Kindling

Tell me your story, and I will tell you mine.

A rag of colts splinter across the Arizona desert,

white dust rises behind them like smoke,

like dreams half-remembered, like a living prayer.

The gray tortoise watches from beside the black road.

Her back is the weight of the world.

There is no chance of rain.

You have heard that horse hooves sound like thunder;

this is not true. They are the sound of goodbye.

They are the sound of a station wagon door shutting

and shutting again. They are the sound of our father’s voice

calling out that last list of things for us to forget.

Then there is no voice, no hooves, no rooms, only the vast

open plain of your heart beneath this purpling bruise of sky. Look,

there are the galaxies that were wrought the moment you opened

your eyes and reached for them, and here you are: infinitesimal.

Come sit by the fire, and I will tell you how wild horses spirited

our father away as he lay dreaming of a tortoise and her clutch.

In the morning, we can share all he remembered to leave behind.

The Comoving Distance of the Peach in Cosmological Equations

Circling down in a tightening gyre,

the crow charts its course

to the silver orchard,

pencil trees

in perfect parallels

until the horizon, where,

anarchy! Lines meet, centers fold,

Euclid rolls gravely and wads

the chaos of glooming arithmetic

into a confused ball. Look

to the farmer. Her twilight fingers plot

a new geometry as they trace

across the paperbark.

Here, soil is x and fruit is y,

and we solve for no endpoint but infinity.

Beneath each callus lies the spiral formula of creation.

Beneath the bark, spiritus mundi pumps sap heavenward

to where peach blossoms unfurl luscious truths,

and there, my firm friend, past the pluck,

past the fuzz, flesh, nectar, and pleasure,

turning and turning, beyond the world’s

widening eye, is the grooved pit of it all,

intricate as your brilliant brain.

The stony core of its center

holds the key. Press

it to your ear

and hear it

lover-whisper,

be sweet.

Be sweet.

Praise to All Audacious

Praise to all audacious enough to rise.

Praise you, dough, full of wild yeast,

warm-wet, breathing,

breathing your best breath before the oven

fire-freezes you in its infernal embrace.

Praise you, birds, singing sun-songs through clear skies

and dark clouds. Praise you, thunder, you roll and quake

my little dog who rises to stretch, yawns and yaps for more,

more of everything but your boom. You, flower, unfurled

like a flag in a storm. You, thorn, curved to your most perfect point.

You, tree, rising tall to bend as winds fell dead limbs and leaves.

Special praise for you, heart, upon hearing music

or witnessing love, and you, voice, brave-joining song so quiet-

quietly at first but then, full singing.

Most of all, praise you, people, moved to joy by this day

of upwelling promise. You flood American streets

with shouts and tears of sweet relief.

May you, audacious souls, rise

and rise

and rise

and carry all the world up with you.

At the Alabama Folk School for Writers & Musicians

It is 5 in the morning, and a woman sings

from a distant room. Her voice, sweet and high and lonesome.

Walls mute her words, but the melody carries,

rising and falling with the breath of those still sleeping.

A guitar punches through the earthy darkness like daffodils

in spring, and when her song softens to silence, I am left

in a dreamy half-awake state, thinking about poems

and the color of music when an insistent tapping

draws me to the window.

A man, his hair a sleepy mess,

raps his wooden baton against the rough balcony rail.

Treefrogs and katydids fall silent.

He is undeniably Ludwig van Beethoven.

A chorus of drowsy birds jostle for place in the branches before him.

They puff feathers, stamp tiny feet, and fix shining black eyes

upon his gloved hand. With a flourish, his baton blurs

like the first flash of sun upon a beating wing,

and their birdsong breaks, like this day,

into another Ode to Joy.

And Then, Home Again

The cows forgive us our trespasses

with their dark Buddha eyes

as we track through the warm wet

of pasture grass. There is no word

to distill the perfume that is bird,

that is bovine, that is earth and green,

that is flowering rot, that is manure.

I will name its shimmer, Holy Ghost.

I will sing its praise as fat bees I once feared

bump from clover to ragweed to goldenrod

and then, home again. The fox who played the role

of Lucifer in last night’s opera is this morning’s archangel:

fur shining like a Sunday morning portrait of Jesus

as bullfrogs thrum Sacred Harp hymns.

And yes, it is spring, and the cows are brown

and white with a smattering of crow shades

all gathered in a lowing circle of prayer;

and I say, intercessor, and you say, lamb.

And the strawberries you picked

are warm and ripe and not too sweet.