The Death

each stalk of grass
is hollow and barren
this time of year
skeletons of
viridescent pasts
like raw
leafless trees
memories of living
and of dying
the pulling back
the cocooning
of life in silent
night, darkness
chambers, interiors
of many plants and
animals teaches
us all about the
death and the
rebirth of life, light
so that we won’t
fully despair

The Return

the light
returns this morning
with the owls
they call
from tree to
branch, as sun

pinks surely
over the
charcoaled horizon
kilned through
night, and sealed in
the new, cold light

of this
winter morning
where I’m aghast
at the magic, memory
magnificence, majesty
transitive verb

of the whole
thing where I
am present
when the light
is seven minutes
old and each

photon graces
my retina with
the reminder
that the light
always returns
until it doesn’t

until the whole
sky is
bathed in numinous
halogenic possibility
the presence of
the now

as the light
returns
may we remember
the power of the
darkness
the importance

of slow, intentional
rest, the rejuvenating
properties of
sleep for a world
that simply needs
to listen to

the magic of the
intransitive verbs
of owls

Dark

Enfold me in your blackness,
I don’t want to be afraid of the dark
In fact, I want to embrace my shadow
Shadows of all that I thought would
Suck the marrow out of me, but instead
Offered me a respite, a resting place
A hallowed breath of solace and silence
Dark, the thing that so much incandescent
Luminosity is meant to fight, to ward off, as
Humanity wilts under all this light

Space

Maybe the most surprising thing about poems is that they take a fair amount of space and time
The words are often all there, waiting on the lip, the tip of consciousness, but flow takes room
Takes open-ended realities, wide skies like altars in the arcing air, vast closenesses and distances
Which the heart contemplates, the healing place, the hell, the compassionate lengths to which a
Human will go to tell a truth, a peace, a playful nothing, a love, a life, a poem

Don’t Die

when it began, I’m not quite sure,
but as of late my son has a new post
script for nearly every exchange,
“don’t die” he tells me as I start
the engine of the car, “don’t die”
he encourages as I head off to work
“don’t die” when the rain is falling
in sheets that darken each atom
of exposed earth, he must understand
something about the nature of life

Celebration

sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the light
minute by minute over the horizon, moment by moment
in our children’s eyes. Sometimes the celebration will be
the sleep, the forgetting, the separation and the longing
which brings deeper communion with the divine, the
place, the way, unsure, the path, the journey, one precious
step at a time. Sometimes the celebration will be the growing
of the self, the yearning, expanding, nearly cracking open of
your sternum with the enlarging, ever-beating heart, the lungs
full-burdened with life giving nitrogen plus oxygen, exhale the
heaviness and grief, inhale, close your eyes and let go