Winter Solstice
All but alone
in the wintered sky,
all but alone, the fulsome moon
breathes—wandering sisters,
lingering dreams.
**
Days with names
Days with names pass so easily
as to be completely missed, brief swirls in streams
marked and forgotten in an inhale.
Some carrying implications true enough for our living,
a loose curve or a sharp one, rapids,
long smooth stretches of quiet—you know
Mondays are not Wednesdays, nor are they Thursday;
Saturdays and Sundays, a category all their own.
But as we’ve seen, as all has changed,
the arcs and turns of time have their own way.
The days I have in mind have real names,
taken of themselves--unforgettable.
Like that day in Jersey, in fall
we buried my dad--that crisp sky, the distant blue
touch of sun. The snow outside the window
the evening my mother left.
And the morning in the darkened hospital hallway,
the nurse extending to me our first born.
And that day in Hawaii, soon after we met you wore
that loose fitting shift, green pin stripes on white.
That day. And so many more.
**
Children’s voices,
up from the neighbor’s yard.
Twilight.
**
As the sun drops behind the mountain,
shadows race with twilight
to see which will carry longest
playing children’s voices.
**
prayer and praise
--spontaneous breath-play
**
I know nothing of the formal structure of psalms,
but believe I might tell them by their music,
the same, if not mistaken, that flowers sing to sun rise
on the quickened breath of earth’s return to light.
**
So why not just ride
the light-glittering stream
as what it so easily carries?
**
The point is joy
and joy deliverance
and the song understood
in the singing…
**
Though the chill has eased,
the furnace wakes at daybreak
to soft tapping rains.
**
so quiet the earth
in hours dark leaves
light returns so seamless
notes can neither touch
nor tell, so traceless
the earth in its way
and yet, and still
it is here
we have our place
**
Checking my own pulse
—how redundant!
**
Jane Imamura
Her words of the camps,
laced with love, pain strung through
with love of Buddha’s love,
page by page, pulse by pulse
in pulse.
Namuamidabutsu
**
The Wife
Neither difficult, nor easy, she said,
“it’s the way we live.”
**
Considering the unconsidered
The body knows, always knows and does its all
without prompt, within conditions given
Sending signals of every encounter, ever,
to all concerned
The body knows, as does earth and air and all else
--the restless foot reaching
Meets waiting earth’s harmonies heard
by everyone, then handed to habit
As so for air and lungs, heart and blood,
light and the eyes and the ears and all that whispers
All this, the stuff and sustenance of the mind
that finds itself there
All this work, all this play
for who?
**
Routine cataract surgery and a detached retina
How smug I was
in those corporate years,
so clear the entitled sense
of the young.
But for the ancients, far senior
to this one, clouds need only be illumined,
not removed, and the real fool
revealed here, not there.
