THE BURIAL

The red in the Sangre de Cristo mountains,

the green of the piñon pine,

the blue of the epic azure skies,

look on

as their colors

enter the desert earth
as a tension laid to rest.

A ceremony's complete.

I exhale

a time zone away.

A breeze off the Pacific

breathes with me.

My new, untethered life begins

as the one sun sets twice,

an hour apart, 

signaling in twin futures

like hellos shared between brothers

from different mother's.

CAVE

There ain’t no cave here.

You got the wrong address.

This here’s a mountain, mister.

I wouldn’t even know where to tell ya

to go lookin’ to find that hell hole of yours

‘cause I don’t know

the next thing about caves, see.

Even the word cave

don’t mean nothin’ to me.

It’s an empty word.

It echoes when you say it.

Cave. Cave. Cave.

See what I mean?

The sound only reminds me

of the faces, like your face,

that come sniffing ‘round

these parts every so often

asking me where the goddamn cave is.

You know, you all look a like.

Like inbreds.

I told all of them, like I’m telling you now,

I don’t know nothin’ about no caves.

Who sent ya, anyway?

Probably that troll down aways,

under the bridge,

who wants to rent a room.

Well you can tell that ugly little rat-trap,

there ain’t no vacancies

in this here mountain.

I am full up and rock solid, see.

Even the wind don’t blow through me.

Got it?

Now get!

 THE ALCHEMY OF TREES

Trees make oxygen

from carbon dioxide.

They turn bad into good.

They help to make

the air we breathe

fit to breathe.

I want to do this:

to take what I find

distasteful in the world

and convert it

into something

that sustains us all.

The alchemy of trees…

If I could master their secret

then maybe I’d transmute

my own breath into prayer,

and then pray

unceasingly, as I believe

the trees do

for us–

that we might be

more like them.

WHEN IS A THING HOLY?

When you take scissors to it

and sage the severance

When you paint it blue

and think Mother

When you hang it out to dry

under a full moon

When you smoke it in the light of day

with incense from the pipe of a great Uncle

  

When you bind it to two others

of different colors to make white

When story untethers it

into soul

When you bury it
in the desert

When you pay close attention,

care enough to care, and call it all medicine

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.