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Horizon

I drank from a hidden fountain:
everything stopped,
sound froze,
cracked, fell to the ground as powder;
light melted,
dripped, clung to the skin like sweat,
sank in.
I breathed in cold darkness
and exhaled puffs of light,
my eyes illuminated everything,
my vision bore through steel,
rocks, smoke;
mirrors evaporated.
I closed my eyes
and saw a brilliant azure sea
caressing a band of dazzling white
stretching away past the edges of sight,
fringing the toes of flower strewn dunes;
the air alive, vibrant, yet light as grace,
and all in a shower of warmth
under the luminous dome of sky.
My eyes opened,
I saw my other cell mates,
“We can get out,” I said,
“You must leave,” they replied,
“Come, let me show you,”
I said, leading them to the great iron door,
it was unlocked, as always.
I opened it, walked out,
calling for them to follow, saying
“We are always free.”

They closed the door behind me,
pushing hard to keep it sealed,
“Go, do not come back, do not speak,”
they screamed without speaking,
“Wolves will eat your flesh,
your bones will lie in the open,”
they cried in fearful anger
and returned to their cells.
I can see them,
each staring at the texture of the bricks
in the walls of their cells,
pining for freedom,
clinging to the certainty of parallel isolation.
And I am cast out, left to die,
wandering the dunes, eating wild strawberries,
watching the flight of birds,
the unfolding of clouds,
listening to the hymn of wind across sand,
the fall of water into the embrace of surf,
sheets of water wiping the face of the beach,
the hissing kiss of foam on wet sand.
Mountains have grown and been ground flat,
washed into the sea –
and still, I am here.

17 April 2002

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Poet Blood

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“We be of one blood, ye and I.”
– Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

It is said one lives longer
if part of some community.
Does this mean outcasts
are slowly being murdered by society?,
and hermits are invisible suicides?
Both might see
a deadzone of spirit and intuition
in the congenial orthodoxies
and mindless homogeneities of social convention.
If so, then what does it mean to ‘live longer,’
and who, indeed, has really ‘lived?’
And for our loners,
driven by the unrelenting power of their visions of truth,
do their solitary paths
weave into some tenuous fabric of kinship?,
like castaways
trading messages in bottles across an indifferent sea?;
or cougars
spraying their pungent declarations on distant outcrops?
Some of them, I know,
distill experience down to its essence, its nuggets, its salts,
and throw these back as poems into an unsensing world,
knowing there are others like them
also casting,
also, occasionally, breathing in the sting
of newly found insight:
“We be of one blood, ye and I.”

30 December 2001

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The Touch Of The Open
(Between An Open Love and A Greedy Heart)

A butterfly surprising me
landed on my palm and made me see
the radiance of life’s floating smile
burning through the haze of my blue ennui
to melt my heart so gratefully
into your redeeming love for me.

But I know you’re that kind of grace
that must weave through life at your own pace,
and so I walk on fear’s knife-edge
dreading unknowns that might come to be,
standing in your glow between
an open love and my heart greedy.

If I close you in, I will crush your dreams,
If my love is open, you will float away.
If I keep you here, I will kill beauty,
If I love your freedom, my heart will break
when you leave
as you must
to be the wonder in this world that you are,
a butterfly
floating free
through the sunbeams of old age memories.

A butterfly surprising me
landed on my palm and made me see
the radiance of life’s floating smile
burning through the haze of my blue ennui
to warm my heart into love for you
and feeling that incredible high to be
the world’s heart now beating as me,
the fullness of all this joy so free,
as big as the sun to life can be.

I’ll think of you in future times,
smiling, knowing I could love so much,
grateful to remember how
you made me flower into springtime love,
a timeless grace flitting heart to heart
linking minds forever in your sea of love,
immersing those soon left behind
into the touch of the open,
the touch of the open,
the touch of the open…

23 August 2017

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I Am The All, I Am Nothing

I am the peace of still water
in a granite fold of mountains
high up in the cool wild mists.
I am the combusting turbulence of dragon’s breath,
human passions erupting
in angry rebellion against injustice.
I am the fresh breath of life
wafting over a summer sea
to breeze across a warming hill, waving grasses,
and sink deep into earth’s luxuriant embrace
to seed for birth ripening fruits of love.
I am the hard cold solitude of ice
self-preserving against corrupting indolence,
and hard against the trampling mindless herds.
I am the midnight dawn of moonlight,
the mind’s awakening beyond the stars
to deep time’s calming vision.
I am the heat of summer sunshine
evaporating birthing dew from butterfly wings,
freeing my spirit to flutter among flowers of chance
and savor the nectar of experience.
I am the all, I am nothing:
the all of everything down to its subatomic particles,
its quantum fluctuations.
I am the all, I am nothing:
the all-everything by chance erupting from all-nothing,
just as you have.
And so we are linked
like individual ripples arising momentarily
from one great enduring ocean.

11 August 2017

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Garden by the Sea
17 June 2017
https://youtu.be/h4yVMtj8Rg8

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Mazurka Beans

I look down into a pot of beans, shaking oregano,
sunlight shines through the trees and fills the house,
the music of Chopin Mazurkas fills the air,
spilling out the open door diffusing into the streams of light.

I look down into a pot of beans – black beans –
the food of Cuba, of Puerto Rico,
the dish I loved my mother to make.
Below the carpet of basil, oregano, paprika, cumin, salt and pepper,
the black beans soak, their skins browned in garlic olive oil,
mingling with chopped ham and onions,
caressed by diced stewed tomatoes,
all blending into a nectar of the earth,
a nourishment, a celebration, an essence of a culture –
sabor.

I look down into that textured herbal blanket
waiting to see the eruption of bubbles signaling a boil,
a brown boil with blood red flashes rending the herbal shroud
and issuing billows of aromatic steam,
the taste of the south like the spirit of its people –
rising, rising –
to overwhelm with luxuriant sensuality
the thin dryness of a pallid north.

I look down into that pot of black beans in this perfect moment
and I see the entire world radiating out –
the entire interpenetrating web
created and unfurled beyond the edges of infinity –
like the eightfold rays of Buddha truth,
flung from the vortex-eye of a Tibetan sand mandala.
Time evaporates, mind is one, “I am who am.”

Outside, I hear my little girl,
babbling and toddling like a little sparrow sifting through the leaves,
as purple florets of lantana sway in the mazurka breeze – music,
the kiss that transcends time,
the breath that transcends death –
and little Ella’s arrow gaze and impish smile
are my eternal rebellion’s salute to a narrow sleeping world.

I am the pepper in your pot of beans,
the heat rising from below,
the browned garlic olive skin rubbing up against you,
the nectar blended from many fine extracts and cultivations,
heir of an ancient and unending impetus,
the innocence and adventure of eternal experience –
an enticement, a flood –
the love-child of revolution and sustenance –
sabor.

19 May 2001

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Everybody I know looks older now,
much older,
and many have fallen away
like last year’s autumn leaves.
I walk through the noisy light of day
wrapped in a quiet mist of memories
rebounding from the unhearing
as wasted words, phantom vibrations.
Silence is best as I watch your sorrows unfold.
After decades I realize it is not my help that matters,
but my empathy,
and have come to be resigned
to its being as unknown as I am unseen.
Perhaps I, too, walked blindly through kind knowing
by souls of living history in my time,
trailing eddies of wasted empathy
in the wake of my blazing urgency.
So now, I look back with understanding and see,
but can only shout to your budding future as silence.
It seems our lives must be this way
so you can discover your anguish
with the same freshness as I did mine.

25 June 2017

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