My Dad Makes A Walking Stick

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Sometimes he will just stare 
into layered forest, like a 

surfer watching waves. Look 
closely, poison ivy, ferns, dogwood 

flowers. Walk with him, see 
downed limbs, branches sprouting 

green, but soon to die. Notice 
these things, the fallen are

hiking companions. Fractured 
Virginia wilderness, hickory, oak, 

walnut, redbud, wood that he studies 
to know. Even before death some are 

stronger than others. Always has 
a serrated folding saw, he holds it 

steady, cuts five or six feet, bits of 
tree dust drift with dragonflies. He

carries these pieces like shouldered 
fishing rods. In the basement, whittling 

knife separates outer bark from cambium, 
sanded before brushed with lacquer to 

dry, then shine, touch the earth again, 
reflect the gleaming sun.

Seeing the Mountain Lion

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please let me 
tell the truth
that I saw 
it, the mountain
lion, lithe, yes
springy, legs, twitching
tail, like at 
the zoo but
free on golden
hillside, in California

I had just
eaten a banana
morning at camp
counselor for kids 
with HIV, beautiful

sun peeking through
fog and me
and the young
lion, that I’d
wanted to see
for hundreds of 
miles hiking, camping
hours of night
and nothing, but
longing for wild
but nothing, maybe
a rattlesnake or
coyote, but then

the moment passed
and it moved
down the hill
toward the road

the next day
saw it dead
on the asphalt

I wanted to
take some of
its teeth, save
something, after so
much time waiting
but I let
it rest, sad
it was gone

Of Time and the Kite

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when my daughter was young we flew a kite
from her wooden deck, bedroom balcony
she held the string, I watched wind
invisible thing
nearby leaves rustling, flapping
nylon snapping, waiting for release
to soar or sink, ever the question
on a day such as this
the two of us standing there wondering
what does it mean to fly away?
I let go, her twine wriggled through fingers
up and up it went
sun stopped for seconds
our fabric patch covering time

Moroccan Sahara

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In the backseat, we must be going 80 mph, reverberating Berber music like Salat, ritualistic Islamic prayer with drums, voices, sintir strings plucked, boom from the old Peugeot’s speakers, permanent Sahara hair dryer heat fills my nostrils. We left Merzouga earlier in the morning, before that, the Atlas Mountains, Azrou, Fez, Tangier. The road is gone, only sand, like after the first inches of snow have fallen. We stop at the edge, no billboards, no little tourist kiosk, nothing, only a thousand miles of granular fragments, beaten down quartz, dolomite, calcite, sand pixels. I touch its wildness, primitive, uncontainable, not a Tonka truck home, not the domesticated box from my childhood backyard, it looms, immense with dry waves of undulating silence. We walk into it alone, like swimming past the ocean breakers, together, apart. Speechless, it has absorbed our words, sun pulsating, the desert almost asking us to quietly join it, forever. Human shadows elongate, planet rotates, heat ebbs, darkness, then stars. They appear first one by one, little white births, souls of the night sky. Then a torrent, a blanket of speckled light, countless orbs above, total blackness below. I think of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust, children who died. Never thought much about heaven before, alone, surrounded.

April Again?

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first thought of Simon and
Garfunkel, angst, new love like
uncertainty, showers, flowers
and better months ahead
sun stays, longer days of
green grass, eggs, hidden
chocolate resurrection, rebirth
believers, earth day dreamers
ecology’s return to the beginning
before we lost our ozone layer
still unknown, how it ends
whether April begins again

Buddhist Dog

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She squirms, arches belly up, 
scratch me, love me, don’t forget me. 
Eyes and eyelashes, wise and long, 
this one-year old furry seer, knows 
if you are kind. Sometimes I ignore her 
paws clawing at the sky, asking important
questions. How can you focus on 
anything more than me, than this 
moment, do you see me, really see me? 
Here I am, I love you. Where’d you go? 
Did you forget? 
You are me too.

Evening Prayer

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I don’t pray every night, but I probably should. After baths, books, conversation with wife, I usually drift into writing, creating, rearranging words on a screen. Mind a whir, could journey depths until dawn, but the clock of calculation, of sanity, of sacred sleep, tells me to stop. I go into my daughter’s room, turn down her light, I love you, I say to her curled up slumber. I meditate in my son’s room, the sound of his breathing, my pew, my stained glass, my sanctuary. Seated, darkness, air in, carbon dioxide out, first minutes filled with brain bouncing from thought to thought, the earlier, the tomorrow, the could happen. Then sometimes the indescribable now, when I’m nowhere, everywhere, witness to all time, and no time at all. Emerge a short life span later, pray for my colleague, that her malignant tumor retreats, allows life, hers to continue. It feels like I could stay forever, talking to God, to no one, to everyone.

Writing in Bed

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exhaling visible emotion
ink onto page
alive each night if
only for these moments
toes touch sheets happy

the hours before are done
no more plodding through city
streets in laced up leather
free naked now
words moving across the page

composition notebook
indenting with cursive letters
pressing down, scribbled lines
fragments of thought
searching for truth night after night

sometimes finding things
like an old Hot Wheels car in
the sandbox, pull it out
examine chipped paint
try to recall when it was lost

describe what it looks like
loose front tire, red Camaro
“this is it,” I think
to reclaim, touch memory
unearth myself, the buried parts

Capri

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Manicured ladies in stilettos navigate ancient smooth
stoned pathways, corridors assembled during Roman times.
Smooth curves of their exposed skin pattern the night,
wafts of perfume mingle with the smell of grilled
octopus and cigarettes.

Some cling to tan wrinkled arms
of sugar daddies, men with white chest hairs
attached to fortunes drenched in cologne.
I never visit the island for Gucci or Fendi,
air-conditioned square shops of consumer luxury.

The purring cicadas surrounded by sea
are my siren song, blue water darkening as it journeys
to Tunisia. Pulsating, my calves quiver up and down steps
to Villa Jovis where Tiberius reigned supreme, decadently
tossing the unwanted off cliffs into the watery
chasm of time.

The ruins sit unaffected by sun’s sweat dripping
from my elbows. I rest in pine tree shadows, imagine when
Neruda was here, arranging verse in his head. Away from the glitz,
everything is as it was, as it is, ants, jasmine, laughter
of the old women who were born in Capri,
born by the sea.

Noe Valley, San Francisco

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Once the Irish, the Germans, the workers pressed together, clustered little Victorians, where they were born, lived, then died. Now babies in strollers, babies pressed against mom, against dad, toddlers wobbling, wide blocks of deconstructed, reconstructed, houses, pasted photos, smiling women and men, realtors, listing, listed, selling, sold. White buses, elevated people, wearing laptops like blankets, heading south to touch more technology. Hilly hills, wisps of fog, oceanic clouds, permanent winter like they say Twain said. Past and present commingle in gusts of wind, September summers, sometimes rain and rainbows.