sleeping, or even
merely browsing), and dirt
which the wind has neither
blown away nor
the rain carried off yet.

Or perhaps the opp-
osite, too much sweetness.
And that the bees would then
come to my mouth
instead, think I
the flowers and
thus render me
unemployable, worse than
dead -- bitten, swollen,
spitting and cursing:

The fucking kiss
that stings.

To eat flowers and
not be afraid.

To taste the death
of their passing and
enjoy that sadness, to
be just ignorant enough.

And I think of the one
for whom I keep the best,
whose mouth alone
is worth it enough to be that bee.

And I find
even just one of her
blooms.


2011

Galveston Island

I know the seawall, the ferry, the seagulls,
the old bread from the freezer door to feed
the seagulls on the ferry that takes us to the
seawall, picnic bench shanties on the beach,
jumping waves with my brother, the taste of
saltwater and sand: Onward! Deeper! then asleep
in the backseat on the way back home wrapped in
wet beach towels; our collection of shells,
hermit crabs still in their homes, now in boxes.

Drift too far down the shore and it's too far
back to walk; bike too fast down the seawall
with the wind pushing you on and there is no one
coming to get you. My father will say, "When you
get old enough to drive, remember to take out your
car and let it go empty just to see how far it will go.
Keep a gas can in the back with enough to get home
but find out just how far that needle will fall."

Like in school when you take your compass, draw a
radius, pull it through to create a circumference:
this is how much my legs can stretch, as far as my
pencil will reach. I find this advice to be true.
Or perhaps I turn it into truth, like the seagulls
following our ferry for freezer bread, drawing fewer
circles as years pass and living within their curve.

But today we sink our toes deeply in the wet mud,
write our names in the sand with sharp sticks and
watch those secrets wash away in the rising tide.
A circle knows what I wish it to see, and I say
Onward! Deeper! to the ocean: carry me off
to the end of the coast with your drifting.


2011

Thanksgiving Chicken

Nathaniel and Katherine Yardbird
hypnotized each other
in the uncrowded coop
for more less
egg laying,
accidentally let slip
unfortunate missives
-- spicy bits, the
snake pit, the cock
a doodle calling --
and, peeping,
proceeded to bring
into life
a perfect bird
with wings and more
which we now
will eat.


2011