Luck is my legend it leads me down the pathways of fate it plays havoc with my prospects and cements a place in time for every breath of wind that might shorten my breath.
There is tragedy in his eyes his soul lays barren there one of three in our family a not so wild pack of hounds loud and obstreperous. He will live until he dies.
First, I strive for beauty I wait for the bell to chime the lightning to strike
Today, it seems, the skies are clear those chimes of midnight are silenced they boycott my breath heap ash on the urgency of ringing and leave me dizzy in my decline.
But if the past truly is prologue it will all come round again.
Language will make its magic. Sweetness will ooze from the open wound of my heart.
There will be words in the order and rhythm in which they were intended.
I’m a friend of darkness lock lips with it in a lover’s embrace
I mourn the dawn beg favors from the twilight hold every hope in my uncertain hand for a day when the sun won’t shine
And I know by my wayward feet by the tremors in my hand that darkness creeps silently up to my borders crosses every line and will someday defeat my meager defenses
I have prepared my retreat a forced march to the grey Pacific where everything in my life ends and begins
The solemn swell of the waves a fitting harmony to that last sweet song.
It is all flowing uphill back into the tributaries into the headwaters
Life returns to its source at the end Chinook salmon spawn in their natal streams and die their bodies nourish their young who make haste to salt water then return from the sea to repay the favor
Uphill it is for us a long slog, it seems
We are dedicated enemies of entropy unconscious yet knowing our duty
So these are your instructions.
You must wake each day and know it as a gift never pause in worship never cease your upstream struggles until it is time for such foolishness to end.
Grit and muscle heart and will life is short yet sweeter still.
The universe closes in on me galaxies align in matrices of light
This moment was never meant to be
I'm a cloud telling tales to the sky a bit of wind and I'll be gone
The moment slips through my fingers water into the well while time that mortal dragon is readily slain for there are no dragons time is a myth and this universe bends backwards upon itself eating its remains and issuing forth new life in a fugue of renewal
Mary Winslow and I have just published a book of our poetry. It's called Dea Tacita and is available on Amazon.com. My email address is [email protected] if you want to send praise. If it's not praise, the addess to use is deadendmail.com. :)
In the stray sweetness of yarrow and starlings’ trill by dusk rejoin the fading without regret as the foot worn grass will receive morning’s frost.
And whenever that green yarrow fades then I fade in the dry husk of this autumn of fire this autumn of smoke and regrets.
Wake in sidelong sun light half hidden days under curtains of violet and scarlet leaves so soon will bury the moss inch by inch.
But I being the beast that I am will burrow through the moss past every encumbrance beyond hope and fear and finally find the freedom of one sweet day in October the air still not a sound but leaves settling into the detritus of dreams.
I'm an assassin a man of ****** I will **** your memories and place them in the dustbin of time
Sweetness comes with sleep memory is illusion ****** a thing of gripping hands and gasping breath the only thing real is my hand holding this pen a dog's tongue on my face
Summer has settled sweetly here we enjoy the hours take pleasure in the taverns and circuses of this life
Our merriment obscures the steady progress of time the creeping insecurity of old age
But I say let merriment prevail!
In the face of all these bogus truths I choose only truth a steely resolve and what might yet prove to be a vain hope in eternity
Time tells its tale and time will tell
I have no idea where this came from. I was talking to my daughter and the first stanza came out of our discussion. Who is this assassin? No idea. My daughter is very tolerant of her dad.
The right eye is the window of hope the left eye the window of despair
And this proposition is proven in my photograph a portrait of a grizzled guy taken just before he stepped in front of a speeding car while gesticulating wildly
Who knows what happened there?
Yet I will live! gather fallen timbers to form a stockade against time
Because finally I have discovered that time is not my friend
It's a simple game she plays time girl trickster girl but my ancient beams will prevail
I swear it by a handful of ash and mark the moment with a rune that exists outside of time and says simply
Be this. You were forever thus.
It's a difficult rune to read and a harder path to follow.
She comes forth like waves slipping over the sand again and again delivered from darkness coveting the light
And light is her signature. A conundrum. Light erasing light. How can this be?
I will tell you.
Light is the companion of the dark trips joyfully in its shadows
And this dance weaves a potent tale of a two-faced goddess one face peering intently into the dark one lit by the morning sun
Yet darkness rules the day hastens the twilight gives measure to the dimming and finally captures the last of the light in a sea green bottle
We are drawn into that night valiantly or not weeping for lost opportunities or not but at the end waltzing into the unknown
Yet I do not suppose darkness without light according to my theology a life that ends in simple extinction cannot be it is a null set
The fundamental equations do not permit it nor can my simple mind fathom such depths
So in my dotage I repair to wine and song to ease the pain of these uncertainties and then to poetry to catalog the human condition and leave a trace that yet might sparkle in the instant of my demise
Dea Tacita was a Roman goddess of the dead. The Silent Goddess.
Slender green shoots press through the still cold ground hands of the earth lifted in prayer
Their strength is manifest their exertions carpet the land in green their tender prayers press forcibly against the sky and keep it at the distance God intended
In the fall invisible seeds will carpet the land buried they will be but in spring they begin to speak
These buried corpses will not only murmur they will sing in lush green voices.
I pray I will be there yet once more to join in the song.
The title is from a James Baldwin quote I jotted down while we were watching the film I Am Not Your *****: "all your buried corpses now begin to speak."
I took the concept in directions the author never intended. Apologies to Mr. Baldwin.
Bring me your orphan memories and I will stitch them into a chapter of time
Stepping fearlessly into empty air walking the tightrope of certain death
Drawing memory into the web of this moment Bleeding it out into meaning
While sleeping While dreaming
These poor words strain to tell a tale a shout out to eternity and it is a clarion call from the dawning to the setting of the sun announcing a state of grace that surely will ripple through time.
The night calls sweetly to us Bids us sleep well and find courage in the day.
The candles of the dead will not be extinguished floating like blossoms in the deep cradled by spectral hands never seen by the living except in dreams or art
Did you come this far for the view? Or was it a curious urge to find forgiveness in a time of grief?
I can grant you forgiveness. I have the power through time and the tides my calloused hands have held the sun like an egg my feet have climbed Mt. Olympus and none the wiser
So come gently with me leave your battered dreams on the bedside table drink a draught of this noble wine stand upon this precipice of uncertainty and contemplate something near to eternity.
This simple dance revolves around itself repeating intricate figures until its inevitable end.
And then? A riddle wrapped in the loose skin of the night beckons to us all the certainty of death leaves us wondering while stumbling along this frosted winter shore.
A thousand times a thousand ships have sailed daily and sent nary a missive home.
The signal fires are burning on forested headlands here along this rugged coast. Dark and solemn capes gather the pelting rain into their skirts.
The signaling smoke from fir-fed fires wraps itself in salt spray serves as a beacon for the lost a message to the departed.
Yet not a word not a message in a bottle from those who have set forth. 180 degrees of the compass and not a sail. The sea splendid and empty.
If no news is good news, then bliss is our birthright. If no news is something else again, then simple silence will be our wage.
Gunpowder blue sky yet no blue, really except for the blue wrapped into the spectrum of black to grey to white
A storm blows in the sea in an uproar no holds barred no remorse for the cormorant or the gull in these fierce swells
We know nothing of power until we know the sea. We know nothing of journeys until we journey upon waters as wild as these.
Odysseus would have shied from this salt caldron from these wind-tossed waves stayed on some pleasant rock imbibing the lotus.
And who would blame him? Only a fool or a sailor without hope would venture into the teeth of this tempest.
And that sailor would have cause to regret his choice would understand the depths of his folly as he slipped into darkness and clasped hands with the legions of the drowned asleep in the swirl of the sea.
Next add four iconic conifers as high as the sky eternally ******* down
These things are always in my sight through my window on this wet world
Multiply all of this by a sweet daughter who makes me proud and raise the whole to the power of a strong woman who carries us all on her back
The equation produces a result that I am 95 percent certain equals happiness though the confidence interval is wide
And this result sweet as it is and as uncertain as it is will outlive me leave a faint echo in time an echo that will bounce off a star and finally be found gripped in my shriveled paw long after the epiphany nowhere near paradise somewhere short of the end of the line
This is a moment of happiness stolen from time hijacked by a fugitive from civil society
I'll hold it close until death pries it without mercy from my hand
Leaves it as a blessing and a curse for all who come after
Take the blessing. Leave the curse. That's the advice I give with my dying breath. And I leave this to you from the generosity of my heart. With a nod to the scant traces of God's grace that I find on these pathways of travail.
Never lost. Never found. Always present and generous to all.
Be that.
I write from Western Oregon in a year that is wet even by Oregon standards.
She captures autumn in a jar reads the moon's straying through leaf and branch
Always in love with love and always reeling from the loss
What wave tossed this refugee ashore? What alignment of stars and planets of uncountable galaxies brought this woman to this world and not another?
A simple truth will tell. The moon at high tide hides beneath her skirts. A slight disturbance in the silken fabric of space and time and all is lost all is born.
I hold my hands out palms up in prayer and thanks every day to mark the blessing to place a peg in the whole.
Given to all denied to none and mysterious to most
Life pours out of a hole in the sea leaves nothing and everything to chance.
A most pious man whose well-tempered music brushed the cobwebs from the throne of God
Evolution was made manifest across deep time these lyrical figures achieve the same purpose in the space between the morning star and the dawn
A fallow field is sewn with pearls a moonlit beach illuminated by shadow every scrape of the fiddler's bow merges mind with the present harvests the meaning in the moment
The composer that good man was for a time church organist at St. John's its notable steeple leaning all askew as a rebuke against God or perhaps the drunken architect
A finger of candlelight plays across the manuscript a fugue echoes through the still church
And though no living person on that still winter's night shares the organist's solemn delight the stirring mass of possibility that is posterity awaits
The dead are all around us they are as alive in their way as we are in ours
We share a world of shadows with these manes and step awkwardly into the light
Every breath of the wind is a dead soul passing every autumn leaf that falls a secret hieroglyph from the beyond
Beasts in the wild know this thus the coyote sings his mad lament the raven turns his dull eye toward the east expecting not light but a flight of dark wings
And dark wings command my attention these days my eye turned inexorably toward the night
Where every word is farewell where all commerce ends and I rejoin the stream of stars
Done with all of this. And surely it will be bliss.
Sour smell of wood smoke seaweed flayed and dried upon the rocks those huddled stones prone and obeisant to the grey sea
And there a star that is settling into the indifferent waves leaving us cold and bereft soon to be entwined with the night
But do not despair We will wake with the dawn bring the candle of hope in our hands and much peace
A solemn and ocean-deep peace shared with every sentient being in time and every being departed from time
The moon has its quarters the sun its seasons I have only this tenuous grasp on life a primal sense of loss and love and the dull roar of the Pacific in my ear
Yachats is my favorite little town on the Oregon coast. A good place for existential meditations.
I am officially too old left it all at the station lost my ticket and finally busted by the conductor for being a poet and a *** the holy two-fer
Never thought the joke would go on this long never imagined I'd be ******* oxygen in a posh bar with Helen of Troy and me in my cups
Yet here we are the ships have sailed the vagabonds have stumbled home every swan has flown
And between you and me Jack (and while she's in the lady's room) I am told I was born of a woman on this day sixty four years ago
I don't believe it
Birthdays are make-believe every crease and wrinkle in the fabric of time every line in my face is a testament to an intricate conspiracy the stars aligned against me and on my birthday, no less
They say this ride has a conclusion people pass on I have seen fields of grim stones that attest to this fact
But I'm not so sure. At this late date I'm still thinking I might beat this rap.
I literally wrote this WHILE she was in the lady's room - so-called.
We speak the true tongue a language formed in the deepest trenches of the earth's oceans those places where life was formed where the elemental heat of the planet expresses itself in steam, confusion and eruption
We sing in the true tongue music that is blind yet sees all its rhyme set to rhythm a motion of flesh-hung bones
We stand against every fate yet our song will endure it will be the last song
And we paint with a palette stolen from the sky on the day of the most perfect dawn
We are God's thieves stealing a line here and there dipping a sad bucket into a river of stars holding it proudly aloft the heart shaped into a song perhaps a poem nothing more
Burned two cities in Japan. It was not antiseptic. It was not friendly.
It was ****** on a scale that the world has come to know too well but by a means that upset the balance of nature
The magnetic forces of the atom unhinged set off on lunatic paths to arrive at something like the sun
Flesh was peeled from bone that day faces peeled from skulls
This is not a pretty thing not a bedtime story for your kids
Yet our taxes pave a path to the next generation of hell-found missiles aimed deliberately and directly at the hopes the domestic fears the quiet anxieties the moments of wonder of love the kiss in the morning goodbye the welcome home in the evening of every person alive today.
When Coyote witnessed the Creator making this world he thought I will make a world like that for myself
And so he formed a copy of every living thing from the mud from the branches and detritus that he gathered there on the banks of the Columbia River
But all of his carefully wrought figures elk and deer fish that sparkle in the shallows black bear who hides from two-leggeds the wings of the air who mingle with the leaves and branches of the forest all melted back into the mud of the riverbank at the next rain
Undeterred Coyote set out on a quest
He found a new country a pleasant land of vast expanse with every manner of good things
When Coyote came into this country his hunger was greater than myth sharp as the edge of a knife
And there he spied Crow on a high cliff with a mouth full of deer fat
A plan quickly formed in the caverns of his cunning
Coyote called out Chief Crow I am told that your voice is as sweet as spring water as pleasing as a woman in the night
Sing for me Great Chief and I will reward you richly
Crow is a vain creature and being called Chief gave him great pleasure
He preened opened his silver wings to the sun and sang his rough song but in a muted tone in order to save his delicious morsel
Coyote called out again Oh Chief! That wasn't much. not like the stories I have been told. Please sing your song again with feeling!
Crow rose to his full height ****** his sharp beak into the air and gave full voice to his raucous song for the sake of every crow on earth
We know the end of this tale because Coyote taught it to our ancestors
The deer fat fell to the ground and Coyote trickster scarfed it in an instant
Hunger dampened he ambled along the well-beaten path to find the next fool
And that is the story of Coyote and Crow. Keep your pride in check or be the next one laid low.
This is roughly based on a traditional tale of the Yakama Nation, a people whose reservation is not too far up the river from here.