air

Pacific Ocean, Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Creation

creation is like wielding the mystery for a moment
being given the chance to turn the nautilus over in
your hands and awe for a few precious flashes
its precise and perfect structure, wonder at being
given transubstantiational power, snippet of the
infinite, devotional on the unity of all the cosmos
unraveled, a glittering equilibirc instant

Driftwood, grass, trees, stones. Image, my own.

Shit That Makes Poets Laugh

a couplet of haiku
getting to write the word
Uranus
espousing astrology while
being an unbeliever
writing all the people
you know into poems
recording the natural
world and wishing for
more smell words—the
olfactory is important,
man, and so under
expressioned—playing with
all mediums of art– music,
history, science, language,
painting, sculpture, theater–
being a badass generalist
the fact that mostly poets
read your poems
realizing that everything
is art, and it’s easier
than you think to tell
someone to fuck off
trying to figure out
if anyone really has an
editor? (Maggie Smith,
in my dreams you’re
reading this and cutting
and slashing, and un en-
jambing to your heart’s
delight.) Hearing that
one of Mary Oliver’s
best poems, ‘Wild Geese’
was an exercise, and
experiment in end-
stopped lines performed
for another poet, a magic
trick (hear Krista Tippet’s
interview with Oliver
on her unparalleled podcast
*On Being*)
realizing that your fly is
down, thank you John
Craigie
trying to figure out the
infinite mystery while
trying to figure out
american politics while
simultaneously realizing
that life is built on water
looking up the word ‘word’
in a thesaurus
realizing that you
should have hidden an
easter egg in all of your
work and you’ve forgotten

Libra Season

As Libra season concludes, I’d like to
invite all of us to love a lot of Libras
for the next few days. Like
my triple air massage therapist,
bless her. And my best friend of
all time, he could not be more elegant and
nuanced in his approach to the world, and people
who I don’t even know, and people I once knew
all air signs, maybe it is the open-hearted
pleasers, balancing their relationships, the “we”
that Libras present, it’s that fire in me that
always gets stirred up by the scale and measure,
skin and bones, maybe it is the quality of the
breeze this time of year that makes me
fall in love with Libras, a little more each
October, regardless, I breath the unruly whips
of Wind and Rain, the scatter of leaves,
the romance of dying with Libras in mind

Hunter’s Moon. Super Moon. Full Moon. October 2024. Image, my own.

Chap Book
best is the open
chap book on the soul leave it
vulnerable in air

Lovng Hard (no i)
Sussing and figuring
and preparing and
planning as to how
to love
difficult people:
Drive the Bus,
Like Mo Willems’
Pigeon, in the
front seat
Self-assured, ready
Without license, but
there is no playbook
to love these difficult,
purposeless individuals
NPCs, people who have,
a bit, burned out on life
Who see the end, but
seem to have no ideas
on wellness or whole
ness- are not willing or
able to take the reins
any longer, who are
Offensive and rude
Blunt without purpose
Unmeasured in their
Aimless wanderings
through Time and
Space, Pretentious in
their lack of attention
to others, Tough

Summer Triangle. Oregon, October. Image, my own.

Stairs to the Coast. Oregon. Image, my own.

October Bowery

when fall begins to crystalize, like any change,
the first real storm front moves in,
the leaves which scudded about yesterday
are frozen to the sidewalk, gathering in
browning-yellow scrolls, little edicts of
what is to come, they thaw and scatter
again across streams and gullies where
the thin water still wants to feed the living
thing before being silenced in ice, or
leave monochrome sepias on pavement,
the Hunter’s moon, high and bright illumines
the grass, reedy wisps along the midnight walk,
the dusty path where the air cools, snappy,
crisp, that breath of winter’s coming, flora seized
red in its death, clinging to branch and vine,
each day more dried and dead, ruffled and flurried
by immediate breezes, sounding like Japanese
paper fanfared by a round and excited toddler,
portents of the next season soon to fall
in golden droplets of summer’s dreams
the ocher aspen leaves, in sheets and
flakes of fiery autumn light dazzling and
freshly disconnected from their source right
before they meet the dust and decompose

Sun, Sky, Beach, Life. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Strength

Growing is a season of its own, one of loving kindness rooted in faith
one of far-seeing vastness, while standing in sacred spaces. For whatever waves,
winds, and ways that will ever-continue to toss and take their course, stand
in your gifts and rest in fullness, plentitude. Delight in bounty and abundance.
Move from ire to the rich roundness of the good in all living things–
circles of true compassion and empathy which connect all creation– human,
animal, plant, living, all animate with atoms as the entire universe speaks the
soundness of its existence, the tenor of being, the voice of living and the lived

Ocean, Tide, Tree, Coast. Oregon. Image, my own.

Point

when i am in my
brain and heart i realize this
is the goddamn point

Conscious Living

What is it to be alive?
In the rich, abundant world
A sterling jay’s deeply
Decked sapphire feathers
crested head
nestled in the magnolia bush
outside my window
the air as thick as dew,
yet moving as if on an
unheard music suspended
by the wind’s unseen breath

and ocean spume, spurl, churn
TO be part of Earth’s respiration
tide, current, wave, flow, coast
where Earth’s breath meets
land-sand, rock, tree, stone
every piece of physical
particulate of the confirmation
of all alive and breathing
beings, being moved
smoothed, rocked, waved, rolled
over and over in the sea’s bosom

Stones and Seal Carcass. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Ocean

I used to think I wasn’t an ocean
person. But these rocky, cliffy,
craggy knobs of sea-shorn trees,
smooth stones and crusty conglomerates
crab shells, jelly-fish skeletons, strips of
kelp carcass, and clings of driftwood
really wrap me into the rhythm of
the tide