DESERT PRAYER
One morning, in a dry month of the driest year,
Lasted long and whispered solemn in my desert ear.
In the sort of irony God relishes, were sent my way.
But one, a tortoise in the sun, besieged by butterflies
(mining minerals from its’ nostrils and eyes)
Made me wonder - was it time for prayer,
Time to tell God I had seen Him there?
But expressions of faith, like water and meat
Are hard to find in the desert heat,
So many prayers remain unfound
The words lie scattered on the ground.
Then spoke my desert heart “this drought has just begun.
Even now, in winter, the leather of my desert soul is cracked,
How much better its first owner were alive to care and take it back.
A season ending recipe when summer fades to Fall,
Refined and honed from forty years of savoring them all.
Gather dry, dead leaves from forgotten years.
Stir them with your own leftover fears.
Avoid the laughter of the young, green grass and yellow flowers.
Leave any happy songs unsung. Let silence keep the hours.
Seek out the dark life, hidden in the empty woods with your empty heart- maybe the mocking laughter of crows will serve this part.
And don’t forget nostalgia. Let that bitterness befriend you
And remind you of the loss the winter wind will send you.
Then go and let it ripen under cold, October skies
And return again in darkness with the starlight in your eyes.
Now let the night beguile you with its secret silent charms,
And wait a while for death to come and take you in her arms.
Tonight
is going to be long ago.
Something
old is coming back to me.
Something that saw
buffalo skulls resting below vermilion cliffs
before there was dust on the Oregon Trail.
Something
familiar to wolves and wind,
Hidden
and waiting for me this night
to
step backward through the years
beyond
the light and shadows
to
embrace me and whisper like a lover
what only I can
remember.
Looking into those eyes, I saw...
Only mossy stones in the shallows, emerging secretly, absorbing the darkness, remembering what stones remember; the brief pleasure and remorse from the touch of other living creatures; a long ago memory of movement when the flooding liquid pushed them far away from another resting place - searching and hunting under the midnight moon.
Then the stones looked at me and through me until I knew that I had no substance. It was I that cast no shadow. I had neither history nor memory - only the mossy stones emerging from the shallows....
A RIVER IN FRANCE
The night lamps spill amber pools on the Compiegne bridge, like the yellow fields of rapeseed south of Paris billowing beyond the view of trains and eyes; and skies, gray as the water and the barges between Paris and the sea, that ocean greener than the Ardennes in April.
The village I love is a river in France, the rivers and towns are the same to me, whether the Rhone or the Seine, Compienge or Paris, the rivers and towns flow down to the sea.
If I returned somehow to the river that was, remembering all that I used to be, could I see myself standing here twenty years hence with time running down like this river in France to the sad salt taste of eternity.
Our eyes, through a sea of longing shone,
Two foxes together and mine alone.
Not just oceans but worlds kept us apart
And kept us from knowing the other’s heart.
If I could remember what they still know
Perhaps it would not be too far to go;
Too far to acquire the untamed mask
Of solitude; too hard a task.
Always, on leaving, together they walk
They share the old ways and their secret talk
And I smiled when they stopped to look behind-
Perhaps puzzled by what they didn’t find.
10/1/97
And hushed to sudden silence, children awed in mystery of
amber evening, catch the crimson sweep of clouds that sings to sleep the
Sad, strange horses, peering from the gloaming trees.
Old and wise, they know my ways, my wish, have told the trees that answered yellow green.
Cold, careful watchers, full of dreams and questions, still send me their dark visions.
Listen now and touch the dreams of sand and water merging.
Not knowing what I know, there is no need to watch no need to wait for more.
The
borders of sight, secret, buried in blankness.
Alone
in winter I am
Shrouded
in dead crystals of ice, and ready,
Like
the solitary bear, to believe in being utterly alone.
Ready
to seek the comfort of the rocks,
My
heart hidden beneath the sleeping trees.
Ready
myself, to sleep under the low moon,
Slow
inner tides waxing and waning,
Waiting
for Earth to remember....
When you tell me you can’t remember, all I see is the long ago anguish in the same eyes that could never lie. That day, that day you said neither of us would remember in ten years or even ten weeks. But now, it’s twenty years and you’re still trying to forget. And isn’t it funny. Of all the things that happened that day, your voice, growing sharper, your words crueler like the wind, my face, as it fell away in the darkening rain. Of all this, we both know it was the tree behind me and how it dropped its leaves all at once that you try so hard to forget.
How
would we find each other, after the long years
In
a place and time foreign to us both, each looking
Backward to our old haunts, forgetting where we started?
What would it be like to suddenly realize how little we know
Of the other, to open all the shuttered windows,
To see through the other’s eyes that first ocean and taste
The salt spray and touch the sand in a far country?
And rising from the sleep of ages to look with wonder
And touch each other’s face, what would that be like?
Winter never drew so near
The dying leaves of one more year
Grimly silent, cold and deep;
But,
dreamless slumber is not sleep.
Kissed
by loneliness and fear
of
dying lonely, lying here
Trees look on the
world and weep,
But, dreamless
rest is not their sleep.
Soon
enough that sleep will come, feared by many, cheered by some.
Spirits on the
watch they keep know dreamless
slumber is not sleep.
In the silence after sunset, but before the light was gone,
I have searched within the shadows of the woods when day is done.
Even as the rain is falling and the snow drifts on the peak
Is it not enough to tell me what I should or shouldn’t seek?
I have listened for the voices and I’ve whispered in the leaves
Coming close to understanding when I prayed among the trees.
Still this far forgotten forest makes it clear I’ll never know
More than autumn rain at sunset, more than silence, more than snow.
Not
that their Gods had gone away
Leaving
only religion to hold sway
Over
bodies whose spirits had long since fled
Now
they worshiped the idea of death
As
an end to each agonizing breath
Not
gods, but stone tombs instead
No
hope in the heart, but faith in the dead.
FOOD FOR THE CROWS
A darkness of crows on the
evening breeze
Came to perch, unafraid of
my silent form,
On the wind bared branches
of the winter trees
Like new black leaves blown
in on a storm.
In its secret winter my
spirit stirred,
And forgetting my own dark
chemistry,
I listened, unsure of what I
heard
In the cries of the crows
looming over me.
And they bore me aloft on
their lonely flight
Til I saw in the distance
the days ahead
Then a sadness settled upon
the night.
As the colors, like crows
into darkness, fled.
In that bitter moment I
understood.
We pray for light but in darkness
burn
And my heart became ash in
this winter wood
Where I wait for the carrion
crows return.
At the end of day, when the
shadows are long,
And the shadow of earth meets the moon dead sky-
In this place where my worship of wings became strong,
CROSSROADS 3/97
When eyes have dimmed enough from time and rain,
Then, once more down the road I will pretend to start
A
bitter journey I shall surely never make again.
To
climb the crumbling tar of Berthoud Pass,
That
winds in solitude across the Snowy Range
And all the quiet winter ground is stark and strange.
I’ll
search the sleeping trees, the downhill side;
In
leafless wonder watch as daylight dims,
While overhead, perhaps ashamed of what they hide,
Clouds with their own regrets spill shadows on the canyon rims.
The towns (saloons), Red Wash, Dinosaur, Greystone;
Forgotten realm of purple shale and yellow sands,
I’ll see the crossroads shining underneath the moon.
Before I learned a road or choice could kill a man
I
kept the straight, remembered route in view.
I’ll
take the crossroads now and follow if I can
Less
sure, but unafraid of all I thought was true.
Let drop another grape among the weeds and think of dust,
Watch it swirl and settle slowly on the drying crust.
In ancient days, when there were clouds and no one talked of heat or drought
The people floated lily pads and laughed til they were caught.
In evening grays they dressed in purple melancholy pain.
It was a time of deep regret and loss, a time of rain.
If through the mist of time these pyramidal mountains stay the same
Then did they trade the days for dust, or dreams when China came?
Dust and no water nor breath
To bring life where only the
dead
Tell their old stories-how
they rest
Quiet in their hidden flesh-
truth
With the final opening of
eyes-limbs
Scattered in a last
unanswered prayer
Glisten
for a moment til the light dims
On
another century in the noontime glare.
His Searching Eye
That he could cast afar to lose himself in thought and reason.
The eye flew forth to find the world he used to know,
To sound the hollow earth, and probe beneath its crust,
Early comes the dark within the basin to the Tree
That haunts his heart in solitude, so dark, so shadowy.
The tree whose hoary branches twist below the bitter stars
Like fingers of the dead from the shallow graves of wars.
He sat beneath the tree and touched the weary bark
With his own cruel, frozen
fingers in the dark.
Sinking in the silence for
the darkness to unfold
Waiting for the world to
empty and grow cold.
The snow rose up the valley floor, rose up the ridge and hid the stone
And when he looked he found his searching eye was gone.
So age had blessed them
both, the tree and him,
Blessed with silence on the
world’s cold rim
Together they would serve the secret ministry of frost,
Blessed with silence, blessed with blindness now and lost.
A solitary Joshua tree, on a hill in the desert crust,
gleans a miserly subsistence in the dry and rocky dust.
Poised for centuries in warning with her arms upraised in ruin
for a hundred thousand mornings in the vastness of the dunes.
Few will wander through the wasteland to the torn and twisted frame
but, regardless of the season, they come haltingly and lame.
And the joshua tree receives them in the heat and snow and thunder
and she puzzles at the reason why they gape at her in wonder.
Over
all he cherished solitude,
In
the lonely call of the canyon wren,
In
the secret places he had been.
Half
a century passed and he’d kept apart
From
the world of man and hidden his heart
In
the darkest depths of untold dreams,
On
forgotten paths along mountain streams.
And peering through smoke and the flames of that fire
He
reminded himself, on the cold bench stone,
One
more time, how he didn’t fear being alone.
.Farther and Faster
Knowledge is power, they
used to say.
They couldn’t know or guess
today
How many count moments of
quiet as waste
In their need for speed and
urgent haste.
How many move farther and
faster by noon
Than Lewis and Clark through the phase of the moon.
How could we miss what we
never knew,
What we never saw in the
languid blue
Of a morning spent slowly
hiking alone
Past ten million years of
canyon stone.
And what of the Utes and the
bison, dead
And the glaciers gone where
the rivers bled
Faster than buffalo grass is
burned
Farther and faster than what
was learned
In an instant flash of noble
truth
When Clark first fingered a
grizzly tooth.
Farther and faster and
further still
Than we ever would or ever
will
Again remember or know or
care
If we still believed it was
ever there.
No wonder we have to quicken
our pace,
No wonder our fear of open
space,
No wonder the hollow
faithless prayer,
No wonder faith in God so
rare.