CAMEO

Dear reader,

if you had been there

on the forest path

a friend and I were on

lined with redwoods

and in the conversation we were in

about hearts and how

they appear sometimes

in the unlikeliest of places

you would have been amazed

also, I think, by the synchronicity

of seeing what we saw: 

another heart.

It was as if the little cordiform leaf

bounded out of its dilapidated dressing room

just as my friend
in the middle of her story, said:

Oh, I see:

You’re love.

No cameo was

better timed.

Reader, will you make 
your cameo now
and please recite these words 
with me:

Hearts, wherever you are,

may you continue to always employ

the element of surprise.

May you remain ever green.

THE LAW OF CORRESPONDENCE

1.

As Within

The tiniest cathedral,

the color of bone.

Doves inside

shuffling and cooing

from the rafters.

Every votive’s ablaze.

A choir of light.

Souls in white suits

pack the pews.

An alabaster bowl

on the altar

gleams, is ready

for its next christening.

All this lives

like an egg

inside a man  

on his way

to an opening.

2.

So Without

A Hollywood premiere.

Hoards line the streets.

Fanfare’s everywhere.

All the stars are out.

A kleig

lights up the sky.

Its beam reaches

for the mirror

of the moon, dreams

its way past

the celebrity

of the sun,

beyond the milky firmament,

beyond the billion-odd galaxies,

back to the beginning,

to the earliest aperture,

no bigger than

Galileo’s eye,

to the birth place

of the first great flash,

to light itself,

to the great anointer.

PREGNANT PAUSE

Inside the belly of Time

I hold my breath

not knowing

what got caught,

or what’s waiting

at the delta door,

or how deep

the shallows are.

I twist around

a pain that lives

inside like a fist,

swollen and fetal,

braided by loss,

death, and birth

strand over strand.

A voice, umbilical,

mute, sounds only

when I cut the chord

with my listening. The ocean

of the world welcomes

its river-child home.

THE QUARRY

What if we called the times we’re in a quarry?

And what if this quarry were the place

sculptors came to to find the slab from which

they’d make their next work?

And what if the rock they chose

was the same hulking mass given to Michelangelo,

the mediocre canvas, twice rejected,

from which he made his masterpiece?

What if we are the artists we’re talking about

and the job before us now is to cut away the chaff

from the weighty and confining times we’re in

in order to rescue and reveal what’s most essential?

And since we're calling these times a quarry,

why not also christen what we create, David?

SCANNING THE SAVANNAH

      darting

 to the      edges

   eyes survey

     a scene

     flattened

          by fear

     when predator is

on the prowl

    bodies outside

           breathing

crave a calm

    that acts as

cover

when the canopy

          sparse and spare

     cannot   

           sometimes 

   the Serengeti

          feels too close        

      for comfort