Friday, June 26, 2015

thinking of June...



A handful of American sentences 
(per Alan Ginsberg, a 17 syllable line):


Deeply felt contentment spreads undirected and without being asked.

**

From the airport to the south, planes lift soundless airborne headlights, glaring.

**

Just south of east, darkness dreams of dawn—was that shadow-glow, or a sigh?

**

Horizon returns salmon-toned under an already bluing sky.

**

Freeway traffic, distant, latent companion, emerges with the light.

**

And though we rise and act as if we do, our prayers admit we do not.






**


April’s End

First quarter almost done,
wholeness prevails. 

A single heave of the heart
makes its own space and time, 

always of and always within
the larger arc.


**


May Day

comes as April’s darkness 
departs in light so clear and settled

even birds still themselves—

the bare, unsung sky 
wanting nothing.


**


Telephone poles where I live
still attract woodpeckers,

mostly in mornings 
before the rush of small town life—

engines turned, closing doors,
the roll of passing tires,

the build of children’s voices,
the playground down the street.

If you tend to rise before the tide here,
you do so with woodpeckers.


**


Introductions to life’s fullness 
abound about the eyes and ears

like gnats around fruit 
set out in the sun.

And there it sits, so still 
you’d think it waiting—

but you’d be thinking wrong.


**


If it is as they say, that it’s the ear 
that allows us to speak
as we do, 

then what of wind and water, 
of birds and trees, earth 
and ocean, 

and the stars—do their songs 
play a part in all of this—what then
do we hear, 

what then does it mean
to listen?


**


Post card poems

A thing of the past
makes present

with the stroke of a pen,
the placing of a stamp.


**


Tell me something I’ll want to know

just for the knowing, and 


for the feel of it.