India

First Steps

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There were days when I wrote more

When I felt more,

When the trees, rearing and

Kneeling around the garden (and,

There are still one hundred ways to kneel

And kiss the ground) said

Something to me beyond words

That made me think of

You laughing.

Low Flying Angels

Bluescape or cloudscape, shadow-short on oak,

Bright front yard of morning.

Sun half-full, half-empty,

Day cloudless and knowing it, day baby-blue and

Luck-blue, dove idle beyond midbranch,

First hush of rooster—

Everything is finite but the roots.

Seldom does one see the unconscious bedding— maybe

In the roses one plants for the elderly,

Or in the toes one cannot pull

From the dirt—

Still, I try, and if eyes are fingers I’ll be

Licking the warm light off them

Until I’ve broken the skin

Of the pool of myself.

It all depends on what human

You gather your dusk from,

What destiny you might thumb absentmindedly, a way

Of margin— black of the avacado’s skin—

Or marrow— black the pupil of that sun-beaten boy

In that foreign land, too soft to tell the

Tale he is telling.

Thinking of him only makes me shake.

It makes me shake until,
Sitting in that round oak, I am 
Blown loose by the wind 
Into the blue sky
Like a petal, a wish,
From this world
To itself—
Already true. 

Dharamsala

Fingertips or heaven-slung tears tapping on the roof

Of my dreams and no gutters to save them.

Bleary my brother’s head breathing slowly

Next to me on this hotel bed and if it weren’t

For us talking about the visions that take us at night then

This travel would be shot in all black and white—
I rise and try to remember what went on

Inside me the cold night gone.  Outside,

Dawn lays all gray so I take my shirt off and hope

The amber in my eyes leak resin or wisdom

For me to wear, but only see the crows

Gathering atop that naked pine instead.

I shut my eyes, hold my breath, reach

My arms out toward them—

I remember how cold it is and wrap myself

In the blue folds of the distance instead and

If only my momma could see me now

She’d take the shirt fallen at my ankles and

Put it on the wood stove so it’d be warm when

I actually wake up.  Maybe brother has. The

Crows are gone.

In the name of

Simpler love please keep

Raining on our dreams so we might

Learn to sleep deep

Enough

That those drops could never find us,

Let alone drown it all

Away. I pick up my shirt and

Go back to bed.

In Thinking of You Today

I am led along the backstreets

of this ancient city—

I peel a feather from beneath its

history of lost steps,

trace the dissolving paths of

pigeons  in the grey sky

above the silhouettes of two children

weaving through the dark world of

crinkled trousers and scuffed shoes,

follow a leaf as it tumbles into

the feet of a man standing still in

the street, his palms open, head tilted

toward the sky, muttering in prayer.

I once became what

I saw, what I touched;

now, only sometimes –

in waking from dreams, or

when your eyes dilate in

the faded light –

am I stirred into the soft

sensation of unraveling,

of returning:

there, in some twilight, I heed the

distant tinkering, and begin

to walk down to the waterfront,

toward what you may

come to know in me. 

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The night your spirit welled and rained

The plains flashed bright, startling

Eyes drifting through the past,

Through earlier years rapidly

Hardened beneath all-knowing clouds.

Old voices thundered

This never happened

As the sky teemed with

Droves of former fathers,

Wiping away the heaven’s white,

Flaring bones, and

Pouring upon your boyhood—

Until now, you have been a stray voice,

Amiss, garbled, rambling.

One can build a house from old bones,

One can sit idle in the doorway,

Peering out onto newly drenched

And softened land.

Boy, go stand still in that field,

Bloom radiant a new body—
Go sing your new song.