SILENT NIGHT

In unison

one hundred and fifty gay Santas

in their little red suites

and clip-on beards

stop singing

and start signing

Silent Night.

Three hundred gloved hands

white like doves

take flight

offering the carol

to our eyes -

and we hear it like nothing

we’ve ever heard before.

And our hearts break open

and the ten thousand tears

that spirit from us

are like an ovation

feathered in grace.

THE TRICK MIRROR

Conversations can get ugly. Like the child

who steps before the fun house mirror

and watches, in amazement, his body

triple in size, twist into a grotesque.

I know a man, who, when defended,

somewhere between earlobe and scrotum,

is like this child

striking exaggerated poses

trying to convince the world

he is bigger than he is.

That he is right.

The whole scene is a sad affair, a failed charade.

Whatever point the man is trying to make

gets lost in the translation.

All we see is the horror he’s become.

To this Dennis The Menace I say:

step away from the trick mirror,

snatch back your cotton candy from Mommy Dearest,

lick the sugar from your pink lips,

and get yourself to the Log Ride.

What you need is a good dousing!

Maybe the water will wake you –

and bring you back to your own humanity.

ANEMONE

First body: shape and form
from algae grown. Gesture
sprung from rock: a holdfast
that fashioned muscle, tissue, and nerve
into being, bringing movement
to this earth as animal.

Above you I hover, like a lover,
lulled by your luminance. Entranced
I draw near - not knowing I am
as good as dead and headed
into an embrace as sticky as candy
and lethal.

Anesthetized and awake,

you will take me
into death’s inflorescence,

and I will go

with eyes wide open.

THE BLACKSMITH

Night.

A trailer in a trailer park.

TV noise and the twitching light.

A worn faux leather chair.

A weary body in it.

A dull mind.

A beer can open on a cork coaster.

Eyes glazed staring through the boxed-in glow.

An elbow: an angle balanced on the chair.

And the fist. The raised fist,

clenched and pumping, keeping

the massive muscle, the rock-hard forearm, contracted:

a machine unto itself – and the only remedy and magic

this man has against the dragon of pain

that haunts and taunts him at the end of every day

when he is not forging black metal with metal and fire.

When there is not a hot hammer in his hand.

TREE IN AUTUMN

Auburn thrashing in the morning light,

She fought against the reaping wind.

She lost her poise and her grace,

A shambles was her dress.

Autumn stripped her bare,
And sheltered in her bones.

PAISLEY, OREGON

Lake is a misnomer in Modoc country.

Goose, Summer, Silver, just names

and as barren as deserts.

The outback, they call it,

where the threat of rain

is their oldest fossil

and the fable we landed in

one night.

In the dark, slick as snakes,

with sulfur on our skin,

we ran blindly for shelter,

the wind, a dragon at our backs.

Somewhere in the morphology of the night

we found Faith, wine and dice 

and a gratitude that curled inside us like a teardrop

we’d save for the next pilgrimage.