THE MOON'S BRIEF SHADOW

Life has given me many windows to look out of and there I contemplated my life. Ultimately I believe we all have a responsibility to try and make our lives worth living and worth remembering.

I don’t know what I can do, still I know I’ve got to try. –Pocahontas

The Moon’s Brief Shadow

She takes it as her
work to excuse the night right
when it is darkest before the
burgeoning sun enfolds the moon.
She has a choice, yet it is her limitation.
Shakespeare enters her thoughts--
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Staring out her
wood-framed window, she finds
her breath nourishing yet bereft.
She looks inside and thinks
in one death there is a new life.
It is her daily weakness
to understand her life’s strengths.

Her hair is looped around her ear.
The irises are pressed in her mind.
The smooth cream of her alto life
matches the sheen of her skin.
She is drawn to the garden and
walks through another doorway
flooded with the morning sun,
so much closer to the fresh air.

And she weaves her fingers together
and counts the clap boards of
the one wall of her view.
The four-sided silver shed knows
the weathered wood is from some
other time still standing firm and tall.
She never forgets the
mingling and learning of
the scars her soul holds.
A plank a year, and soon gray hair, she
measures how she has lived.

Together, she and the yellow heat stare
into her complicated soul,
warming her sweetness and vulnerabilities
many white winters have hidden.
Impulsively she takes her slip off
and lies in the morning sun,
feeling the dew of the green grass.

Life demands pulse, she thinks
mixed in her mind's quietude,
row after row, year after year;
constantly a tale that requires
a mirrored truth.

We are simply one in some way-
the mercies of many lives hidden.
And there in the yard of blades,
she becomes un-tethered
from the earth's illusions and
with her hands, writes
the words of her mouth.

THE REASURGENT EYE OF THE DOUBLE HULLED SHIP

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
Ernest Dimnet

The Resurgent Eye of the Double Hulled Ship

Pensively, a thickness sits dormant,
rides motionless,
floats sea level, a silvery sheen
passing through decades,
latent through Presidents and
quiescent seas.
Seasons of war's ammunition filling
black-holes regurgitating
bright bands of tears,
thick oil spills.
A Surf Scoter suffers held
captive by blue rubber gloved hands
despondently washing away a
suffocating catastrophic tragedy.

With miles between, voices like lead are
all affected by one grinding misalignment.
She was just a child watching death.
And like the family craves order, the water
finds a systematic sensibility causing chaos
which cannot exist within.
Time after time there is perfection in a breath.

HEAVENLY TIGER LILYS

Where ever our fathers are let us say happy fathers day to them.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

Heavenly Tiger Lilly

Is a monk’s ennui the
path from the cave
where one can
find enlightenment?

Or through the experience
of sifting through the soil
one’s calloused
feet have walked upon.

A cacophony of universes
settle into
an ingrained harmony
overshadowing the birth of
each piece of his omen.

Can we see into the
portentous rankle of
others and slowly
strip away the outside
escapism?

I am consumed
and enveloped
in my fate of our
crossing paths and

in my omen, I am
enlightened in the dark
and exposed in the
golden cup of a tiger lily.

NOT MY FIRST RODEO

My poem was inspired by the most beautifully written words of my dear friend Darla. She has etched her initials into our earth and hearts and continues to share her abundance with each of us. Serendipitously, the moon we all share was full last night and smiled on each of us.

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
Ayn Rand

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. Willa Cather

Not My First Rodeo

They called on Jan to harvest.
They called on me to help.
We called upon the skies to
give rain to our humus.
My windshield wipers push
the water from my view and
I turned down the dirt driveway,
splashing through puddles
towards the red farmhouse,
my body burning for something.

We sit on the porch, he and I.
He found bees producing honey
in need of a keeper.
He found a revolution
that he could be a part of.
I found an earth worth knowing.
I found a place I can call home.
We watch the rain fall in sheets,
and breath in the earth as
she releases her warm musk,
and we know her tears feed
the pregnant fields.
By 8 pm the skies
turn universally clear.

We quickly change into
our dirty farm clothes;
screen door slamming
on the way out.
Check list in hand,
we start harvesting,
racing against
the last of day.

In field 7, we
pull 15 lbs of golden beets
from the moist ground--
each tuber beautiful,
each destiny distinct.
A wicker basket on my hip,
my pants wet
from the rain soaked greens,
caressing my ankles. I
feel planted and ripe.

The light of sunset is coming
closer and closer
to departing for the night;
my basket is overflowing,
on to field 1.

My fingers grasp the top
of a head of green cabbage,
water droplets falling down
my rough palm.
The round body, full and firm,
and so much more than the seed
I remember
planting just months before.
I cradle it in my hands.

I look up at the moonlit sky,
memorizing the last strands of
orange and pink
barely visible above the tree-line.
I receive an overwhelming sensation
that everything is one.
Every step I’ve taken,
every breath I’ve exhaled,
each seed I've planted,
each birth I've witnessed
made peace in my state of bliss.

The falling dark ends our harvest and
we collapse into our porch chairs,
and raise our glasses in success,
in elation of truth and abundance.
Our eyes meet.
No toast uttered.

The stars start to peer out
from behind the departing storm clouds.
La luna is keeping us company;
our conversation lingers and slowly
begins to fade into the physical night.

His strong arms and baby-
soft skin under my fingers.
Our eyes, our bodies,
our spirits
connecting in every way
that our souls could dream.
The cool air caressing our skin
with the moon as our witness
leaving my heart as
full as la luna.

MY NEXT LIFE

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
Marcus Aurelius

Fascinated by the fate of our lives, I have to wonder who has charge of our destiny, which leads me to the Greek heritage of the Fates and their divine mission on the earth which also inspired my poem, My Next Life. I found Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis determines the length of the thread, and Atropos cuts the thread when the proper time has come for death.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. Khalil Gibran

My Next Life

When I close my eyes, I see you born into my tapestry.
Clotho has begun to spin the thread of my destiny.

When I smell your ivory skin, it is your perfume that
intoxicates me; the first creation of you controls me.

When natures wind blows the locks of my hair,
I feel the graze of your fingertips across my flesh.

I want to sketch your nude body and memorize
the curves, dividing the earth from the goddess.

Only seconds determine the confidence of my
devotion, as Lachesis measures our simple fate.

When the heat of my breath escapes my lungs,
it is the words of your heart whispering to me.

The taste of your time loses me in a storm of need—
blending us into a sheet of lightening enflaming the sky.

And in my devotion, I feel the white clouds on my back,
a woven allegory of jealousy’s want. My path is a

painting of truth which cannot be altered as Atropos
cuts my life from yours in the determined night.

PRECIPICE OF CHOICE

Is it our choice or is it someone elses that we take to our hearts? Do we take care of our own actions in the face of false action? These questions define our existence whether we make a decision or not.

In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Precipice of Choice

Waiting through the night at
the fire-company, anticipating
the alarm to sound, red fills the
thick night air somewhere.
The rationalists are sound asleep
in their single beds,
the alarmists just vacillate.
People are burning to death
through the soles of their feet,
stumbling with
no ambivalence, just defined by
what they crave.
Others find false action in
a white cloud of smoke
bellowing from the burnt pork.
A surrendering to life,
the people and the pig, and
the acquiescence of life.
The squandering of time,
the fire and the distance, and
then the reality to an instant.
Time has become the obstacle
to the addiction and the
question is the addiction.
It was a blatant set of morals
charred into an oasis of souls
all mortared into a stone wall.
This is where the mood
is going to change.

IT ONLY TAKES ONE TO KNOW

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.
Billie Holiday

It Only Takes One to Know

I wish I didn’t know
what it was like to kiss you.
To invite your lips
with my eyes and
my scent softly, gently.
Magically two
mouths join freely.

I wish I didn’t know
your lips as I know mine.
The softness of your
silent words, and
the individual
delicate lines of flesh
that cross my lips.
Timeless pursed prints
owned only by
your garnet lips.

I wish I didn’t know
your kiss which radiates life
from our breath, trembling in
between our heart beats,
pulling us across the verdant
meadows of spring.

I wish I didn’t know
our passionate kiss
which erupts
and crashes like a waterfall,
searching the unknown and slipping
back into a soft kiss.

I wish I didn’t know a kiss.
A forgiven kiss,
a kiss of infatuation,
a kiss of love,
a blessed kiss of birth,
a kiss filled with
a salty goodbye,
leaving me rudderless, as
our kiss is capable of
parting the seas.

THE QUIVERING FLIGHT

I feel the need to explore the inner working of nature and some how compare that idea to the inner workings of life. Life is a journey of a thousand miracles and I pray that I don't miss one. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? William Shakespeare may have said it best.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
H. G. Wells

The Quivering Flight

An onion of boundaries,
an alluvial plane covering a heart,
dark leagues of an ocean,
a thousand petals of a rose
unfolding,

peeling, pounding,
submerging,
falling deeper into
the density of blood.

From air and nothingness,
a soul has plunged into life,
fine lines have been
born from salt.

Undressed beyond flesh,
aged as rock,
swathed in questions,
and a body emerges
from a primordial mix

of seeds and oceans
and unrolling songs.
A hummingbird flies
through veins of lies
siphoning truth and
turning sterility to love.