Sonnet #193

Inside every heart is a moment of silence
That is the actual beat: Without that pause
That space - that's how we measure because
the tempo is the wait between the tense

This silence, rising falling, spreading, waiting

Consider this: The world of the birds is larger
Than ours, the world of the whales is larger
For where we can only reach the wainscotting

They can breach above, below, follow tides
or winds until the whole world that is a home
is larger and wider and deeper than all of Rome
And the music that they make from where they hide

Connects all the kingdoms of the earth and we
call it silence. We call it empty skies, empty seas

Sestina #1

Braced against the skin of this watery rock

Every single person anybody knows their name

Is here, some apartment, some crowded room

Below our feet all the ground we'll ever hold

All that lives, and all that dies, wrapped in space

Endless space, and swirling suns and galaxies

I send my love to sing the galaxies

The rolling derbies of steel upon the rock

Where new kingdoms will carry our name

Where children of our love will make room

For more children, where the life holds

Warm and clean shelter, fill up this space

When you merely study this dark and space

You will not see just the empty glow of galaxies

Where no signs of life cling to ice and rock

You'll paint mythologies upon the stones by name

Therein pushing history and dreams to make room

For human bodies to rise into the dark and hold

This seedling I carry to our orchard, I hold

so close into my chest, the space

between the lemon tree and the galaxies

Is shaped like the absence of a rock

The absence of a history, of a name

And I stand between these two places, all room

I plant my love and my tree where there's room

For roots to reach and hands to touch and hold

We'll carry all these living things into space

And bring the wild earth to the galaxies

Where seedlings and insects dig into rocks

And make new islands, become new things, new names

I send my love to you signed by name

Will you let me sweetly into your room

Where, together, we may have and hold

And bathe our skin in dappled starlight space

above us sinking into our skin, the light of galaxies

Calling to our children down to our little rock

The universe in a conch shell, names in chaos held in rock

Where geologic time holds deep in our quiet bedroom

The skin of us, the tiniest galaxies of us, to fill all space

Sonnet #192

Be loyal to mother and father and child
Be loyal to god and to the holy wild
Be loyal to all children, all grands and greats
Abandon all loyalty to king and state
Abandon the store that would abandon us
And fill in the factories with slaves of rust
Abandon all loyalty to priests of the mind
Instead of loyalty -- be kind, always kind

For olive trees twist and the vines all falter
And the fig trees ooze sap in the place all bones rattle
Where the roof tops bend and carry no shelter
There is the place where kill comes for cattle

Loyal to only the wind of the stars,
And the shivering Atoms, life, alone, prays

Sonnet #191

And Solomon, what's left of all his glory?
His meticulously described temple is gone
The gold and olive-wood carving is a story
that contains the temple, now. All he has done
as a king, the wars and lovers, all, adrift
like wet books in large oceans, passing
from one wave to another, the slow shift
of rewriting wet pages and back into the tossing
Until the story, itself, only pretends at truth
There was a man, once, who would be king
In his dream, he asked for wisdom from a God
And, when he woke, the babe was brought in
Two women shouting, "It's mine! The child's mine!"
And, his mind burning, he held the sword of time

Sonnet #190

I used to know how to write a poem
Once upon a time I even knew stories
I see these ideas I built like ruined Rome
I have buried more in my worries
Than I have ever been able to keep
Once I thought I could change everything
Build parapets of paragraphs, war weep
To carry sorrow to joyful ignorance bring
Light to undiscovered continents inside
The soul of dreams. I wake up from this
The dust accumulated, buried streets wide
I stumble to work lost to the fabled kiss
Of forces greater than one little soul
I have forgotten more than will ever be whole

Sonnet #189

The castle is no place to be a man,
All that dust and draftiness, narrow stairs
And those tiny slits for windows. Escape plans
And siege equipment, and all those rare
Accumulated things growing mold
or hidden in moldy boxes, and the cracks
in the walls where mice, chewing on old
manuscripts. And there's all those people hack
coughs in the dust and race around the stairs
No, the castle is no place to be a man
The crown is an unnatural invention made for stares
That weighs the mind down. Will you stand?
I've never met a man in a castle - only jesters
Who seem unaware of the jeers of their betters.

Sonnet #188

The day I knew I could never go home

Again, never again, was with a cookie

I knew in childhood, a humble cookie

And the memory of the cookie's grown

a mythology in my desire, a craving

irrational, at best, an addiction to it

Such that I must never permit

the thing to enter the house, and staving

off this desire is a fact I know as truth

If I give in and taste the cookie,

It is not so great in my mouth

As it is as a memory of the cookie

The taste is nothing but a dream

Old rooms in lost houses larger than seem

Sonnet #187

We do not know the world is not an egg
Waiting to hatch when it is warm enough
The inner workings of the magma and rough
stone crust are known only by trembling legs
And layers of sediment, volcanic eruptions
We only know what lies smeared upon the edge
The topsoil layer, the distant crane flight's stretch
and the mumble of the clouds between; excitations
could mean anything. How do we know for sure
Each planet is not a dragon's egg, remember the serpent?
Remember the old tales, how darkness swallows azure
and the land beneath our feet cracks - inadvertant
to this, we make such plans about new myths, a blur
of heavenly angels that will come, for some important

Sonnet #186

There used to be parakeets across this country
They were a splash of color in the corn
The farmers took the musketball and scorn
To drive them to the brink, a stuffed sundry
Along with the carrier pigeon, they all died
And that was supposed to be the end of it
Ask anyone they'll tell you there's no parrot
Native to this country anymore, all died
All died... Except, the pets went wild
And look up into the trees of the city
There the colonies cackle in style
They call them invasive, but they're pretty
And they came here from some emerald isle
The same as any ghosts where we lacked pity

Sonnet #185

Every time I write a book, the bird
Of it takes flight from my little boat
The flood is always here, the lost word
The critical isolation of ideation by rote
Essential to the maintenance of civilization
So from this little ship I send my birds to shore
Or boat to anywhere they land, find ration
It feels greedy to call upon the rainbows for more
The unfinished things return, finding none
And curl in among the elephants and cattle
The strong fliers, the far seeing birds, leave home
They land in distant places, cry out their soul rattle
The trilling insistence that morning sun rises
No matter what floods come, no matter night's swollen surprises

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-Management

Sonnet #184

There is a hole in the center of us all
A passing through of things, a gape
a place where laughter rises and falls
Where sorrow swells and hardens hate
This hole, the more we pour into this hole
The emptier this place in us becomes
It fills with emptiness, until the toll
of the hole pays in everywhere we run.

Let us go, then, to the wild places, where
the lake swells against the reeds
and the trees lean and grow to dip their
branches into the shimmering. I need
Cicada songs in high summer, birds and turtles
basking beside me, we lean back in the world

Sonnet #183

Omens foul I've seen this day, the laughing crows
Two trickster crows, nipping wings, I stopped
They sounded odd, rogue cicadas songs, I chose
to seek them out, the strange rattle, they swooped
Above the cars, saw me true and cackled

Next a dead coyote ruined on the road
The stench of meat, the bones, blood spackled
Then home in heat, the devil's goad
Drove black cats along the path beside

The dry wind whistles in dying grass,
The darkness comes, the gloom abides
The hour grows late, and still I pass

The signs of dead end roads, prayers of fear
Black angels walk the roofs, I hear them near

Sonnet #182

Play child's games and win child's prizes

What is the prize for a life lived well?

Immortality in some aether above the hell?

A brand of identity that is mostly not lies?

If we are to live this life together let us not

Pretend we have to hurt each other, or push

We don't have to stand above the rush

Or flow into the kneel of prayer and thought

Imagine what the God would do if here

Imagine life is more than one life

Imagine all known is a seashell by a pier

Us all deep inside it, all known is the knife

That cuts us free, forces of water, near

Forces of sun, sand grinding on the shell

And we have no sure way to dig out of this well