1

The mind keeps saying unsolicited things:
how the wind is always in motion but never arrives,
unlike the sea which nods, replies, retreats,
while the wind scoffs, topples limbs, lashes
the headlands. The sea can only tremble
as surf on sand continues, the eternal
water flows back and forth, unlike a clock.

A man whose soul is older than the mountain
climbs like an ant clinging to a moving road.
On the path his robes reach earth, yet his visions
touch heaven. The blind man pulls a scarf
over his head, pats his brow as if he sees
like those he passes, who define the world
by meadows, trees, flowers, which the blind man
knows by breath, the sense of his feet in earth.

With a few honest words, one can learn to know
more than the self. The shadow of memory,
astonishing in its brilliance. Moving from light
into dark, off the eastern mountains, several
embers left, the ancient music weaves
with lips that sound like plunging whales.

Not the only voice he hears, but one of many;
this particular, distinct, that one, confused,
the next coming from the bottom of a well,
and another as if it were his daughter.
The possibility that all humans possess
the things of feeling. The poet casts off the noise
of bells loving nature more than art or man.

With one or two well-turned words the clavier
is tuned to the sound of an enormous mind.
The wind allows for percussion. Somewhere
out at sea a whale blows a furrow in the shallows.
Adrift, the music shifts, bails out, and wheels.

Walking with the woman who found a home in me
and whom I found at home. Her voice separates
each demon from its echo. A chorus of tenors
sings but they are false warbles. Adoring beauty
I pick her paintbrush, lilac, and some small blue
weeds that hang like whistles. Classic or romantic,
my poems hope to walk naked and talk with God someday.

2

At Dorris Ranch, spring travels the meadows
with swollen bluebells, yellow sunburst blossoms,
and the mild grasses, smelling of the wild.
To the west, a smoky azure glaze at the tinge of dusk.
To the east the hills with their gray-brown
spiky rocks that run along the road. In winter’s
high winds the maples topple and the poplars
lift along the pasture’s edges. At dawn, we come
with our dogs, ready to run their muscles into light.

The sleeping man dreams he sees his other.
A different traveler in the compartment, his lover
stares out the train’s coach window and sees
the weather beleaguered by points of starlight.
The couple’s boy longs for fog and sea, the moist
thinking when his mind is most fertile and he plants
trees lit by the moon and summer butterflies. All that
has lived is still living, the boy thinks with words
kept silent in the dark where he remains.

No one is quite sure how but April is here and spring
has arrived. Catkins lacing filberts and flowers on the plums,
one would think beauty is eternal. The apple cantilevered
along the south side of the house and the pears in the yard
near the blueberries bloom white and pink like the flowering
maples to the west while the persimmon’s green leaves begin
to catch the glints of noon. No one is quite sure how
it happens but now the birds sing dark and light.

Water springs from mountain, orchard, ditch,
runs from street to garden, across the empty fields
and over roads of rock, mixing sand, making mud.
The evening river wakens dawn, sleeps past noon,
balks at supper, turns down its covers and dreams.
These things are clearly seen but may not be true.

3

A verse to death, song to silence and what will not return.
Life! What a sorry self yet sometimes filled with joy.
Heart and stone, two things that will talk tomorrow:
of narrow bones and married fists, of tongue-tied lungs
and the merciless whistles after girls.

My voice sends back echo after echo, in memory
and to the future, to all that has passed and all
that will come. Who knows how we will survive
the crossroads, who knows what creature
will think us harmful as we think it. To surmise,
what I ask is for a little joy, lots of surprise, and
to love those who call for silence in all this noise.

Is it wrong to think God’s inside the heart?
to dream we go down in earth, rise after death?
If no one spoke of common things the silence would be deadly.