Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

Rain Dance

Before the ocean,

There is the river, the stream,

And of course the rain.

And before the first drop,

There is the warm breath

From the lungs of the Earth,

High and heavy,

Aswarm with the dry seed

Of dust from the plains

Blown into the hungry skies,

Stalked by steam,

Surrounded, devoured,

And wrenched to the ground

By the children of ocean

Winding their way home.

Monday, April 24th

Broken Cord

The cobweb bobbles in an updraft,

A dust laden chain of silk tugging

Tugging tugging on its moor

Long after the architect

And all her distant children

Have met the shoe, the bird,

The sun or the empty web.

The unvisited ancestral monument,

The flag of one lone moment

A safety line meant everything

To every last one of them,

Unmourned when at last,

It falls away.

Tuesday, April 25th

The Branch

The rough branch

Dry as the ravage of winter

Waits.

The wet branch

Surprised by the kiss of spring

Wakes.

The furled branch

Supple with summer's green

Works.

The turned branch

Free of it's autumn fruit

Wanes.

Wednesday, April 26th

Fundamentally Nothing

Between apples, there is the air,

So there is not nothing there,

Though the soup of nitrogen

Oxygen and other fluff

Is mostly empty too.

Between the manic molecules,

Between the electrons and the nuclei,

There is always something seething,

Careening, bubbling, something

Where there should be nothing.

Something singing, something splitting,

Something popping, crashing, ringing.

Shattering into something else

And dissolving back again

Before the void can catch its breath.

Close to nothing, but not quite,

Shy of zero, short of empty,

Trembling in between,

And making chaos in the mote

Of the smallest nonsense space.

A tremor in the curtain of causality,

A quiver in the stranded string,

Or a dollop of imagination,

A dancing share of soul,

Bent ever still toward creation.

Thursday, April 27th

Dogwood

How patient

The dogwood teaches

Grace to rain

Mild and pink

More quiet than mist

Blossoms drift

The wind laughs

Teaching the vain wood

Humility

I was kind of troubled by the anthropomorphism here, so I thought I'd rewrite this one as prose. Watch how, as it progresses, the human characteristics creep back in.

Dogwood II

The mist of the mountain

Cool and mild

Rolls down the valley wall

Heavy with the heat

And falling thick

Sets the wood to quiver.

The dogwood wakes

Her boundless blooms

Spreading soft and pink

Trembling in the calm

And drifting, spinning petals

Paint her shadow white.

She shames the rain

With the grace of her dance,

Until a summer gust

Sends petals like a storm

Thundering into the startled grass

And leaving her new buds bare.

Friday, April 28th

Two Cents

Abe sits on the sidewalk

Turning green and thick

As the hillside above

Under the work of warm spring rain

Fallen further than from a pocket

Clanging unclaimed, unwanted and lost.

But I stop. I notice. I reach down

And drop another next to him

And go.

Saturday, April 29th

High Sierra

The river never washed these cliffs,

Open and high,

The face exposed instead

To centuries of rain,

The rambling, round plateaus

Deaf to the thunder so far below,

Wrapped instead in the silence of the sky

Until summer

When the clouds blow wrong,

Up from the ocean, hot and wild

And bright with arcs of fire

Struck to the few bold trees

Clinging, leaning on their shelves,

Charred and stunted from past trials

But still living, still reaching,

With their few green shoots,

Toward the hidden sun.