MAKING SHADE

I can’t help

but notice

how a shadow

now outshines

the beauty

of a bloom.

Shadow is a thief

that steals form

from presence

making a likeness

from absence

and darkness

while upstaging

the original. 

The sun is shadow's

accomplice

 

and like the poet 

has the power 

to embellish 

and even exaggerate 

all that it touches, 

all that it sees.

AN IMAGE

scattered white

blossoms

on the ocean

under oars

rowing toward

a golden gateway

toward a misted 

distant bridge

is an image

that reminds us

that love

takes all forms

FRANK’S PARACHUTE

He took his parachute off

when he started saying 

what others

were afraid to say.

He fell through failure,

regret, and shame.

All his luggage

was left at home.

He had no plan

or torpedoes to damn.

The featureless water

beneath him

was all the mirror he needed

to know who he truly was: 

a parrhesiastes,

unapologetically unpopular,

unequivocally and irrevocably free.

Like a moth on fire, 

hissing and sputtering inside

its brilliant, beautiful flame.

THE BELL

Personality returns to itself

as a thing rehearsed.

A dog will salivate if 

consistently cued.

Oh, to be just a bell:

a sound without memory.

TAMING THE TIGER*

In the forests of the night

I will assign a symmetry 

to my fear. I will see tigers 

where there are none

believing their stripes 

and terrors are truths.

Midnight machinations

will make memories

appropriate to the present

to explain the inexplicable

from sources patterned 

and processed as accurate

perception. Resolution is 

what I seek. A frame 

for the furnace. A permission 

to heal. A lamb wanting to waken 

inside an eye, fleeced

and burning bright.

*A mash-up of Peter A. Levine’s, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and William Blake’s, "The Tyger."

SPIRIT CIRCLES

Some connect to spirit 

through the sound of a gong

Some use poetry 

to round out their music

Some set the curve

of a hawk wing down

to bask in the cleanse

of a full moon

Still others simply watch

a squirrel make loops 

in an avocado tree next door—

its chittering is ringing in the leaves

THE TASTE OF GOD

After weeknight Little League games,
whether we won or lost, 

whether I played or not,
my mother would take me 

to Loard's Ice Cream parlor.
I would always order the same thing: 

Cherry Vanilla on a sugar cone.

Grief has me wanting 

that concentrated goodness again
that my mother made possible 

in the one simple scoop,
in the sweet juice and rind 

of the half-frozen cherries.
God was in that ice cream.