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Fallow fields

Fallow fields and bare trees,

sky big enough to swallow the world,

no orientation given..

we work for our bearings.

Building of nests and swooping,

flitting winged ones

keep the silence lively:

Here, staring at reflections in the pond

passes whole days.

Returned

Light plays across short, bright

Spring

low on the hills.

Grasses on broad flanks,

rising deep in crags,

stones spreading islands of lichen.

Crafts of vulture, fleet cradled high

in cup of valley,

and swallows,

ticks and tiniest leaf curls..

they are returned.

No mystery less now than ever,

basics uncertain,

direction wide open.

Trusting movements of the season

drains panic

away.

Swallows swift,

Vultures glide,

ticks sensing,

leaves spiraling,

lessons shape days unfolding.

Kindleless fire

You lose your beauty

and the sky turns pink.

It’s not yours to lose.

What twists us in knots

keeps us,

an unholy marriage,

from the divinity shining

within our own eyes.

Who says what is beautiful,

he, she or he?

Meaningless judgments aimed

at raising one, at undermining another.

Recall the kindleless fire

and your heart will know none

but love threading song.

Vanishings

When death meets you

long before memory remembers,

wrapping tender and dark tendrils

around your heart,

a shadow casts upon all that follows.

Inexplicably.

Without reason the most beloved people,

one after another after another,

disappear.

And the pain nearly kills you.

Vanishings become a lifetime of dancing,

red shoes stuck to your tired feet,

exhaustion pulling your heart toward the edge,

right up to the moment when you find out:

The she you could not have named,

She died.

And you were with her through the end.

Ghosts haunt lifetimes.

Watching day

Watching day wake across the land,

Sun creeping,

silent,

hill fold lengthening upon hill fold,

I remember when life was new,

when meeting was discovery and touch,

rolling bloom and rest of breath

one upon another,

two together,

bleeding into syncopated music

not for writing down.

And this is how your heart beats, and how mine,

and the stretching ribs and curving neck.

If life becomes new again,

not in difficulty but blessed opening,

in pattern changing expanse,

I’m here, wrapped in soft cloak of yearning,

ready for flush of fresh blood,

spring snowmelt,

to waken me,

Sun brightening mine own hidden contours.

I’m aging like those hills.

We reach back

We reach back in the generations,

untangling threads,

and wonder over familiar terrain,

hunting fruit-bearing trees never noticed

before.

But before

was when the wood was too green,

flowers knocked off by freeze,

bees unable to work their magic–

harvest waiting for the right season.

I wander the woods

after sharing those stories again and again,

ones asking unanswerable questions,

sensing the complexity of things.

I did not know,

until now,

I am the winged one

returning to the grove

to hum between pink petals

and play my part

in the fecundity of my ancestors.

Ancestors

whose bones move beneath this skin,

whose bones make blood

carrying me to the end of my days.

False spring

Petals on the ground.

Storm approaching.

Grey blue clouds and pine needles blowing

northwest.

In shafts of sunlight,

ponderosa bodies redden brightly.

I hear voices and turn around.

This is no time for people.

Stones soft with green, half buried

in hillsides, and madrone leaves

outside-in

usher me home.

No other way

Watching the weather come in

through breaking light,

February flowering trees moving

below with the wind,

I can’t recall the bird I heard last night.

Sleep dropped hard–thank god–and

dreams of a friendly pockmarked face

and who he was.

I’m small here beneath swirling sky,

flea to the breathing animal I try

to rest upon.

I’ve no idea what’s coming.

Somehow, with birth arrived a tossing of

security

for a life that wouldn’t crush my soul.

I know no other way.

And don’t think I want to.

Like salt

I’ve hills to stare at now,

hills and wire where birds sit.

Seems nothing will stand in place,

bottom dropping out in every direction,

the basics no longer assumed.

Still, the blessed pace of clouds is just right.

A deep fire burns in toothed cliffs folded

between soft slopes across the valley,

they smolder even without light;

Heart of that earth gathers to it eyes

and broadening questions.

I take each day like salt to the dish.

Limitations

The limitations of our fathers,

they are not ours to live by. See

and be done.

Do

and live beyond.

The next generations are here to end

that which came before.