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.