14 Tuesday Oct 2025
When it comes to surrender,
better drink three hot cups of faith
following dawn.
Watch the light grow and, as your belly softens
in warmth, your eyes will braid upward,
adrift with the steam.
This life isn’t up to you,
not really, but the soporific of control sells.
Sit in your pillowed chair, stare out your version of
the sash window
and know, Mystery weaves us.
Our work is to listen for its music
and step into the slipstream,
longing and beauty our tiny rudder
within that flowing power.
05 Monday May 2025
Bees have buried themselves
in crab apple’s blooms,
hummingbird launches skyward,
chattily, all the frills of mating on display.
Stripey-legged bobcat’s ghostly moves
stitch the garden knoll
while anise hyssop digs into her new home
and calendula flowers at hollyhock’s feet.
Everybody’s humming their song…
02 Thursday Jan 2025
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≈ Comments Off on Mettle
Withstand the Void.
Please.
Be upon your own two small feet,
at the edge,
darkness cloud-forming,
ledge a tipping perch.
Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,
the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.
Call forth in echoless open and
wait,
the wind will snap and take it up.
Let the Void offer
all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,
rage, grief, shame and sorrows.
Be with them.
Sense their intolerable
movements in your one body–
these are the monsters
you are to marry.
In union, living through and beyond
your exiled, an invitation
to what Beauty is yours deeply,
the gift to be offered back.
Leave no aspect behind–
you are here to love the denied.
Blood needs circulate.
Bones need grow. Air must enter.
Bring the outcasts and castaways under
warmth of your grand cloak.
Allow them refuge of your beating heart.
Welcome the unwanted,
a feast-filled table is set to feed everything
in dawn of this new year.
17 Friday May 2024
She barks at him
bitterly
across two tables and a faux fire
(real flame, no wood),
he nods,
yuh, yuh,
nose angled toward his paper.
They’re married,
the cafe their living room.
Meanwhile, Nina Simone
and a squealing cappuccino machine.
A man, clearly successful,
speaks at air,
bluetooth lodged in both ears.
Opposite,
women burble of this and this,
while another couple, thick grey locks
lidded by heavy cowboy hats,
laughs together.
At a single,
a young one,
pale and half asleep, sits alone,
the lower half of her face parked in her palm.
Two dogs, wide eyed,
wait.
Spanish wafts over from the counter.
With warm cup held in both hands,
I drink it all in.
27 Saturday May 2023
Posted in abundance, approaching, change, history, honoring, movement, poems, poetry, transition, violence
≈ Comments Off on These are the last days
These are the last days
of watching the valley open slowly
her soft green eyes,
of waiting for jackrabbit to come for breakfast,
of the coyote pack ushering in each full moon
with choral rhapsodies,
of tarantula pilgrims crossing the sagebrush mesa.
These are the last days of grit and clay dust flying
through any open window,
last of the sheriffs far more dangerous than the criminals,
of dried chiles and turquoise sky
against pink hills,
of churches holding centuries of prayer deep
in adobe walls,
of a boiling pot of cultural conflict
passed generation to generation to generation
onward making anyone arriving
within their own lifetime
a tourist.
Listen to the wildflowers and thunder, though,
and it becomes obvious–
they don’t care about endless strife.
They celebrate life and sing upward to our supportive sun.
These are the last days preceeding
the very first…
21 Thursday Apr 2022
Wind blows a chorus in the mountains.
I’d forgotten how the trees sing in rounds,
sometimes whispering,
sneaking a song, suddenly, behind you
then switching far out in front, down the hardscrabble
with its abundant life of stone and tiny leafings,
scales and flitting feathers.
I wonder about the songs echoed
from those not swishing needles and branches.
What part of the rondo do our human ears miss?
How sweet to offer our voices back
to the heart of the mountain
by joining in its steep and generous sound.
20 Monday Dec 2021
If your love has courted you
winding and strong
to the door of Death, again, again,
ya kinda gotta wonder- – what
in
the
hell?
(An exclamation ! floowing from that question
seems most appropriate
but not in sting of a shaming judgement, No, no,
as it needs usher in a tender resignation,
an emollient of wondering in which
you slip a hand beneath that tiny bird,
approach slowly with soft eyes to ask,
how, oh how, did this loyal heart of mine learn
to love like that, to love those with inclination,
without qualm,
to do those things they’ve done?)
A new snail trail, steady and true, awaits
in this, the second half of life . . .
13 Monday Dec 2021
The storm is making noisy mouths of the shingles this morning,
and pom-poms of the pine’s branches.
Rain beads the panes,
droplets meet socially, gather in their weight
and river down, down towards wet ground.
A limy glow. Needles sticking long on fence, on chair,
all throughout lavender’s hair.
Yesterday at this time crows were dancing in sunrise light,
pink orange, sorbet swirl of clouds,
save one:
She sat still atop a black fir, staring.
Our four eyes, in settled bodies, soaked in the welcoming arms
of our rising Sun–
now, She knows how to begin a day.
24 Thursday Jun 2021
Today is the wagging tail of a red squirrel,
and an open door.
It doesn’t close now, outside being home,
inside being a storage place.
Yesterday two hummingbirds chased hawk,
funny youngster learning her way,
an iridescent green-backed fly sat still
at the center of a jasmine flower
and I laughed in the toppled, strong arms of a ten year old,
who pushes me always to the floor loving
every taboo body part and happening of hers
as she, too, learns her way.
In the tumbly, bumbly flight lessons
of the two towhees
I witness a desire to enter through the propped door
after hopping the limits of the garden perimeter,
speaking confusion and discovery.
Here, together, the sky-reaching cypresses,
the eucalyptus bird hotel
and the sweeping vultures,
all of us, we are finding our way;
some heavier with faith and knowing
bring needed weight into the feet of those
easily tousled by winds blowing hard.
What must it be to be full
each day
with relation, within the great motions,
settled during movement
and drinking in the finite, ever-renewing Beauty
at no distance at all to a single one of us?
23 Sunday May 2021
The fourth decade
walks me between prayers,
of one blinked forth twenty years ago,
a blessed ‘Fuck it’ rising from the earth
to cup and guide and split open, and
of another gathered in the thirties–simply
‘Thank you.’
With solid scaffolding of experience under me
I can walk with the first tucked in a back pocket,
the second, on more able days, held in heart,
and the infinite wanderings between
growing a garden of ripening fruits and blooming flowers
with seeds maturing slowly toward ground
rich with Life ready to receive them.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 