The Missing Years

"Orbits" 10/11/2011 

I spent my missing years

missing my father,

falling in & out of love,

altering states & reading books.

I travelled:

walked the dirt of sacred spaces,

slept in the desert,

slept on a couch,

slept on floors, in cars, & in hotel rooms,

in old beds & in new beds.

I found & lost a thousand dreams,

made a hundred schemes and let them fall.

They still appear sometimes on my drives:

coyotes crossing a road, the way they walk

a meditation on what they’ll do,

not what they’ve done, but what comes next.

I made poems whose satisfaction next lasts,

thought stories whose ends would never come,

smiled sweetly at the births of nieces and nephews,

frowned at injustices & cried for all things lost.

It was impossible to know how long they’d last

& there were many moments of found inside the lost,

like tiny electric charges jolting me out of sleep.

Then one day, there it was:  

the life I had been waiting for had been there all along.

Yes, I still miss the things I’ve lost:

the years of people, honest prayers, & unfinished stories.

But the things I’ve found, the things we’ve made,

are sure as the stars on an October morning & do not vanish,

not completely, but mark our movement around in orbit:

the circle that is a life that is always being found.

Moving Bodies, Standing Still

a hunter’s moon, full, dips

golden below hanging giant Jupiter,

blue-green & brilliant as a lighthouse-ship,

moored & pilotless,

somehow fixed & yet always moving,

but oh the difference a half a moon’s phase makes:

as these mornings

the third quarter moon wanes slowly

still high in the black sky

over the black roof of our home,

as the speedy sky-king looms large,

still blue, but less green,

charting my course to the west

before I bear south into the cold.

hours later,

halfway down an  ill-maintained hallway,

I pause thinking:

dizzy from the recognition of perpetual motion,

I stand here still,

but we are never still;

nothing stops, speeds, slows:

all’s perspective,

a trick of the body, the bodies, the moving bodies,

standing still.

so much of the day depends upon the spin of the moon in mid-October:

the recognition of change transpired, occurring, & yet still to stir,

how much of the morning world is illuminated by things moving away?

all this in the movement of the moon, so close,& a big blue star, so far.

the eye cannot fathom distance so great as the dishonest light

from even the king of the sky,

nor nearest neighbor, orbiting constant

cutting between all other points of light,

which are not points only apparitions,

these wandering ghosts moving so quickly in their friendless fields never pausing.

let this be the lesson  of the homeward bound:

nothing is constant but spin,

even when it seems like we’re just bodies standing still

we’re careening closer & closer to some

& sliding farther & farther from others

in & out through our continuous & careless sways.

[a very rough cut, not sure about it.]

Bewilderment

It is not fear.

Fear is waiting for

children to outgrow you.

Bewilderment is

watching them grow

into themselves

all the while knowing

& not knowing what

your role is in their process.

Fear destroys, inhibits;

bewilderment creates

opportunity, awakens

ingenuity, buoys up

sinking hope.

Standing in the morning

darkness, full moon

sinking below its

slower neighbor,

blue-green Jupiter,

so far away: what

could bewilder more

than your own smallness

alone with the stars,

knowing your smaller

children sleep just inside

the walls without a clue

what wonder & wickedness

waits for them .

I swear this is not fear.

This is not the hollowness

in the chest & sinking stomach

of self-doubt, the nagging

ache of regret. These tempt

& torture. This is bewilderment:

the dizziness of recognition,

feeling the spin of gravity,

the pull of magnetism,

the tricky grace of not knowing

what world waits for you

& the ones you love.

With this as a driving force,

I will not pray for clarity.

Six Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens

(who is looking at blackbirds)

1.

a once thin man, carrying

a thing:  a parcel of uncertain

particles, though obviously

not a blackbird’s wing,

his footsteps being

much too slow.

2.

a man in a plain grey suit,

with a somber imagination

& a difficult sense of humor:

a stagnant pond that off & on

again reflects an almost silent tree

in a cold month before the muskrat

sleeps, it sneaks into the poem

her sad reflection smiling a bucky-

toothed grin changing everything,

except for the topmost branch

still trembling from its missing blackbird.

3.

a Connecticut Homer visiting Florida

to smell flowers through a broken nose

finds himself infatuated not with the sound

of a blackbird singing, but with the innuendo

and diminuendo of the foam-cloud surf,

& magically all his well-fed monsters vanish

as so many fizzling stars, smoke-ringed fireworks,

a cigarette disappearing  across a low blue bay.

4.

one man crossing twenty bridges

into one village of twenty men

all of whom hate poetry,

especially poetry about metaphor:

blackbirds, fruit trees, uncertainty.

5.

a miserable liar, who speaks of poetry

as if it were a lion asleep in the sun,

waiting to rip itself apart line by line,

phoneme by phoneme, bit, bit, bit.

a man in a lion costume sneaks into

the poem about blackbirds to scare

them away, only to prove that poetry

is a destructive force, at its best only

knowable in the traces left behind.

6.

a dead man, a handsome ghost

in a white nightshirt pretending

to fly, a blackbird in white feathers

drunk, falling into a green-gold sky

over & over, as if death were a dream,

recurring each night in the purple hour

of 10 o’clock, & life started over again:

a yellow ring in the blue-black—

as if every morning is Spring.