Worthington Rag

Not My Voice But Another

2012-01-28T07:09:00.004-05:00

I didn't know that when I was tired I could sleep.

Ten hours!

A dream of a library on a sloping hill in maybe Vermont.

I allowed strangers as much time as they needed to find books and then we all drove away.

A dream of hunting deer with Bob Dylan, using cheap shotguns.

Freestyling at the picnic table.

Blueberries with vanilla ice cream, heavy on the blueberries.

Did you know that you are allowed to be happy?

If you have to pee in the middle of the night, get up and pee.

Now are you in the vortex?

Vortext?

Now are you?

These poems are not designed to impress.

Exclamation points are the new prayer!

Lent went and let it stay there.

LOL.

A dream of an old house, rickety and white, in the middle of a field.

Thank God you came.

He loved my lyrics, especially the one about drinking beer no matter what anyone thinks.

Later I sang for a large audience - mostly strangers - and my voice was not my voice but another voice - I didn't know I had and it was good it was so good.

We Dream We Do

2012-01-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

Yes, my heart is full of flowers.

Yes, I slip on the ice sometimes too.

You direct but I don't listen very well.

Cars crawl slowly along the interstate going who knows where.

We dream we do.

We like this sentence better than the one we haven't written.

One says yet.

Are you enjoying this process of creation?

I only exist this way because you want and need me to.

It wasn't Bob Dylan but Rimbaud who said I is another.

The longing for opium dens intensifies.

She owes me mail.

I love mail!

Hamburgers are beef patties and raisins are dried grapes.

You have large eyes that somehow make sense to me, as if . . .

Oh lacunae how I love thee!

The teacher misquoted Macbeth and nobody caught on.

Some students just don't want to learn and what can you do?

Chickens hate snow.

My heart overflows with peonies and gardenias.

Noticing

2012-01-26T18:00:00.003-05:00

The dead squirrel slowly blanketed with snow.

The bald eagle settling on a pine tree, then lifting off when it noticed us noticing.

A good thing sustained for a period of time can become a bad thing.

But what if all things are only neutral?

Like angels?

The fence gate swings this way and that.

The little baby's toes were like green peas and he smiled a little when we tickled them.

The car that won't start but only bark in the cold.

I asked God for a message and he sent an eagle, ha ha.

Prayer is itself a distraction.

Buttercups.

Who tends to the Gods if not us?

The tractor growled as it bumped along between frozen ruts.

Who tends to God if not you and me?

A song will do.

Some students want to be there and some do not.

All things are inherently meaningless, thus comforting.

Liar smiles.

The road turned and we pulled over to watch the eagle who, when he lifted back into the sky, tossed a bit of snow our way.

No, I will not rewrite.

Some Happinesses

2012-01-25T09:52:00.002-05:00

It won't matter.

Silence I mean.

Four syllables, twenty sentences . . .

You.

I asked the wrong questions.

I questioned the wrong authority.

Up one hill, down another.

Don Quixote is a good example.

Fox scat.

Ravens in the snowed-over hay field.

State officials declined to be interviewed.

Lights out.

Silence and darkness are not equivalents.

Silence equals clarity, sometimes.

Up down - it doesn't matter.

Question reference points.

Laugh.

Juncos picking through the wood pile.

A little scattered corn.

Some happinesses go unnoticed.

Passing What Is Gathering

2012-01-24T15:12:00.003-05:00

It is not night any longer.

We are fishing and we are not talking.

There are rings everywhere, spools of time unraveling.

Here is the crown, here is the scepter.

We are quietly fishing together.

We are letting the canoe drift.

The next sentence only knows the previous one.

Mirrors, knitted baby caps, frequent apologies.

Time adjusts itself to our decisions.

The night passes and the gray afternoon stands waiting.

The canoe drifts, past blueberry bushes, past the camper's beach.

Your letters are always late.

You are always late.

When I am angry I resemble royalty.

You crack a beer and I wait uneasily.

You changes.

But I do, too.

It was a rowboat, and this is fiction.

What is passing what is gathering?

My friends are waiting on the shore but I can't say who they are talking to.

Happy to Settle

2012-01-23T06:58:00.000-05:00

You can walk away.

You don't have to decide now what are you walking away from.

Distance is not a place and neither is a feeling.

Bridges are nice.

Walk away from nice?

What about bridges in Nice?

You can put the pencil down and the world won't end.

Your shoulders are happy to settle.

Your ankles are happy to settle.

You have friends who aren't leaving.

You don't have to wake up at 4 a.m. and stare at the stars and come back and struggle to write about it.

See how easy a sentence can be?

There is nothing wrong with the weather.

There is nothing wrong with drinking a cup of coffee.

You asked the right questions of the wrong teacher, that's all.

You can walk away now.

The right teacher finds you, not the other way around.

The right teacher is always already there.

You see how the sentences are just there?

It's okay - you can stop writing now.

Sufficient

2012-01-22T07:35:00.000-05:00

These are for you.

Thank you.

It was nice to hear your voice this morning - and also hers.

I promise not to waste myself anymore.

I'll go to bed earlier and I'll wake up later.

I'll put jam on the bread and not worry about how it was sweetened.

I accept as gospel don't worry be happy.

My friends in New Hampshire are blessed this morning.

My friends in Vermont are blessed.

I will rewrite as necessary.

I appreciate the gift.

It's okay that it wasn't what I thought it would be.

I'm tired of being frightened for dogs.

Honesty really is the best policy and there really is nothing worth hiding.

You like roads as much as I do.

Is this what you wanted?

I won't sleep if waking up is more helpful.

There really isn't anything that we have to do.

The gifts are distributed equally but it does appear they are at random.

Your understanding is sufficient in this regard.

Circumstances Fade

2012-01-21T06:31:00.002-05:00

You want - how do you say it? - a habit of inner peace. Rabbits ducked through sage underbrush, skittish in moonlight. Halfway through the walk it snowed. One comes back to where they started in a state of gratitude. It's about a gift, which is about as much as I can tell you, not being seated at a table, not having shared a cup of tea.

The man without shoes is not concerned about return nor about modes of travel. Tiny flakes, barely more than frozen silt, making a brushing sound against my shoulders like what-was-his-name, the drummer for Stan Getz. Airplane crashes, unexpected insight into dead rock'n'rollers. You better believe I'm egocentric. Yet once there, the crowded circumstances fade, and all that remains is a helpful conversation.

A Christian convocation? The dog disappears and only at the driveway's edge does she reappear. It's about receiving a gift and so you want to mimic that state of anticipation, faithful anticipation. The pilot said about landing in fog, it's harder than it looks. Different tracks on the way home suggest we're not the only ones who prefer the dark silence of night.

And Falmouth, Massachusetts. If you're not surprised, you're not writing. If you're not laughing then your prayers have become bloated. I leaned on the windowsill and asked God to show me a better way and look what happened. This minister walks into a bar and says to the bartender - big guy with biker tats, hasn't smiled since seventy-eight - give me twenty whiskeys and the bartender says - get this - what's the big deal with twenty?

Through The Gloaming, Lit Up With Song

2012-01-20T08:46:00.001-05:00

We woke late beneath tangled blankets, discussed the way winter light is not spring light and why. Snow. One misses the moon one does. Baby pictures from the nineteenth century are oddly discomfiting. Uncomfortable? We sure did spend a lot of time in that yarn shop.

Up North a ways. Coat hangers, hamburger wrappers, a crushed cigarette. Years later, meeting in a coffee shop, one could only note how the years had worn on them both. Thus a story, a good one. Words falling over one another en route home. We pass through the gloaming, lit up with song.

Ah smoke, you have helped so many of my poems! Choosing coffee beans yesterday I felt the mutual amends go unspoken and thanked God that we don't always have to be these bodies in a food store. One always wants more until one suddenly wants only one thing. Are we still talking about salvation? It comes down to words until it doesn't. Like like.

Your hand grazed my wrist and I remembered knives from long ago. Something leaps, something is lifted, something is happy to see anyone at all.

Confused About Who Loves Me

2012-01-19T06:21:00.001-05:00

Going out I slipped on the ice, steadied myself by staring at the moon, a thinning cusp lolling above the tree line. It's what you say about life that matters in life. Though later standing still in the darkness, you couldn't decide whether to say "thin" or "spare" to describe the light. It's all there is, you could write that, right? We all get home, sooner or later.

Just like a tuned-up alligator? Pass the sugar, please, I'm done with watching my weight. Yet the inclination to pay attention must be directed somewhere. Norman Vincent Peale won't you please shut the door and go home? Spiritual ballistics!

And then there's the muddy hole God made. You can't imagine the sound made by falling trees and you can't believe what babies think. Another few minutes of the passive serenade and then we're going to get serious. Damn but it's cold! Of course there is always but.

But it works, right? We solved the tractor problem with shovels or belief, I can't say. Early to bed, worldly to rise. My legs ached and I couldn't decide to take the long way or the short way home. Be still my fainting heart or I'm apt to get confused about who loves me.

The Vantage Point Itself

2012-01-18T09:10:00.003-05:00

The vantage point itself was suspect. As in, it was hard to judge the tragedy as it yielded benefit for so many people. Salvation, salvage - who is to say? Yet your note arrived in a most timely fashion, much as your earlier one had. In general, one is lifted, not saved.

Yet on the other hand, in that black hour before dawn, I recalled the broken tractor and all the words we uttered around it. What did the gimpy sage say, where the road branches, about letting go of the body altogether? This teacher and that teacher and the lesson never changes. Catfish dreams. Also, an old friend who followed me along a dirt road made virtually unnavigable for - as yet anyway - obscure reasons.

We donned caps, hefted hand-carved hiking sticks. Do you remember as I do that morning we spent gazing at the distant Alps, making love on a single bed, and feeding one another day old bread and cheese? The divine arrives so often we miss it! What hurts? Oh, what I would do if time were not merely what passes.

I mean you think we'd learn. Here we are again, all naked and happy, as slippery as eels. The plans for a Christmas wreath were accidentally used to start a fire. Why cry when laughter uses less bodily fluid? I love you still, in spite of self.

On My Knees Again

2012-01-17T09:17:00.002-05:00

Little steps. You go down into the basement to look for a book of poems - what was it called again? - and find nothing. Fleas leap happily onto your bare legs, nestle in the thin fuzz and gorge. I swung on a gate once, watching the sun appear to spin in the sky, and a rainbow appeared - this was without rain, mind you - a real rainbow that sort of folded over on itself and began to shimmer and settle on me like a divine envelope. Jesus can we stop talking about that damn cross?

He laughed, resting against a pine tree, scrubbing pitch from his fingers with a little saw grease. In the distance, horses stamped and cold air steamed from their nostrils. We are the winter we've been fearing? What use are coupons and recipes in Heaven? Yet who can say what it is or isn't except those that are there, waiting.

Anybody else but me notice that I'm okay now relating the one sentence to the next in a more obvious way? Like this? I want to say it was angels but all I can really say is I never forgot it. On the other hand, one lies one does. We are all salesman.

You keep going and eventually you won't be where you started, that's about the most I can promise. He wrote once about the yellow pickup, its soft edges, the only truck he ever loved. It takes a village to comprise a village for purposes of identification as a village. You're not laughing now but trust me, you will be. I begin to pray on my knees again.

Plain Empty

2012-01-16T19:13:00.000-05:00

At a later hour, the sentences move differently. Roast beef, steamed broccoli, scalloped potatoes. Maybe black beer and whiskey? One forages beneath dense cover, anticipating language and surprised to find only words. What we don't know . . .

Or, the dances that we recall, from years ago, when the world was a simpler place. Certainly the illusion of forward motion is a convincing one. Otherwise why bother? What I meant to say was black coffee with cream from that new farm over near Christian Hollow. How did you end up where you did?

In other words, stories. Stomach pains that make it into the project as . . . well, the word "dense" anyway. I am the mirror ball I have been waiting for. At the end of the day the place from which the words usually spring feels dried up or covered over or plain empty. He was getting to it, he wrote.

The neighbor's dog, the big dipper. Walking this morning my face fell off, and I was aware of you, in a solid, pleasing way. Certain readings were undertaken in error. Oh,were you showering? I begin to find one or two syllables that might work, might . . .

A Slant of Light

2012-01-15T06:48:00.000-05:00

So the days pass.

So the stars filter their own light to hide what we can't yet see. Does it matter that you are loved?

The collective illusions - Da Vinci, Johnny Cash - work just as well as the personal. In general, we see what we need to see, hear what we need to hear. I wouldn't go at it any other way.

One studies forgiveness and only later practices it. Horses plod through snow, eyeballing us warily, uninterested in entering the forest on such a frigid day. A few strands of cloud, a half moon due South. It was Blake, I think, who said we are here to bear the beams of love a little while.

Or pace monastery halls, sucking hard candy and dreaming of France. Government can come to no good. She collected glass bottles, turning them this way and that on the window sill. One remembers a slant of light and in remembering falls weeping.

I am coming around to the notion that form is simply an extension of content. Some decisions are harder than others. We spent the morning looking at the broken tractor, smoking away the aftertaste of last night's whiskey.

I'll give you a dollar if you can show me where God is not. Alligators and sharks worship only hunger which is why we fear them.

Or seem to.

The Worst of the Night Before's Whiskey

2012-01-14T19:28:00.001-05:00

We are assured of nothing. Yet as we spoke - you from a distance, me at an unwilling center - one sensed a general, a kindly movement on which rest was possible. Perhaps it is simply like staring up at the stars and not drawing on your knowledge of galaxies. We are what we assume? Please, only facts are acceptable where the road branches.

One asks what it means to aspire at all? Or eat aspirin in the morning, fending off the worst of the night before's whiskey. The tractor was broken and our breath hung in the air as we cleaned the lines, all to no avail. One trudges, one does. One begins to assemble an argument, as if God really were a judge.

I tried to be calm at a difficult time and could only pretend to admire the clouds gathering in the distance. In the presence of newspaper journalists, one is either prone to fibbing or not. Dessert was good. Later we will walk into the desert together. It might be a psalm I'm after.

No envelope can contain what the letter actually means! And that is the whole problem of form. The twenty sentences forget where they're going and end up in a forest, metaphorically speaking. It's late and I really do want that jigger of whiskey. Can you be quiet now, can you melt into the candle?

A Fruitful Dalliance

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Of which I am one.

The cottage in the distance faced a mercurial future. We are in motion, all the time.

Or was it gazing upwards, counting stars, imagining reason that did us in? Gazelles leap over fallen trees and never arrive back on Earth. We misused our natural capacity for creation and now look.

Ah but there are ways. Your letter arrived in early Spring and my heart - or what I call my heart - broke repeatedly, but also beautifully, as light is fractured by prisms. Don't call it a car accident and don't feel guilty. Later, circling the block and thinking about a cigarette, I recalled my one night in a convent, reading Thomas a Kempis by candlelight.

I would rather feel compunction than know its definition. Yet one does collect books and read them and then go out before dawn, letting certain ideas gleaned from them lift one over the pine trees. Jesus is a busy man, what with healing us and all. The poems must do, as little else does.

Or else? In the morning, I return, and you are there and we are prone to comfort one another in ways that are themselves a comfort. Thus, repetition encourages the immortal perspective, a fruitful dalliance.

Though a day spent walking through museums - wondering what the world will look like when these works of art are no more, because being made of matter they are as doomed to dissolution as you and I - can be oddly pleasant, even reassuring. The hotdog vendor outside wanted to talk and so he did.

Or, all in all.

One More Walk On The Lake With You

2012-01-12T06:30:00.000-05:00

There is a focus now on bass notes, a certain way they echo. I remember everything, despite a thousand reasons not to. Memory crushes the present, the way an open palm can crush insects or smiles. Trust is not the issue, until it is, and then it's all there is. You see where this is going?

You wrote towards the end that our lies had become like renegade soldiers, always gathering in the distance, ready to storm our meager shelter. I remember in Burlington a dog with a red bandana that I tried unsuccessfully to rescue, the sense of hope and promise inherent in any loneliness. Death is the end, don't kid yourself. I wake and go walking in the darkness, attended only by the devil and his now-familiar longing. Oh how I wish I could start my life again.

We are perhaps one, perhaps not. He fed himself a crust of bread and watched the sun fall beyond gray hills. Voices of children in the street, witnesses to hunger and political failure. Followers of the executed criminal persisted their damning testimony. I braved the gallows but for what?

Did I mention dishonesty? Broken thoughts that fall from my tongue like windows out of long-abandoned factories? You left, you did not come back - what is death against that? The end is coming, brother, and it's going to feel like being drunk in a snowbank on Christmas. I would trade every prayer I've uttered and every hint of God I've written for one more kiss, one more walk on the lake with you.

Trying to Make You a Map

2012-01-11T04:00:00.000-05:00

There are those amongst us who have become pilgrims.
I am one, although you cannot tell by looking at me - or by listening to me talk.
Our common objective is the present moment, bright and clear, untended by the past and without regard for the future.
Heaven is a state of being that remains distant but possible, somewhat akin to the optical illusions you enjoyed as a child.
Obviously we are bent on undoing fear.
There aren't many of us - not even enough for a club.
We don't congregate, except when we're sure we won't be seen, and even then we are careful to advance only with cover.
What can you ask of those who are tortured by the fearsome condition known as recollecting God through desire?
It's not arrival that makes one a pilgrim, but the decision to travel.
We give up a lot to get here.
Antique lamps, expensive tables our grandmothers purchased in White River Junction, even the family dog.
Somebody somewhere wants to know you're not just playing.
I, for example, offered up my poetry and so am left now with paltry sentences.
At night, alone, like you, I study the stars for signs.
The old reliance on songs is being reconsidered at the highest level.
Before the sun rises I walk deep into the woods, grateful for the chance to know myself as alien.
We know we are broken.
We are trying to make you a map.
You don't owe us anything.
It is the surest way to love.

Gifts from a Ravenous God

2012-01-10T06:40:00.000-05:00

The possibility of a nomadic life had onced appeared real. In the desert, one finds keys, even old window frames. Yet jazz remained an instructive mode, one that allowed us to appreciate evolution. No rock unturned, no snake not reviled.

Oh you and your habit of planting things in winter so they'll sprout anew in Spring. What kind of breakfast did they eat when they had to go kill horses? We stayed up and watched the moon and listened to the wind and in our dreams that night a thousand glittering streamers fell from the skies, gifts from a ravenous God. You like hills?

I remember in particular the poems I did not write. In New Hampshire, near the coast, a woman tries in vain to dissemble identity in time for her wedding. The heart is always in motion, meaning that we are driven by a longing to which we only rarely put a name. Call them psalms and get on with it.

Whoa! Once trust was raised as an issue we began to fall apart, telling lies all over the place, as if undoing the foundation - whatever that meant - was a sound objective. A found objective? This one, for example, was created aside a Poinsetta plant while a couple of cats snored noisily beside a hissing stove.

But then love does have a way of rendering us all visible, doesn't it? Jesus comes in, asking if I'd just undo this one sentence for him. You don't have to consider death if you don't want to. I am here, for example, and so are you, and that might be enough.

A Real Breaking Point

2012-01-09T04:27:00.000-05:00

He leans his forehead against a tree and a little smoke rises but you have to look closely to see it. We picked blueberries out there many many years ago. Can we work the word silver into the poem? Nobody listens anymore. Or that's how it seems, drunk with wine, playing Thelonious Monk records.

We are not separate from our living space. There is no need to be both giver and receiver, which is why we favor one role over the other. The horse looked up and it was easy to believe he was grateful for the change in circumstances. I am as always in the middle of things. One wants a kiss despite their age.

And cloudless skies. Complicated rhythms that seem to require keeping joy at arm's length. Can we listen to the radio then? Blades of grass spackled with vomit and drops of dried blood. That's the whole picture and it's very interesting.

Nobody listens because nobody believes they can anymore. We walked the fence line slowly, repairing barbed wire, and talking about our friendship which had endured a great deal but seemed finally to be broaching a real breaking point. Ah, my old heart, how you quiver and sing! She drew the curtains and turned to the bed, her hair falling on her shoulder in a way that made me wish I had taken up painting. Longing scales the invisible ladder and waits for us up high between the stars.

Near A Rose Bush

2012-01-08T05:21:00.000-05:00

It is a day of learning to forgive, or hoping to anyway. The past shades all things but this is simply a habit of seeing. What cannot be undone does not exist. In the moonlight, even the tiny pine trees appear garish and large.

Earlier - before the sun rose - I felt the presence of Old Scratch, sad and angry, just past the tree line. We walk slowly over icy fields, finding our way. The dog, once known for traveling many miles far and wide on an ordinary walk, now slows down and stays nearby. Count your blessings, not your dollars.

Ah, who am I anyway? Three fingers of cirrus float overhead, a chickadee perches near a rose bush. Must winter always come? Must we always think in terms of followers?

You come at my child in anger and grief and I cannot let that be. Merchants walk into the temple with heavy hearts, hefting cages in which nervous doves await their fate. Are we different? The sun comes up and it goes down and I cannot take my eyes off the sky.

Thus, this. Thus a note of apology, offered years too late. The lamps flicker and grow dim and eventually expire. We ask for too much and our boots are filled with sand.

Sharper Every Day

2012-01-07T05:07:00.002-05:00

So much so that when an opportunity arrived he took it without question.

I'm in the wrong chair for drinking tea but when the muse beckons you don't ask questions.

Prayer is a continual action largely unrelated to language and won't yield fruit until you get that.

The world is coming to coaches.

She wrote later - in an apologetic note that he saved - that the list of things she didn't understand in the world grew longer and sharper every day.

One who begs forgiveness understands forgiveness.

How the hell did Terpsichorean find its way into the project?

Realization does not dawn slowly.

Lately I am focused not on the practice of others but on my own practice which is informed by others but not, um, exactly what they do so much as, you know.

Avoid speech.

Listen?

We show up and we write and we do it without judgment.

Another way to think about the past is that what happened, happened.

Five years later I understand the concern you raised when I spoke about singing and dancing as a means of attaining grace and can only say that I'm sorry.

You want some pie?

The gibbous moon sank slowly into the hills where a train - a very loud one for 4 a.m. - cranked along decrepit tracks.

One fears for bears in unseasonable winter warmth.

Another way of making sense is not to say anything at all.

The decorative wagon wheel was moved from the barn to the front of the house and everyone agreed it was a lovely development and would much improve saleability.

Yet who could say who it was saying - and more importantly meaning - all that?

Before I Mount The Gallows

2012-01-06T06:25:00.000-05:00

One consents to wreckage, a sentence comprised of penitential reflection. As light can be seen through the delicate flesh of a mouseling's ear. Not play, not singing. We stopped where the statues were dusted with snow, seeking lines that would beget poems that honored the ancestral impulse. Certain relatives are buried in unmarked graves.

Yet morning does come and one rises and begins again to compose the twenty sentences. We are only partially what we eat and partially what we feed to others. A pile of rocks, stubble pines, glints of sunlight warming nothing. So nobody listens, so what? He carried the trapped mouse out into the morning dark and let it go near the chicken shed.

Ah, but that was another story, one we told to help people fall asleep in difficult times. Drinking coffee outside Worcester, reminiscing about nicotine. Would you hold me a last time before I mount the gallows and sail off in pursuit of the old dog? Night comes as well and you can't forget that. There were apple trees all over that garden.

I have made a religion of the phrase "and yet." You experience silence as an island first, then you are lifted into a familiar song. There is no such thing as here and there. One returns to be broken, one longs again for that forbidden kiss. You know, don't you?

A Kind of Settling

2012-01-05T07:03:00.003-05:00

The dog hesitated - and so I hesitated - and then I went on and so did the dog. In the distance - even now - one hears beavers at work on the trees that are left. And trains - en route to Albany, the Erie canal - passing through Chester, circling a hill. I would give anything for grace but sometimes accept this quiet.

When we return, it will be as rocks falling, a kind of settling, and it will have nothing to do with language. Alone, we can say: this is who we are. I will not begrudge any one their tea, their moment of prayer. She gives no contrary indication, which we take as a sign (which why wouldn't we?).

Nor will there be any folk dancers. Well, memories help to move us along, there's that to be said for them. Dreams of flight accompanied by a dream of falling slowly down a dead aunt's stairs. We wake up and there's Jesus, gazing into the fish tank the way the rest of us do, pleased with what it seems should be less pleasing.

The luxurious ego of kings vs. the fate of Thomas More. One falls to sleep picturing their own courageous martyrdom. "You just used a whole lot of words but I don't think you said anything." Well, we are often parroting our fathers, to their regret and ours.

Isn't this sentence lovely? You can wake up any time you choose. It's mutual and always was. It's Christ on the cross and dirty happy hippies all over again.

A Dream of Rain in Kentucky

2012-01-04T07:51:00.001-05:00

Thus. The twenty sentences at last understood as a helpful exercise in the application of pronouns. I learn. You see. One does.

Or so he wrote. It was a polysyllabic enterprise before anybody else showed up with big ideas. A tree cannot be anything but a tree and does so without effort. Are we still talking about writing? You tell me.

It is not related to photography but does have a thing for musicology. The notes follow one another, like hikers ascending an Austrian hill. All it takes for something interesting to happen is one slip. Or maybe a bus. A rude awakening?

Forsaken Ming vases in the hands of a sad nude. Thus Bambi, thus rambling, thus a dream of rain in Kentucky. The river you see only seems to flow, as the time you take only seems to pass. He wrote I love you. Me too.

Singing The Correct Song

2012-01-03T13:42:00.000-05:00

Soldiers? I woke up under the impression that one is supposed to give and not receive. What followed me into the field then, nagging in a quiet - no, an unspoken - way? Later, drinking tea, stars glittered overhead exactly as they would have if I had made them. Well, love does and then is.

Yet peace remains elusive. The past and future are but constructs used to hammer the present into submission. Poetry is rarely any help but it does pass the time. I did it again! He wrote he wrote.

But later watching the horses, the man without shoes felt calm, sure that the world would end in love. A dream of lilies, a dream of a sad mother whom everyone had to protect. Are we singing the correct song yet? One believes that to remain incomplete is itself sacred.

In other words, there is something in longing that completes us even without satisfaction. I miss the old telephones that kept you locked in place, like a dog on a leash. Every so-called advance since has been marked by secrecy. You write, I'll open the mail. They are out there in the distance, weary and footsore, and we are going to have to figure out how to love them.

It Ends At A Disco

2012-01-02T08:29:00.001-05:00

Or perhaps I meant speculator. Belief is worth looking at, as are its roots. You walk down a slight hill to the barn and suddenly slip on a patch of ice. He wrote a poem about magi on bare branches and it was picked up by several knitter's groups. All is well once you've got coffee.

Don't stop laughing and if you haven't started, well belly up to the cosmic bar and get yerself a chortlin'. This guy started running, looked behind him to see if he was being followed and got clotheslined by - get this - an actual clothesline. This calls to mind our condition in Heaven. What I was looking for was a rat and what I found were black gloves somewhat hidden in the hay. Old Scratch is never not on call.

Of course, we are always being followed. As a child I had a series of significant interactions with prisms and clear quartz and rain followed by sudden extreme sunlight and so naturally as an adult I covet mirror balls. One makes a list of the poets with whom they've lost touch. I mean pets. Did I mention my many followers?

Oh this road can be a lot of fun once you know it ends at a disco. At every moment, believe in light. She stepped outside and lottery tickets fell from the sky and - here's how you know she really got it - she simply reassigned them to snowflakes. That fall hurt but your smile - followed by mine - was more precious than gold. Just watch and wait and from time to time be happy.

There Were Good Kings

2012-01-01T18:04:00.001-05:00

One assumes the position of a supplicant and then gets angry when other supplicants arrive. Giving must be in the nature of utterly. Cardinals come up from the river and we watch them all morning without speaking. Often, the prayer we spend a lifetime preparing for has already been answered. Thus one learns what Heaven is for.

Or not. A few glasses of wine measured against moonlight on the barn, half an hour of moaning. One genuinely desires to forgive and ends up in conflict yet again. Are you following this? Amidst grackles and chickadees and the occasional ubiquitous nuthatch?

Well, against snow anyway. The morning passes searching for clear quartz, polishing it with denim, holding it up to the sun. God is see through. Now and again you write a sentence and think, there, that's it. Then you write another one.

Then he wrote that good poem about the cardinals as magi. I will no longer play Macbeth! Yet there were good kings in that play, which is worth remembering. I think of you often while walking. Once fed, no longer hungry.

A Fatal Conglomeration of Toxins

2011-12-31T07:21:00.001-05:00

Without a filtration system - mechanical and or biological - fish in a tank will die. We have to do certain things, don't we? Buy toilet paper, fry breakfast sausage in syrup, read to the children when they can't for themselves. Thus one assumes the mode of cranberries, one adopts a salty way.

Without you I am a block of wood on which somebody has painted eyes. Feathers fall, memories are recalled. We pull the past out of our brains, polish it a little, and call it reason or cause. The filtration system - whether mechanical or biological - enables the inhabitants of the tank to survive what would otherwise be a fatal conglomerations of toxins.

I am saying it is all in how we look at it. The ghosts near the forest rallied a last time, but I threw Jesus in their faces and they gave up with nary a whimper. Or am I remembering the old dog who died approximately one year ago today? Without some method of arranging our memories, we would lose entirely our longing for the present and then what?

Perhaps it is because we transitioned to hunter gatherers? Somebody said hey look that'd be a great place for a village, let's make babies and hem our stories in on calf skin. On the other hand, there's Las Vegas. Well, we have to perceive until we accept we don't have to so . . .

So one wants to mitigate what obscures a natural joy and peace. Transform obstacles to love? We arrive at each moment with the capacity to be born again. If a certain language leaves you cold then go find your own flaming pronoun.

The Startling Dark of Midnight

2011-12-30T08:33:00.000-05:00

The pilgrim landscape dusted with snow. The interior fire can sometimes be gray. One walks all morning and all afternoon just to speak with fellow believers. So I declined to play the part of Macbeth, so what?

Lives are altered by our actions hence the need to choose - to decide - carefully. Eschew lawsuits. At times it behooves the hungry soul not to feed itself but simply to observe the terms of its hunger. Sentences, my love, not lines.

We advanced confidently in the direction of our dreams. Decomposition beckoned, lent its shadow to the project. This is what I do and if you don't like it leave me alone. Little crescent moon, what did you think would come of the startling dark of midnight?

Oh but then a cup of tea comes. There are always firsts and they are always repeating themselves. In other words, wake up and allow your dream to interpret you. Remember you?

Remember that night on the fire escape, drinking brandy from a thermos and talking about the apocalypse only we knew was coming? Everything that happened is still happening, if you want to see if that way. The other night, out walking, I was aware of him in the distance - his black frock, his ancient pistols - and felt again - faintly - the powerful desire he wields, the yearning to know our experience, the anger at having once chosen otherwise. One hurls oneself from Heaven, one discovers that eternity is simply the longing to make it back.

The We We Really Aren't

2011-12-29T10:12:00.000-05:00

Nowhere is better than here. One's life fits into a shoebox which can at last be dropped into the sea. There was a point I wanted to make about the space between waves but . . .

The morning walk abjured in favor of dreams in which Jesus was invited to appear. A simple yes or no would do. Yet the answer, when it arrived, was in the form of an email and only complicated the question's nature.

Question nature? How often do I return with blood on my palms and mud in my pant seams? There is only death worth talking about and it happened a long time ago.

Raise your hand if the crucifixion appeals to you. Stand if the reflection of broken glass in the driveway is more memorable than a lover's parting words. Do you believe in pain?

How about grass stains? Suisecki? A one word sentence has a lot of explaining to do.

Yet we kept going, as if into a photograph. We wake from one dream into another and have to choose the one in which we really wake up. What I meant to say before I embarked on the twenty sentences was thank you.

Or yes? Time doesn't pass so much as the we we really aren't does.

Intense Almost Divine Love

2011-12-28T05:39:00.000-05:00

Fear on the logging road that tracks the old potato field (next to the frozen pond). Overhead, stars flicker heedlessly. One walks as if into a painting, as if some artist or authority had made this in a state of intense, almost divine, love. Understanding this or that social setting is not critical. We fumble, we make do.

We approach writing a certain way, as a process in which product is not valuable, not saleable. But malleable? Historically, our preference for gold is a function of the fact that it gleams in sunlight and yields readily to heat. We want to measure. We want our treasure.

While later, one assumed the stance of one who wears a frock coat. The past is never not with us. One prefers the abstract to the dense text that often follows. Pull yourself together! My boot strings broke and I cobbled together something else for the long walk that winter morning.

If you can't make room for your fleas then you can forget about enlightenment. A blanket is helpful against the cold, dust that's visible in the moonlight can help you recall old friends. I mentioned fear and I'd like to retract it. Retrace it? It passes is all I am saying.

A Cherished Noun

2011-12-27T05:36:00.000-05:00

The notes find themselves. Which is to say that music is there in a way the sentence is not. Oh but then you never write now, do you? Was it something I said? He waited all day for the mail and it never came and it saddened him but there was always tomorrow and what is tomorrow but a comfort?

Or that's what you told yourself when the closet got too stale. Albany freeways from which the distance beckons in a hazy, in a Saturday, kind of way. Remember eating frozen apple pie and crying about what we had just done? Remember our issues with the upper class? John Ruskin is absolutely not the kind of guy you invite to parties.

People who go to school to study ice sculpture have my vote. Art that grows old and disappears is all yay. Consider that Emily Dickinson asked that her writing without exception be destroyed upon her death. What was it what's-his-name said? To be a great artist you have to give up everything including the desire to be a great artist?

Or something like that. We are perhaps doomed by our incessant hankering for repetition. Rankled by imitation? All afternoon I wrote and sang and you were right there in my mind. Like a cherished noun before which verbs fall weeping.

Both Visible and Hidden Patterns

2011-12-26T08:14:00.002-05:00

One recalls Jesus while studying the art of floral arrangement. A wind that recalls hills, a howl that carries in a way train whistles never do. Snowy fields facilitate memory, especially in the moonlight. You give and give and there is no end to your giving.

The dog sits by the window mulling. Curled up into the shape of a button, weaving himself like a thread into our lives. What is family really? We shed our maneuvers, we surrendered our strategies.

We meditated with coffee, waiting for everyone else to wake up. You have to engage, you have to risk conflict. Solve problems? A fish rises and falls in the current, indifferent to its environment.

More plastic flowers! A tire swing nobody has used since 1949. We are not what we use but rather that to which we aspire. Rhyme leads to the center of nowhere which is why we keep using it.

A king begs forgiveness, a mendicant preacher gives up and gets married and lives in a little cottage, happy for many years. You have to alter both visible and hidden patterns. To follow him to is submit to renewal, moment by moment. Heaven destabilizes which is how you know it's real.

The Maneuvers of Extraordinary Men

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Shall I allow for the maneuvers of extraordinary men? Pay the rain for when it blesses my field? Dross will do, when gold is unavailable.

There is no such thing as unavoidable complicity. We are called to love, not to overthrow rotten systems. Beware the lure of the big picture!

I await the mail as I have for decades. He came down from the mountain bearing arrows, a strange - an almost crazed - look in his eyes. One sentence follows another like a lesson in reliance.

Fragments, all of you! The dance grew violent and thus one abjured all art. What are calories but tiny funeral bells?

Many questions that together comprise an answer. The farm implements gleamed in the moonlight and in the distance a few deer could be heard tearing frozen leaves from the bracken. It's a nice enough world if you can tame your expectations.

Blame the infestations? Time passed, the dead turned over, and soon enough came the enlightenment. I shall want for nothing when I am in Heaven but until then, more chocolate cake please!

Ah, but I cannot really ask for that, not that way. You call me away from shifts that are mandated by ambition.

Narrow and Dim

2011-12-24T04:30:00.000-05:00

Like a dog twisting in folds of the blanket, anxious to get out in the snow, I continue to think interms of what I don't have. There are always consequences. Andjewelry. One can look lovely while feeling lonely. Deeply – evendangerously – lonely.

Is it all a narrative, all a story? Wecharacterize ourselves but what are we really? The shoe fell of theship and sank quickly into the gray sea. Later, a dream of emptybottles, mermaids bobbing where the waves rose and fell. We are allpart of whatever it is, without exception.

Mothers who drive buses. Horses whocanter to the field's far edge then stop and stare as if thinking.Our capacity for selling never ceases yet our wares change from yearto year. The truth is we can grow accustomed to anything. Like, say,dogs.

The row of books one hasn't read growslonger by the year too. The stage on which we prance grows narrow anddim. Dancers remember us in drunken moments. We are all part of it,this thing I call God. He means the part of the brain where languageis not language yet but only sound, maybe only the idea of sound.

Splinters of Eternity

2011-12-23T09:13:00.001-05:00

One morning, after several hours of prayer, I went to the window and saw a crow resting on a tree limb dusted with snow. As one teacher wrote of Jesus, his back was always turned to me. Yet what else are we called to do but follow? The road is many and the few upon it narrow. Well, sometimes it's better not to speak.

Yet upon waking - and following a few scattered minutes of prayer - a sense of joyful peace descended on me and I felt as if it was time to stride into Babylon with plans for a new society. I am going to run for political office, just like my Daddy. It's fun to eat figs with criminals and cavort with the generally unrepentant. The world is what you make it, my friend. Sally forth!

Yet on the docks - faced with a ticket for the ship that would crush every iceberg in its path - I hesitated, remembering the words of Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. What I am saying is that words fail me but who cares. A morning of snow, and birds who keep their distance making a different choice. I sat quietly with the dog who farted as she slept. We are here to open the shutters of guilt, we are here to illuminate splinters of eternity.

Hey, are you in the mood for some salted flakes of salmon? Faced with metaphysical improbabilities I could only say I know I am. Mountains in the distance, boots shrugging onto our feet. What is movement but an embrace of what might happen? Christ is the position we assume in love.

You Think But Woe

2011-12-22T06:56:00.000-05:00

In a dark hour I was marooned. The howls woke me after just a few minutes sleep. Wherever light was, wherever truth was, that's where I was thinking about writing about truth. There are no exceptions to the possibility of getting burned on the way in. The road is easier to find than you think but woe to the one who finds it and just ambles.

Let me say it another way. Let me have my tea and drink it as well. The organist stumbled coming out of the choir loft and her daughter had a sudden idea for a hymn. Let's go to the record store and get ourselves a date. This poem (that prom?) must include a cornet.

A hornet stole my wedding ring. There's disillusionment at work, a proposition bound to failure. We marched all day until we reached the temple only to find that it was closed for renovations. A war can't begin if the other side stays home. Hearts pour forth their wisdom, angels fall to their knees.

Some people are harder to please than others. We studied the shore line, intent on finding the perfect stone. So I'm not the prize catch I once was (said the Tuna with his hand-carved cane). We begin (and end) where everyone else does. Your dulcet voice, your bloodied knuckles.

Thought In Those Days

2011-12-21T04:30:00.000-05:00

We are never not dancing. The lightfalls where it does in the interest of surprise. The stage can bedismantled in a matter of minutes. Outside, clouds moved quickly fromwest to east, like commuters bent on getting home before dark.Another cigarette, another way to slow down time.

The teacher said quietly that talkingis not working. We went back and forth between the main building andour little tent. Thought bogs us all down and yet. I once looked upfrom where I was fishing for perch and saw pillars of sunlight as ifsomeone – God I thought in those days – was setting a newfoundation. Doing never does anything.

She wrote about children and theloneliness was evident. Thus the desire to write this desire. It'sgood to ask what we're after. Bottles of whiskey, boxes ofchocolates. You want a special song?

How about traffic sounds? Anything canbe dismantled or so he wrote. I knew where the door was andstill declined to enter. It's a question of rhythm, a matter ofwords. You are with me whenever I feel it.

A Grave Way, An Important Way

2011-12-20T08:21:00.002-05:00

If we are going to do this, then let usdo it in a grave way, an important way. As this morning I passed without speaking the frozen pond and woods. As one searches for words. What iseffortlessness worth but nothing? With what is spirit made anyway?

Ah, the rigidconstructs of thought! I became a Communist in order to see youclearly. Yet beholden to grief – and stuck still in the throes ofsilence – I also made soap from organic goat milk. We are all other. It's time to stop.

It's time to sing? I can still see youthirty years ago. I compose this sentence in your name. One or twostars and a cut of moon were perceived as affirmations. One falls into a pattern, one gets comfortable indeed.

Violets remains in attendance. Likepolitics or talking. You cannot bear the bear can you? I waited allday on my knees. And you, you draw the requisite voice from my throatlike it's nothing.

All Is Well Or Will Be

2011-12-19T08:34:00.002-05:00

So it is true that goldfish only die on dreamless nights. Punctuation is dictatorial, also helpful, at least in those situations. A bland wing does what petroleum cannot. Don't wake up! While in the most recent installment of my gargantuan novel I abolished all pilgrims.

A board on which a few words were painted. A poem in which a blue streamer was compared to my late grandfather entering Heaven. Tea helps. A little bit of crying never hurt anyone but still. We are the signal we are waiting for.

Worth waiting for? Something always happens around the tenth or eleventh sentence. Plastic plants shift and shimmy in the soft currents, the cloudy H20. We have been waiting for the arrival of insight, which will alter our behavior, and transform the grim and grimy world to a beautiful gold city with streets that run with chocolate and malt whiskey. While in the meadow - right there - a calico bull quietly ponders the death of an Iris.

The syllabus was not in any way helpful. Prayer is akin to pine trees in winter. Let's put Jesus in it just to say we did. The silver bells atop the church were silenced by rust. And yet, in passing, one is reminded that all is well, or will be.

Privileged Glimpses Of A Certain Interior Landscape

2011-12-18T08:55:00.000-05:00

I come to this project out of a sense of duty but also possibility. One wants to see what will happen when language - curtailed by form - is freed of its tethers. The result was an overly critical narrative that was judgemental and disapproving of both humanity and society. Well, plagiarism remains an issue unless you're invested in repetition.

Like shrinking closet space for those wedded to keeping pace with fashion. Thus - without divulging sources - I experienced riotous excursions with privileged glimpses of a certain interior landscape. It was bells, it was carols, it was men who were not afraid to kiss rocks. As if to say. Or rather, as if this thus makes the language of criticality a meta-narrative that represses any effort to begin anew.

A hibernating newt? He saw the river move sluggishly beneath mounds of ice and snow and it reminded him of his father who had died years earlier without ever having run for political office. You can dream and I can blow up balloons just to pop them. She invited me to a parade in honor of Minerva. I fell asleep imagining what I would say to you, having dreamed of us together all these years.

One weeps fecund tears. One reads Wordsworth again and finally understands genius. When cold, approach a working stove. I plucked a turkey feather off the trail and went on struggling with multiple strains of thought. Often it seems to start just when you reach the terminus.

The Dog Outside

2011-12-17T07:05:00.001-05:00

Remember the days when there was nothing to do but dream about apples? Thus the poem - nestled in the twenty sentences - begins. A Roman senator passed by the window, his mind on a bowl of figs. We are what we perceive and what we perceive we believe. Push a little and see if the world doesn't give.

She was interested in liberation theology though she'd never heard the phrase before the conference. The dog outside will not come in. If you want meaning, you're going to have to come and claim it. Five more minutes before the house changes shape. Three witches in the hedge, plotting against us.

A gunmetal sky, a flat palm coming your way. It - meaning what - is never as easy as we'd like. Suddenly time begins to pick up speed, much like a car as it goes downhill. He paused only to ask if it was one word or two. In photographs you are beautiful but impossible to love.

In our brief exchanges, I have come to realize that I cherish in you only what recalls the burnished past. A tangle emerges, to the left of which Jesus gently reminds me that conflict is unnecessary. A temple emerges, another obstacle to peace. In a moment I am going to wake up but first let me tend to his corner of the dream. Cancer has entered our lives.

Slipping From A Cloudy Scabbard

2011-12-16T08:56:00.000-05:00

One jumps, one begins. One gazes at the sky and wonders if there is another way to see it. Tea in bed. What a rotten moon, slipping from a cloudy scabbard, scuttling up the sky. Be bold my darling!

Letters come depicting a possible lifestyle, one I might have wanted. We are what we grow. Why is almost never the right question. He gave a fortuitous speech, one that paved the way to the nomination. Yet one never knows what the future holds.

If we're going to leave then we're going to have to leave now. I risked anger, I made unexpected changes. The speakers you brought are fantastic. A poem comprised of four letters. Did I mention the mail?

If you're going to leave then please leave now. A clean sharp break is needed. Also lessons in elocution. Evolution? We fall backwards almost always.

Secrets While Tending The Inner Garden

2011-12-15T06:24:00.000-05:00

Walking this morning in the field surprised at how little light is needed to find one's way. Or perhaps knowing the way in advance helps? The beavers were quiet off to my left (that is, to the east). No visible stars. Last night I heard the far away train and talked to my daughter about the mysteries. Navigating puddles, listening for the dog's tags. We give up the little mysteries so there's room for the big ones. There is a bridge I will always remember for the God sounds you pointed out beneath it. Death is not the end but it damn well seems to be. Earlier we ate apples and popcorn and watched the sun set and discussed the role realism plays in funny stories. Pretty please with cheddar cheese? A head cold makes one struggle to communicate, which is another way of saying one struggles just to show one cares. Yet the practice of awareness is fundamentally healing. Does any of this make sense? She keeps secrets while tending the inner garden and we all know where she learned that trick! Must we then learn how to barter? Isn't negotiation a sign of weakness? All these voices in my head with which I must contend! Later, alone, I wondered who is served by the undoing of what is not real. You're out there and we both know it.

Mistaken For Grace

2011-12-14T06:53:00.000-05:00

The impulse to avoid praise mistaken for grace. You are what you teach. There is no escape from the Truth.

There is no escaping Duluth. We stood outside while it rained, talking about our children. The night passes, with or without you.

Saint Paul is sometimes also mistaken for grace. The train lay rusting aside the tracks, blue jays nattering nearby. Silence grates.

Do something! He wrote, just before the sun rose, remembering that night in the rain. A cup of coffee went down the wrong way.

What did the clown song say? We have to laugh or else we're going to miss peace altogether. We studied a schedule, mistaking it for Truth.

That moment when they lose their first tooth! Please accept love, please don't reject doves. In my dream, I saved you a piece of raspberry cake.

Why must it always happen in the past tense? In other words, thanks.

Into The Same River Twice

2011-12-13T04:00:00.000-05:00

Few things are as moving to me as remembering Elvis shooting his television. Well, maybe members of the so-called peace churches training dogs and riding bikes. We climb hills only to see more hills and our legs are tired and now what. You cannot leap off the same bridge into the same river twice.

Heraclitus sends regrets. One apologizes to God in the moonlight, one contemplates an act of violence. Rebellion? Standing near the willows I imagined I heard deer breathing and crows shifting in their nests atop the pine trees.

Childhood is a photograph. All spirals are reminiscent of what decline? In this sentence, an old friend is held and remembered. Much like swimming in the creek, much like our knuckles after fighting.

The horse lifted its head as if anticipating the gunshot. What ends, ends well. Cheers rose, one dreams of a rose. One walks a long way in the dark to find a home where it is quiet and the soup rests on the stove all night.

Have me will you? The dead return for no reason other than to sip the joyful dram we can't surrender. Drama? No, I never turned to you for anything you weren't already giving.

No Other Miracle

2011-12-12T07:31:00.000-05:00

I implore you to use language precisely (not bluntly).

One rephrases the last sentence in particular.

Is a word missing?

There is no other miracle than to see the world through another's eyes.

For all my mysanthropic tendencies I do love you.

The fragments of Christianity, the crumbs of Buddhism.

One makes a good catch (in a metaphorical way).

Yet the next sentence - which was this one originally - needs revision.

To make clear what is possible.

Are you referring then to the miracle?

Thus, be careful of concluding.

Nitpickers unite (with certain caveats)!

How many perfections are possible?

Hence the Latin origin, the Germanic adaptation.

But why exactly are we qualified as fools?

He whispered - there in the dark, before the sun rose - is it foolish to even try to be perfect?

We have not eliminated all our weaknesses.

Ask, too, what is amenable to elimination and what is frankly not.

Our natural hunger for what?

I meant for the nineteenth sentence to be the twentieth so now what?

Breath Deceives Us

2011-12-11T04:00:00.000-05:00

One insists on positive affirmations.One gazes at his son and does not see his son. As the wave rises from the sea, it also falls back. We insist on other. Yet is also helpful to ask what problem cannot be solved by radical hospitality.

Weeds where yesterday just soil. A stand-up bass where yesterday was cigar smoke. I followed the moose's tracks for close to ten miles before letting him go before me into miles of unmapped hills. Gifts are as gifts do. One looks for his son in a familiar face and sees another child.

We are bent on love even though we pretend otherwise. You can choose peace or you can choose victory through conflict but please understand the two are mutually exclusive. One or two stars where the moon is visible, there between fading contrails. Everything will be just fine in the end. Thus the end, thus this.

One takes their tea late, as the moonlight seeps through shuttered windows. We insist on repetition. One sees their son wherever one looks. Our breath deceives us. I love you even so.

You Are What You Haunt

2011-12-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

I am witness to a crime that was never committed, a trial that was never held, and an execution that took place only in the dreams of certain angry men.

A jail cell is a comfort in other words.

I can see without my glasses, just not as well.

Left rotting in a cell?

Awakening is the goal.

And yet.

A challenge to full voice.

You cannot adopt the methods of what you would undo.

Nor sing.

Nor write by a South-facing window and call it of all things home.

Yet there are times when the inchoate fear is absent and those are the times when I am writing.

Put it this way: you are what you haunt.

Hence the sense that desire is inevitable.

Regrettable?

I am not a traveler other than in secret.

Someone - Kierkegaard perhaps - said that to be a Christian is to be a type of spy.

As living in the world is a sort of puzzle one completes piece by piece.

A certain street in Vermont, a certain song on the radio.

Screw that - a certain slant of light!

Before which - again - as ever - I fall.

Perennial Composition

2011-12-09T05:18:00.000-05:00

What is anger? Who has been hurt? What is being defended? What good are these questions?

A possible metaphor for necessary sugery. The narrative i in perennial composition. An idea, a segment. This is how certain people grow rich.

This is how a poem moves away from the poet. This is how a river seen through trees in early December makes one want to exchange their walking stick for a tie. This is the futility of plannig. This is falling, again.

A wren? A lily. A man helping a man that his brother would only hurt? Me capitulating.

If at the end of the writing you feel no better is this success? If at the end of the writing nobody applauds is that success? What good are questions? If at the end of a piece of writing - this one or another - there is only silence is that a cause or an effect?

If I Have Presented Myself As Not Fallen

2011-12-08T03:00:00.000-05:00

Between stars and clouds, the moon. A dog's paw, crusted with blood. River sounds, trains sounds. Turning the corner, the smell of cinnamon. I am always going.

Always at one without knowing? The mentalist guessed my zip code from 1974. Between stars and clouds, unbroken darkness. If I have presented myself as not fallen, forgive me. Forgive my spelling.

Be aware of how verbs work in your sentences. Don't be jealous, it's a waste of time. Be willing to love your enemies or at least understand why someone else might. Saints is as saints does. The more practical model might be Mennonites.

At the beginning with lilies. Between stars and shreds of cloud, the memory of a dead dog. Passing the river, at one with fear. Bad things were done and I won't let them go. Withered apologies are thin gruel indeed.

The Dubious Gift Of Knowing

2011-12-07T06:49:00.000-05:00

Duck shadows, tall grass. The sun rose and kept rising and when I looked again Venus was up above the pine trees. That world which I love despite knowing better. What do you think?

Gypped of a taco. The tractor tires lay covered in snow, mouse prints going in and out, tending each of the cardinal directions. Repetition is fun, period. Later, we went out ourselves, mulling the dubious gift of knowing we are going to die.

"And yet" is why you can't go home. Another writing project, another self of which I must disabuse my self. High shelf? Sometimes you build mansions where a cottage would have done.

And yet. I wake the same, unawakened, and wonder what it is I think is going to happen. We open our arms to the sky. Open, unopened.

That dream is okay but I want another one. You in it. Despite the baubles attending the necessary ceremony, I continued to care for you, and it was that more than anything which led me to the balcony where I saw, for the first and only time, as it were, Christ's face. You can learn a lot watching dogs.

Bad Guides

2011-12-06T05:13:00.000-05:00

In trying to account for anger, one is inevitably led to fear. Dogs struggle against the fence between them, their jaws snapping, intimating cruelty. Yet any point of identification is only marginally helpful. As a writing project can serve either to hide or partially reveal authorial discretion. One is invested in the nineteenth century, one has a certain predilection.

In the morning I choose my words carefully while at night I babble. The study of commas are a substitute for life. Walking the same trail I walked in dreams, aware of some interior kernel from which peace might spring were I ever to discern the right method, was itself a kind of peacefulness. Or else bring all the pieces to the table and then let's decide. Grieving parents make bad guides.

Yet loss - scarcity - abounds. And the perennial emphasis on Jesus can only be marginally helpful. We eschew coffee, go for long walks, remember a point about poetry, made I think it was decades ago. Thus this in the wake of prayer. Thus absence.

Thus you leaped a second time and that was both end and beginning. The past as a beacon directing our attention. And yet, again. In trying to account for anger, we come to fear, which appears inexplicable, without source, at least without resort to mythology. What I am saying is that dogs matter in the same way prayer can reduce us to desire.

A Helpful Poverty, A Real Party

2011-12-05T06:42:00.000-05:00

Disappointment near dark. One rises, one prays, one does. One reconsidered in light of the narrative I. Oh remember that little lake in Galilee, the one where we talked about our fathers? Also olives.

Also sheep. Certain reminiscences are seeds of helpful poverty, a real party. A quick fox reminded you that words are not unlike numbers, at least one way. Thus, why bother with new? It depends on the meaning of thus.

A little shake, a little nudge. A little glass of cold milk mistaken for blue. I am a victim of a certain type of heart but not another. I am always surprised that people are not nicer. Still.

But what does one expect after years of prayer, years of making rosary beads with their teeth? How busy we have become, and how transient. For example, the mail lay stacked on the floor, disregarded for seven days. Is there not another way? You tell me, you Freudian speed trap with bangles.

A Pretty Melody Cast Into Space

2011-12-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

One cannot be both a witty primate and a diminutive marsupial. What is it exactly that Lazarus says? The record of attestation grows thin, even marginal. Yet to raise one's voice in song - a pretty melody cast into space - feels precisely generous. Who is the you when I say You and I?

Do or die! He wrote, being entertained by dreams of clocks alternately sinking to the sea's bottom or being jettisoned into space. Thus time passes. Yet the words - what we might call product - remained. Thus, self-destructive utterances.

Thought will not suffice to undo thought! Nor can a fifteenth century King teach us anything about healing the effects of adultery. You will gather your will and appear at the barricades by dawn. Easter is as Easter forgives. A whole afternoon passes like moss on the south side of a favorite maple.

Even the distressed eventually come to rest. I notice that we (subtly) take pride in not sleeping. One does not die so much as admit to a writ of repossession. Oh you and your many excuses! I forgot what the last line was going to be but this one is a killer.

Dreams Grovel

2011-12-03T04:00:00.000-05:00

And then sometimes not. But never without malice, or at least not entirely. As one adores this sound but not another. You can't think your way out of thought, nor write your way past language. Thus the mail.

Thus some systems are merely deficient while others fail outright. Rhyme being one example. Bob Dylan concerts in the mid-1980's. We walked through the parking lot holding hands delighted with the present moment. Faking poetry, before one cut their teeth on experience.

So you want to reconfigure your personal settings? No nonsense meditation only. He did not cut off his hand to signify the gravity of his longing but he is certainy descended from men who did. Oh for Christ's sake must we hear again that old canard about undying love? Once more, with emphasis.

Once more in Memphis, rendering new Mobile. What works is not in dispute yet somehow remains hidden. A lilac, a heart attack and also a bus. We wait and wait and for what? Dreams grovel where footsteps end.

Sometimes Emptied

2011-12-02T05:47:00.000-05:00

Ah, 5 a.m., you know just what my vulnerability is. Tea with maple syrup, memories of second grade. I've been on my knees so long I forgot I had feet. Thus, prayer. Thus shame.

This shame. Or rather a particular memory which, upon recollection, makes one sad. Yet grateful? Well, living in a world of emoticons makes me sad, I can say that without compromise. On the other's hand . . .

And yet and yet. I argue with you while you sleep in the next room and then wonder what the next year is going to bring. Sometimes the twenty sentences aren't fun so much as familiar. Exactly the way "um" fits so well in so many conversations. I am the previous installation!

But somehow Jesus gets through. Oh, how I love saying "heaven" to scientists! So we are sometimes emptied of our natural inclination to peace, so what? There's always tomorrow (always more sorrow). There's always a skull that's happy with craters.

You Can Still Dream The Dream

2011-12-01T03:30:00.000-05:00

Tides, perhaps. Some interior dismantling that may ultimately be favorable. Apostolic? After a long time talking, one begins to understand silence. One begins to see beyond what the physical eye can see.

Or crosses a bridge, where before they had turned back. Turned inward? There are so many ways to fall and be forgotten! Yet tears eventually come, fructive and cleansing. And Thomas a Kempis, after what seemed like many dry years.

Like the dark which in fact does own certain qualities opposed to light. It's poetry but it's also work. Spiritual problems demand spiritual solutions, do they not? Little stones, removed from one's shoe to make the walk easier, are dropped by the road to inhibit other walkers. So not all models are created equal.

What - or who - is other? He wrote he wrote. He was always writing and thus approached - and then crossed - the boundaries implied by - sustained by, really - language. As in, please keep your troubled lens to yourself. I'm awake at hours - I'm slipping through prayers - so you can still dream the dream.

Feed Fish

2011-11-30T05:30:00.000-05:00

The kettle is always found where you left it. Oh for a pair of torn jeans, oh for the perennial lift. Snow falling in a Paris garden. Intimations of some more glorious state. You left and I have tried to say you left without adding the silent equivocation and always I have failed.

One seeks patience. One dims all lamps. All night without dreams or at least dream unattended by memory. You cannot be the apple in the wooden bowl in the painting by Rembrandt and yet . . . In the lacunae, my love.

My sodden black glove. Once the conspiracy has taken root, reason flees for the hills. Nobody believes an umbrella man. That photograph you took of me - long since misplaced though hardly forgotten - belongs on some fool's mantle. Be careful or love will find you wanting.

The fisher of men was too busy baiting his hook to help me untangle my dreams. In your last letter, you mentioned audacity. Sparrows fly in and out of the barn at what seem like perilous speeds. It's a nice day for tea, a nice day to feed fish and pretend that war never happened.

Into The Lapidified Air

2011-11-29T04:00:00.000-05:00

The secret to all good writing is to know that you can't make a mistake so long as you are hearing right. Seeing the light? Even rhyme is subject to the great undoing. Ghost is a kind word, another way of seeing the real self. As in, that spider plant looks healthy.

One inquires so as to know yet the act of inquiry - arising as it does from a sense of lack - is itself a kind of knowing. So. One eats cookies for breakfast, one casts a kind of spell. Cast iron no less. And thus.

One's writing is an evasion. Or rather, a theft. The grand cosmological design bereft of a few sentences. Thus this. Thus thus.

It's a matter of trust! I keep saying the same thing which is to say that silence is only partially fructive. Which is another way of saying what God isn't as if God was that. Could I be more productive? Could I scale the last shelf into the lapidified air all to kneel before the one who is not - but why not - ever there?

Grist For Heaven

2011-11-28T04:30:00.000-05:00

One laughs, watching how easy it is to write. Just say it! And so all those empty mornings are suddenly valuable. Wood-shedding. One struggles to maintain a useful fire.

The dog is the father of the child who is father of the man. Don't talk to me about co-pilots. Those apples are meant for pie. My stomach is grist for Heaven. You wake up, you lurch down the stairs.

Aspirin equals true forgiveness. One anticipates a fatal experience. Is befuddled? You can see, as through a window, the frozen goldfish. What I am getting at is a rhythm implied by electricity.

Keep talking. The combustible present absent a token. One asks a question without expecting any answer. Never mind that direction we discussed. I'm drinking from a new bowl now.

One Arises At An Odd Hour

2011-11-27T06:36:00.000-05:00

At dawn an empty clothesline, through which both horses can be seen waking up. A penumbral method of attaining grace. What remains illusive is not unuseful. We traded quips outside the meeting house, fingering black lapels. My God is your grim reaper.

Oh apples how I love thee. To be or not to be is almost certainly not the question. On the other hand. Swans in one's dreams signify fear of a deepening unworthiness. These words!

Peas and birds. The lingering aftereffects of writing sentences for four years straight. One accepts judgment, one stands ready in their cell. Snow on the barn roof, Buddha grinning in the eaves. I have no investments to speak of, at least not the way you understand the word.

Time passes and leaves no wake hence our inclination to create. Our inclination to make? Oh pass me another slice of apple pie and tell me again how your mother fears the sea. Yet one arises at an odd hour and stirs the stove and steps aside and expects nothing. At last, the moon.

The Prerogative Of The Silenced

2011-11-26T05:42:00.000-05:00

It is a pleasure to write this way. One is in process, indifferent to product. The apples on the table do not claim red. Folded napkins are a comfort. In the other room, a cat tidies its paws after eating.

The recipe called for pepper, God called for garlic. Oil lamps stirred by an indifferent wind. We turned to Ecclesiastes, we claimed that we were guided. Channeled texts my foot! Yet never quite without coffee.

Without coffee one can never rush the gates of Heaven. What is attainable is maintainable. Inalienable? I got my enlightenment at Josiah Crest's Radiant Zendo of Lovely Impermanence, you? Oh you, always kvetching about spinal curvature.

It is a pleasure to write this way indeed! To repeat is to insist and thus is the prerogative of the silenced. Yet proceed with caution lest the angels send you back for another lesson in humility. Don't eat apples, pat every cow you see. Grace as always hides in the peas.

A Gleaning, A Comfort

2011-11-25T05:40:00.001-05:00

One wakes - stumbles to piss - gasps between stars. Horses step delicately over the frost, heavy presences, nervous observers. Not the breeze which slips hymnally through surrounding trees. Studying the veins in one's hand, one remembers St. John. Luminous apples indeed.

Glittering salt! Fragments of yesterday's activity, ragged chickens scratching the mud. How little we need to do when you get down to it. When you get down to it, keep going. This is what Jack Gilbert meant when he found Byzantium in was it a pear?

Ophidiophobic at 5 a.m.. Flavored coffee begs many questions, not one of which is solved by aspirin. Your smile is a gleaning, a comfort. One awakens, one does. And in the same circle of light that yesterday yielded only books!

Bakers? I trembled when it came time for my medicine. A cold night the stoves themselves could only rant against, mute iron fists. We say beneath when we mean between. I am instructed by strange dogs gratefully.

Only Fractured Solitudes

2011-11-24T05:36:00.001-05:00

Coffee. Three shooting stars. The universe in perpetual decay. Disarray? All my best arguments are with myself.

Dreamless sleep first. Notes for the day. Burning the bridge to impossible is not an acceptable mode. One insists on who they are. Freedom is not made by language.

Creaking trees, crunching snow. Think of bells in dark towers long unrung. I followed the dog gratefully off the road. Small stones wrapped in rice paper, given as gifts outside the temple. Memory is as the present moment does.

All words are de facto lies. There are no crowds, only fractured solitudes. As in: he wrote he wrote. Against the cold, a monkish cowl. The loneliness of understanding love.

Truth Coming Home

2011-11-23T05:26:00.001-05:00

Behind my shoulder, a disgraced pontiff. The mattress depresses as one prepares to pray. The gift of eloquence finally understood as not a gift at all. Yet wordiness, as always, attends.

Long walks in snowy rain, talking out loud to the dog. One arrives at what is essential by way of suffering. The path is optional but not the destination. I love you and want only for you to be naturally joyful.

Though earlier one wept, considering the damage. Your prose poems magnify what in me yearns to inspire. I say I say. Behind the clouds, the moon and behind the moon, you.

Truth? Coming home I wondered who would notice my footprints. Return a spiritual practice. In my hands now a new project not so different from the old one.

A running dog, a dream of wolves. I cannot help you, nor manage most social settings. The argument at last has been settled. The dog crawls back into bed, I kneel to pray, I hold you the only way that I can.

Stymied Embraces

2011-11-22T17:42:00.001-05:00

A blurred blue sky gives way - is overcome perhaps - obscured at least - by gunmetal gray. Winter is icumen in. Appointments, stymied embraces, folds of skin the color of coffee. It was always like this, even when it wasn't.

Or so. I say. Love. Is the new blurred blue.

I went back to Toronto, letters in hand, and arrived at a funeral. Her penmanship had suffered. Consult the preceding stanza for directions. It gives way to threats of storm.

It gives way is the wrong way to say it. Later, one could taste the coffee, could replay certain parts of the conversation. You move mountains only when you don't give a damn about the deer who live there. Pissing, a Christmas carol could be heard, thin as a reed in the distance.

It seems that her voice cracked and the plumbing was always spluttering in the walls. Discussing the death penalty on mattresses, watching the Montreal sky out the window. Something difficult, something blue. Knocking on the door, waiting, collar turned up against the snow.

Models of Betrayal

2011-11-21T08:04:00.001-05:00

I woke to voices. One wakes, one arrives. What is hesitation for? What does it mean to say I am content when you are not? Thus morning.

Thus this. Twenty sentences as proof that one lives because it is evidence that one works. And yet and yet. Must one submit to must? I dreamed of testimony in favor of Jesus, given in time.

I want the room to fill with light. I want to feel your hand slip into mine. Mind? In any case, a narrative of which one is scared. The circumstances under which you wear a wedding ring.

Or hear the bedding sing. We wait a long time for that moment and when it comes there is only ever disappointment. If you are paying attention. The priests became models of betrayal long before the present millenium dawned. It's all over.

It never began? Do you begin to see the problem? I cannot continue to write letters to people I do not know. One makes poetry, one makes a prayer. Over tea, watching shadows on the wall, alone as always, saying it's okay when it's not and never was.

With Each Kind Word

2011-11-20T18:26:00.001-05:00

The dog yawns. On the cross, Christ after Christ nods its head. The essential affirmation is not always comfortable. Yet - again - yes.

And then there was the time we ended up walking twelve miles home in the snow. "I really do like that dress." He stood outside the bar, watching stars, not speaking, unsure of everything. One says "as always" and means what?

Current drugs include television, money, low carb diets, caramel nougat. Fading friendships, ascendant loves. The horse lowers his head with each kind word. Melting ice in the sunlight.

God. One wanders to the pond's edge and recalls fairy tales that suggested some transformation was at hand but in a frightening - a power not of thyself - kind of way. Harp music, flowers I do not know the name of. Not God.

Well, that's to call the problem what it is. The strains of violin faded first, then the engine broke. There is nothing before us but a long dark. You bring your attention to it and as always it rusts.

The Difference Between Stars and Stairs

2011-11-19T07:15:00.001-05:00

One longs.

One disagrees.

One falls to sleep trying to find a single thought that is not bounded by both past and future.

Places I have been include.

The dream of a hermitage high on a hill, the dream of pumpkins and apples, the dream of you.

We move backwards and call it spiritual progress, as if dusting the sand to remove evidence we ever walked there were a virtue.

Nothing is that also does.

What she was getting at - in the letter that arrived three days before the boat sank - was a difference in tenor, see?

In other words, always.

We woke when the sun was just showing itself, found three dead 'coons in the yard.

The memory of tortured dogs.

One is haunted by this need to do something, anything.

As if there wasn't a script, as if free will actually meant freedom.

One is drawn in particular to the difference between stars and stairs.

Saints vex.

When you lead with form, content suffers.

The twenty senteces are becoming a mean taskmaster.

What feverish pitch can I not attain?

One longs, one does.

What?

Men Who Practice

2011-11-18T04:30:00.000-05:00

He crests the hill and stands, shoulders wide in the moonlight, face hidden like a holstered gun, staring at the town. We do make mistakes, or we believe we do. The river rises and the dog drowns trying to cross it. You collect beaver teeth, dead butterfly wings, and once played a rusty harmonica to try and win a girl who'd never seen a radio. I write it and he takes it, again.

Before I could mail it to you, he took it, folded in his black leather glove and left. We are always waiting. We are like braids of smoke curling above small cottages where the poor touch bravely, exercising the one pleasure left them. My anger has never left me. The rose of sunset is nuclear today.

Bloody fingers, loose teeth and I can't feel my feet. The damaged crow tried to get away from me and fascinated by the glossy black of its wing feathers and furious eyes I followed. You torment me too. He instructed his followers to pin me to corkboard as a reminder and I hung like that for centuries. Here's something: I don't care what you want to read.

I repented and it wasn't enough because really, when was it ever? He does not care for temples, churches, zendos or the men who practice in them. Unable to sleep, I get out of bed and kneel and profess my faith in Jesus. In the darkness, laughter. In the laughter, my name burning up like crickets.

As Fructive As Writing Poetry

2011-11-17T10:35:00.001-05:00

One is no longer a child and thus is not wise. Of what are we scared when we refuse to embrace return? For the call goes out all the time and we are always capable of answering.

Enlightening text vs. texts about enlightenment. Why must it always come down to vs.? In the morning shadows, writing, and calling it God, and enough.

What I am getting at is a theory of home. I do not believe in creation myths. Ribs baked on sauerkraut, served on a bed of steamed rice, with cider maybe, yes.

Another man passes a fallen man. Your Samaritan is my rube sucker. Are we stuck then, where the roads cross, and thick fogs roil down the hills toward us?

Never omit the mail! Never rely on a protagonist you don't love or can't imagine loving. Historians are useful, but only to a point.

He wrote he wrote. He bent paper clips, watched seagulls out the window, and it was as fructive as writing poetry might be. Jesus drops his bag in the hall, hunkers down, waits for the classroom to empty.

So we are back to the start then? Here in the twentieth sentence, can we at last articulate a beginning?

Wedded To Yet

2011-11-16T06:20:00.001-05:00

There aren't that many places where one has to kneel.

A chipmunk scurried between pews in the country church.

Ethereal vs. earthly.

Vs. reading lessons.

The computer grinds along, not quite smoking, thus disclosing our fatal commitment.

One carries a flashlight, turns from the road.

In the distance, dogs howl, heedless now of sir Oracle.

The inherent danger of stairs, I mean stars.

In my dream, everyone was laughing at my writing and prayer hut, and encouraging me to expand it, and all the proposed dimensions were divisble by six.

The chicken or the egg is not an irrelevant question.

Part two begins with a label.

Seven students misunderstand the witches in Macbeth, one gets them.

Would you crawl across cut glass to recover your wedding ring?

Obviously some symbols matter so say it.

The page fills with notes and then what?

One wishes Ghandi and Dorothy Day would get out of the way.

Like kirtan leaders with ideas for a new age.

Another crappy poem by a man who might have known better.

Yet the morning passes with two distinct visits from Christ and so I can't complain.

I who am wedded to yet.

A Turning Point, A Good One

2011-11-15T05:58:00.001-05:00

It seems as if I am always saying the same thing. Like between the cattail and lake, deer.

Moon between dense clouds. Unseasonal warmth.

One wakes to find they only act for money. The introduction of laughter into the grand plan was a turning point, a good one.

A scattered bunch of pens. He hummed.

He recognized his anger at last for what it was. We walk through balmy dreams.

Beware of what you call awareness. Jesus calmly sewing buttons onto coats for old soldiers.

Forgiveness has been redefined, helpfully. There are mornings when one wants only to go back to bed.

From dreams of - I forget - to dreams of - I can't say. Well, goats certainly.

Will death please stand up so I can put my arms around you? Hopeful, ambient.

The present is not enough. At last.

Between Action And Activity

2011-11-14T09:17:00.001-05:00

At the outset, one sentence. Yet also an agreement that nothing will be said. Learned? We are the bell we long to ring, the silence in which it rings. Or something.

Someone? You can't say anything anyway. One woman likes chickens, another adopts a turkey. The moon rises up through riffled storm clouds, one or two stars appear on the horizon. It's nothing and that's okay.

Or so I say, being predisposed to saying. One distinguishes between action and activity and feels . . . dirty. The devil loves semantics! Exclamation points resemble what garden implement?

I used to write he wrote he wrote. Being clever is not it either. Yet one does fall to one's knees, breathless at the sight of all that light in dark skies. We break out laughing. Twenty sentences later, still.

Another Nautilus

2011-11-13T07:00:00.001-05:00

Briefly. In lieu of arrest. Subtly prideful. Emphasis on eloquence. Oh, and rain.

Three kisses, eleven stars. Beneath the old Willa tree. Not cops, men with guns. I mean Jesus. Hold thy tongue!

That quality moonlight has. One is the prism they can't define. I mean listen! Seriously, tea? Yet another nautilus.

Yet another naughty us. Odd ducks, strange birds but luckily, letters. So is it a question of flight? We bear the loving beams despite ourselves. Immortality is wind.

The We In Question

2011-11-12T06:20:00.001-05:00

Could I repeat myself precisely? Without access to the past? What about for a parade?

In my dream, an old Irish woman cracked funny at a funeral. Outside the window was a big parade (with what seemed like too much space between marching bands). She said, we criticize the Gods and right then it's a banana peel appears on the stairs.

As if by magic. Someone dies and all of a sudden students abound. She did not mean that the Gods were invested in retribution.

Rather, we assign this or that quality to the Gods and simultaneously adapt the world to that quality? The secret to everything is that we're doing it to ourselves. But also - importantly - that the "we" in question has no idea what it is.

One draws a breath, one hunches their shoulders, awaiting a blow. A lighthouse? The seating was cramped and many were annoyed when I laughed out loud, saying to the man next to me, I get it.

I finally got it! I have been given permission to embrace the Thoreauvian impulse. He was supported largely by his mother and one certain kindly benefactor.

"But be sure to watch without judgment or condemnation what attracts you," he wrote. Oh sure and purple monkeys with winning lottery tickets will fly out of my butt singing early Elvis Presley songs.

The Divine Plan Which I Only Know In Fragments

2011-11-11T05:43:00.001-05:00

It has to do with where one places the prayer. Our lives are altars. Our lives our altars? The worst thing about automotive culture is not the pressure on fossil fuels nor the evisceration of the rural landscape but the impact of bumper stickers on civic discourse. We must absolutely distinguish between simplicity and stupidity!

Said the man who hasn't won a chess game in - let's see and then let's fudge a bit - seven days at least. Chocolate is not dishonest but I am, happily. Or will be once I better understand the Truth of Christ. I am fabricating all the time, which is to say that I am carefully selecting threads and weaving them in accordance with the Divine plan which I only know in fragments. If you aren't laughing by now then I suggest you stop reading.

Oh, I don't really care if you read or don't read. Look around. You think this project is contingent on readers? It's contingent on stars, and dogs, and and the hoof prints of certain quadrupeds filled with frost as the sun rises. Okay, now I'm laughing.

Jesus, seriously, it is so hard to say one true thing? Why would you tempt me otherwise? The truth is, it's the devil - the "evil one" as what's-his-name writes on his blog - who wants me all sober and pontifical. Give me a good belly laugh, give me maple syrup in my morning tea. Give me love any way I can handle it, watch me go under, lift me back up!

The Exegetical Impulse

2011-11-10T09:47:00.001-05:00

When I do not write first thing after prayer - that blue-black moment before the sun rises but after the dog and I have counted uncountable stars - the writing changes. One looks outward - yields, perhaps, to the exegetical impulse - rather than inward. Distinguish, in other words, between goals and the quest for its own sake. The way we say it matters, but matters always, is what I'm saying.

The tops of the pine trees darken and the Jesus ever settled in their limbs softens as if ready at last to set himself adrift.

Well, I chose coffee instead of tea, pacing the small room over peering intently at empty pages (alternating from window to page to window). Letters have a salutary effect. One learns that to write is to love and that it is the love that is hard to understand and bring into application, not the writing. Decisions, as always, have to be made.

We follow the apparently unraveling thread until we learn its infinite nature at which point we can stop and dedicate ourselves to saying it.

Saying it just so, I mean. Yet I do equivocate, as the horse sometimes does, deciding whether to follow or simply to stand and wait. Sometimes it seems as if flakes of snow have been sifting down to our shoulders forever. One longs for what one cannot say.

To long is of itself to know eternity (I wrote in the nineteenth century).

And still it does not rain. Still you sit in the dark shadow that never deepens, never softens, awaiting the mail. Repetition is akin to whistling past the graveyard of meaning. You cannot take it seriously, nor seriously enough.

This, the first writing of the day, as noon draws near, and all the ghosts who always stand between me and my pencils.

A Mode Of Insistence

2011-11-09T07:18:00.001-05:00

First, the itinerant carpenter withthaumaturgical impulses. We resist commensality and thus feelexcluded. What is the same cannot be different, that is the nature ofour fear of sacrifice. The phone call – at the other end of whichan old Greek woman sounded mildly annoyed – came from a New Yorkmonastery. I am all “over the place” these days.

I am angry, too, which complicates themorning prayer. Would you walk past starving babies to get to theperfect yoga studio? The politic body is ever being addressed. Anydefinition of wealth other than “freedom from wants” is wrong.Thus you see how I conflate the many confusions that compose me.

Yet some grace stays possible, even asthe dog struggles to walk, even as the neighbors grumble about fallentree limbs, even as the bank account dwindles. We forget the degreeto which a pine tree can bless. Consider healing as something otherthan the cure. The finger one mistook for the moon now taps one'sshoulder, ever unwilling to be forgotten. In the distance, coyotes,and in the body, a chill.

One forgets their pen and so the pageremains blank. It is hard to solve time when you need time to do it!The closer I get to those twentieth century men exploring adistinctly Vedantic Christianity, the more I feel I am getting closerto something. There is virtue in repetition once you understand it asa mode of insistence. Why do I believe I have to end here?

In Contact With The Missing Contagion

2011-11-08T06:09:00.002-05:00

Something. Perhaps a wrinkle in the skin near the wrist. Three shooting stars. What crossed before him as he walked in darkness. Can a sound be said to limp?

Can a memory justify anything? Something does. Yet we are not so ancient that just any memory will do. One considers light. One does.

Mathematics enters the writing, a critical union. How else would we know oneness. I write to circumvent an otherwise time-consuming learning. It is like sculpture. Or something.

What he meant to say was . . . It's in the lacunae or it's nowhere. Everywhere? What passed before me brought me up short, fully in contact with the missing contagion. Something divine we know as always.

The Way One Wants

2011-11-07T07:45:00.000-05:00

You start sometimes without knowing what you're doing, or even what material you have. Frost in early November means nothing to a potato.

It is hard to accept that needing to see stars every morning is as addictive as whiskey once was. Jesus maintains a steady presence, reachable but not always responsive, not the way one wants anyway.

The female cardinal, that dusky fire. Chickadees, their tiny hearts like invisible sparks against the swiftly gathering cold.

In my dream I was writing and slowly the writing became this writing. Nobody is watching.

God, like democracy, is a good idea that is challenging in application. This is why so many scientists annoy me.

It was Dylan's melodic phase, which is an interesting way to think about it. Could I, if I chose to, write songs again?

One turns it over only to learn that they were still holding a big chunk back. It's a process, awakening, not just a word.

Those poor Irish boys, first executed, then denied burial. Yet for some reason I persist in admiring the entire nineteenth century.

One takes note of that which takes note of the sentence. One forgives dancing, one wakes from dreams into new dreams and shrugs as if to say, what else did you expect?

What else is there but to "keep on keeping on?" Faced as always with bells that do not ring.

Mindless Ambling Endlessly Fruitful

2011-11-06T06:08:00.000-05:00

One's dreams never grow old, or so I think, rising from yet another at 5 a.m. (yesterday's 4 a.m.) to wander up and down the road with the dog. We were in California looking at houses and C. found one and I remember pointing out the corner yard to S. saying Mac could live there, couldn't he. The house was square but arranged so that one could move through it in a circle. Later, I sat with realtors in a too-bright, too-plastic government type room, awaiting permission to act. The image of yesterday's dream - the executed men struggling with their nooses - still haunts, but not the way shoes do.

The thing with shoes has nothing to do with the devil. You have to take them off when you approach the sacred, right? Or so Moses learned in his traveling days, drawing nigh the burning bush. What more practical item of clothing is there? Mine are old and falling apart and easy to discard as one nears God, the mindless ambling endlessly fruitful.

Years ago I took note of the deep sadness that appeared to be uniquely mine, even at a young age when such exquisite sensitivity was not, um, precisely indicated. Why don't you ever smile was what a lot of people said and still would say if I didn't compensate the way I do. You understand, of course. What happens is that the inclination to write imagines an audience of one and then it begins to own all sorts of unexpected energy, like a bunch of prisms bouncing on taut sheets or perhaps a mirror ball swung by a giddy giant. Of course our correspondence takes time, it would hardly be worth the effort if it didn't.

Or so I write, being so inclined. I, who can't abide inelegance, want to push the borders of all comfort. The new work calls and I struggle with its mandate, its form, its size, et cetera. What do you suggest? And how can one not reject shoes once it's understood that nothing is that isn't God, that the holy is ever upon us?

Apocalyptic Copout

2011-11-05T05:04:00.000-04:00

Moses was a traveller at heart. Hence, one is haunted by shoes, by sandals. This far and no further. Ashes caught by the wind lift like little flowers and the voice becomes a whisper that cautions against transition.

We are - with God - a singular brutal economy. One continues long after the sun rises, until at last there is nowhere left to go. Jesus instructs us on the true meaning of justice, the radical forgiveness that necessarily underlies love. Why don't you ever write me?

Yesterday in a dream I saw you holding a baby and gazing at the sea. God cannot be seen and we cannot really be reborn. Yet some concession seems to occur, some union is readily perceived. We move towards a final undertaking, bent on grace, despite the evidence against it (against us).

Meditation is an apocalyptic copout. All bane and never a boon. Let us think, then, about one might exist between old and new testaments, without actually bridging them. You who worship the back of your hand, whose shoes are the marvel of family and friend, what exactly do you want from the silence that necessarily greets all pleading?

The earth shall be darkened on an otherwise clear day and the righteous shall have on hand candles to which the rest of us might cling. Here comes the devil's train, long and black, screaming down the bloody rails. We are compelled to follow particular ends under the guise of free will. The mortal self stumbles, the unseen other watches, the heart (as always) hums a plaintive little tune.

Jesus Waits

2011-11-04T06:33:00.000-04:00

Slushy fields, stars made luminous with mist. Splashing in unseen puddles, toes chilling quickly in old boots bought years ago to save a buck. In the cattails, a beaver slaps the pond in warning. Deer watch nervously from the bracken, ears cocked, eyes unblinking. For all the harm I signify there is still this yearning for peace . . .

Yet where the logging path turns to hardtop one encounters at last (unmistakably) their Luciferian pride. Old farm implements, burnt goldenrod, bunches of punky snow. The dog noses the ground, leaps ahead, shows up behind. The leading in hell thing is not working! And yet . . .

One recalls too - having seen it now in so many places - God's admonition to Moses. No man shall see my face and live. Our transformation to men of peace - our second birth, as it were - must begin with willingness. Cold winds follow us all the way to the road's end. Noon is, indeed, the darkest part.

Meanwhile, Jesus waits patiently, picking his teeth in the pine boughs, studying the stars in their filmy bowers. One proclaims their desire to surrender and . . . Nothing happens because nothing ever does. Though there is this, the twenty sentences, easily culled from that other dark place, the one we rarely write about. Nobody listens when I tell them I have control problems and authority problems and so my solitude deepens and so then does your envy.

The Only Song I Know

2011-11-03T04:46:00.000-04:00

There is something about men that I cannot say. Also, there is something about money that I cannot say. Must learn? One never knows, hence God.

Above his head, the canary woke up and began singing. Stale beer, warm and flat. The concertina bore no dust and he hefted it in shadows, staring at the empty street. A mournful air, the only song I know.

Drudgery? Fiery anyway? The dream was supposed to be cautionary, yet I awoke with travel plans. "He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them."

Thus San Francisco. The self-righteousness of new members of the so-called peace churches. The chainsaw, the neighbor's fence. At dawn, barely visible in the distance, horses signifying what?

"But for one thing, McTeague would have been perfectly contented." That old story. God is. That one, too.

Kiss Against My Better Judgment

2011-11-02T05:47:00.000-04:00

Against my better judgment, I kissed you.

The garden was shrouded in mist, a loveliness no sweeter for the regret that was soon to consume it.

One hears chains, one sees a long tunnel.

Yet I will always remember that one hill in was it Galilee, the warm breeze on our faces, and the way you talked about your brother growing up.

Here we go again Jerusalem.

After, I went where the dogs live.

The voices of the long-insane were heard echoing amongst the tombs.

One forgets a great deal.

How seriously you took each meal, always careful to both bless and laugh.

I came to in the very place where I began.

One suffers at the whims of plot.

One judges, one kisses.

In my dream, you carried a vase of water through the desert without complaining until at last you arrived at a single wilted flower.

One kiss is sufficient for judgment.

A carriage can be seen in the Heavens, the great steeds that draw it are thundering even now.

We always carry a rope, as we always believe that some ending will be necessary and it is better to have choices than not.

It was because in that moment you were simply a brother yourself and I understood that and so much else besides.

We bear miracles, despite ourselves.

One years for a sweet rain, for a chance to try again.

One longs to the point of suffering for forgiveness, that single kiss.

Evolving Understandings

2011-11-01T10:43:00.000-04:00

The red bird at intervals not established by me.

Bruised gaps in the lamb bone after stewing.

Prayer as song and song as union.

Evolving understandings of Christ Mind.

Daughters.

Reading at night, covers to the shoulder, the sound of rain (or snow) on the window.

Pine trees any time, Maple trees in fall.

The dead goldfish of my childhood.

Certain kinds of love and the corrosive effects of time.

Certain waltzes.

Apples, cinnamon.

The image of a monk in summer praying beneath an open sky, its riot of stars.

That I have been here before and know what to do.

Max Planck.

Laughter from the stomach not the throat.

Black bears when they don't especially care you're watching.

Tracks in the snow.

The two note spring song of chickadees.

Emily Dickinson, of course, especially in the later letters.

That there is enough, ever.

Beneath God

2011-10-31T05:23:00.000-04:00

The pleasure of God is indeed a sovereign pleasure. An arbitrary will - unhindered by obligation - preserves wicked men.

Truth does not appear in multiples. Our hands are not strong where God rises up.

Sometimes an earthly prince meets with a great deal of difficulty. We are apt to fortify ourselves with followers.

There is no fortress with God. Great heaps of chaff alight in the whirlwhind leaving behind a field of stubble and devouring flames.

You cannot singe the delicate thread by which we hang fortuitously. What are we that we should stand before the one at whose rebuke rocks pick up and hide?

Justice cries out for the infinite. The sentence composed by God is both eternal and immune to righteousness,

You come from beneath. God is a great deal of patient.

An unmindful God is a concoction of troubled separatists. God is altogether a one such as ourselves.

Wrath and damnation don't ever slumber. We are ever ready to be seized as God permits.

The Scripture represents us as good in search of better. Oh the hungry lions that await should God withdraw his restraining hand.

An Ache Where Yesterday There Was None

2011-10-30T08:11:00.003-04:00

Perhaps it has to do with a combination of vowels righteously struck. The dog rushes out into snow, heels at the first bank, stunned and amazed. There are lessons everywhere. For example, you must believe that you are a body in order to feel fear. The "voice" was the one mind briefly surfacing. When you understand that all animals worship - deer, trout, blue jays, mice - then you will know God. Peace is a decision. Conflict never greased a wheel in its life. A sudden memory of doughnuts, an ache where yesterday there was none. One studies the techniques of parenthetical afterthought, one writes every day. Love in a deep blue. Everything without exception is the answer. Pay no attention to the so-called observing intelligence, it's as susceptible to the devil as you are. A treasure chest discovered in dreams and then carried forward. Certain directors do better with certain actors and certain scripts and thus is Salvation obfuscated. Trees fall, banks of snow cradle the garage, and all I can think about is how delicious this tea is! Nor can I abolish the desire to own macaws. You can learn a lot from rivers. I began writing one sentence and erased it in favor of this one. Why is not the question you want to ask.

The Unequivocal Yes

2011-10-29T04:37:00.000-04:00

Visible on the starling's beak, a drop of water - melted snow - through which sunlight sifts into myriad rainbow parts.

Snow buntings on the lilac.

One sees the neighbor's barn and - somehow moved - is suddenly willing to see nothing else.

Bright winter let me not know another.

The end of the divided self draws near and one is given any number of tools and tricks to help ease the transition.

It is easy when you know the Holy Spirit's love for you is your love for it.

This morning a starling rested on a snowy pine bough and I perceived the sun - bright, variable and alive - through a single drop of melted snow that hung from its beak.

You have to commit, there is no substitute for the unequivocal yes.

Peace and quiet.

Suddenly one realizes that no healing is necessary, only the awareness that no healing is necessary.

Let us say that a carriage appears, cresting a far hill, and in it the preacher sits, bible at hand.

In the starling - and the tiny sparkle that might have been melting snow at its beak - one came at last to the fundamental acceptance.

Delay is understandable - and goes unpunished - but why put Heaven off?

One by one the snow buntings fell off the lilac bush and each thusly lightened limb trembled in sunlight much longer than one would have suspected.

Peace is quiet.

Learn to identify the substitutes, the idols, the many tactics you have created to assure confusion and delay.

It is related to - is manifest in - the way sunlight dissolves into a vivid rainbow entirely without the starling's consent.

Your yes does not create holiness but rather establishes your willingness to see what is already created.

How delightful to see Creation in the lilac shedding its heavy buntings of snow!

Say yes now!

That First Critical Principle

2011-10-28T05:19:00.000-04:00

One reads about the eternal beginning.Identity reigns ever supreme!

Can we say – reasonably – thatbeing is the same as non-being? Is it – forgive me – identical?

For example, where does sky end andearth begin exactly? We must go back – or down maybe – toestablish that first critical principle.

Yet God agrees that if there is a world,there must be a way out of it and that he must provide it. Liberationis his vocation!

Source has but one will. The dream ofothers scars our potential.

Yet in time we become a stone fromwhich Divine sparks are struck. God, like most humpbacks, is buriedbeneath a familiar hill.

You think your skin conceals you? Tryspending fifteen minutes with the devil's kindling.

“You” and “I” are a prison.What swallows whole does so to ultimately save.

God is perceived in essence, both being and becoming? All rebelsare eventually brought to heel.

Thus I am delivered from my selfhood.You offer raisins and gratefully I accept.

Only

2011-10-27T05:15:00.000-04:00

In my dream many faceless men and women worked the side of the highway, picking fruit and nuts to eat. What is it that we surrender when we turn to God?

I fear the loss of what has brought me only anguish.

(This was down near Berkely, Mass, I think, where Dad once dreamed of living). It's not as hard as you think it is, is what I keep hoping.

Your letter was so welcome that it momentarily terrified me. I would prefer not to forgive my shame.

Tea and the moment in which one sees no past or present. Children's voices. That correspondence.

One writes a dream of waking up in France. Attend the content and the form will take care of itself.

Yeah, right.

Yet saying "I miss you" still brings tears and feels right, whatever that means.

Another cup of tea, another chance to sift through the execution of Lincoln's “killers.” What is it with me and gallows? On the ship, the sea darkening around me, all I could think of was how badly I wanted you to rise from the waves to hold me. The inner voice proclaims its love. You can listen if you want but you can ignore it, too.

Somebody please I don't want to fall.

Angry In A Measureable Way

2011-10-26T06:31:00.000-04:00

Could you say before God you had a good life? Not everyone in those days was bad or misguided.

What is joy but a cup of cold water straight to the face? You can give nothing to the Lord and if it's all you have then he's going to rejoice.

I don't care where you got the incense. The chocolate cake had a bitter aftertaste, which led at least one guest to recall the last words of Socrates.

He had two kids, one of whom was still not speaking to him. There is the only way it can be done.

Widows in the rain, contemplating the methods of trees. I feel ashamed, embarrassed.

The church steeple gleamed in the sunlight, putting one in the mind of bells. We kneel to pray with those who merely kneel.

The moon akin to a couple of bright pennies. God doesn't give a damn about the sweat stains in your work shirt, the bulge in your wallet, or the books on your shelf.

Go steal a rag and polish the temple floor. I am the offering box I am waiting for.

The servants escorted her along the balustrade, all of them careful not to meet anybody's eye. A teacher kneels to scratch the dust, angry in a measureable way.

Nobody knows the bubbles I've seen. You have to pray a long time to see it.

The Manifestation Bone

2011-10-25T05:52:00.002-04:00

One wants to write "a riot of stars" and so does, and thus discovers the unsatisfactory gesture. There were little smiles on the waves, little curls in the swell.

It rained and I worried how you would answer. The mechanism of thought cannot end thought but it can demonstrate the futility of thought.

In other words, pay attention. Coffee and dogs, two good totems.

Your warm hand on my forehead before sleep. I am what is there.

Some mornings I wake up and the twenty sentences feel like more than I can manage, but I do them anyway, because sometimes something happens in them that has nothing to do with what I can or can't manage. Pancakes, chuck steak.

Riled up with vintage swords. Driving home in the dark just shy of midnight I began fantasizing about cooking that leg of lamb.

We laugh at the word "butt." I do want signs or so I say.

Grief has but one form. The world and my life in it are not what I think they are, or say they are, and all salvation lies in my acceptance of this fact.

Or whiskey. He wore a camel's hair coat, I think.

Once again the desire to write a mystery gnaws the manifestation bone. I'm not but you think I am.

In Lieu of Prayer, A Memory

2011-10-24T07:10:00.001-04:00

A field of frost, a reminder of snow. In October, you go to sleep sad and wake up not sad. Scallop-colored clouds, a pinkishness that seems to float between pine trees. Is that music I hear in the distance? When you realize the present is all the time there is . . .

Cold tea in lieu of prayer. A memory of dreamlessness. The horse stamped nervously, aware that a stranger was evaluating him. We bring the flame with us, that's how. Scribbled notes toward a new breast bone.

Secretly we all long for death, we all fear God, and that's why we never have any lasting peace. Thank you, friend, for not telling the truth in a difficult time. Life in the movies! Well, buttercup-flavored ice cream at least, and pie crusts made with real lard. One sound I won't miss is the rat-a-tat-tat of a real typist.

She looked at me a last time on the stairwell, I have never forgotten that. I cultivate grief the way other men cultivate orchids. A long night finally ends and you can see the crucifixion for what it was, an extreme teaching example. Yet I still need new recipes. Meanwhile, one anticipates fearfully the sea at dusk.

Unanswered

2011-10-23T03:14:00.000-04:00

Why do I bother with the world after 5 a.m.? What would a prayer life actually look like? A chipmunk scampered between the pews. I'm tired of Colonialism, tired of martyrs, but still. Jesus won't you just shake a little sugar on me?

Make it a new way of being lost and thus a new way of being found. A snowflake does or does not follow preordained patterns? You never know as much as you think you know yet your capacity for creativity is always boundless. The statue stared back, stone-faced. Beyond which, it was a raw day in which not much seemed to happen.

Burgers? We watched eighteen-wheelers track the old canal, the way oxen once did. Geese sailing back and forth overhead as if trying to orient themselves. We are not our orientation! Cold root beer, over which some bonding happened, over which some grace occurred.

I am not my sentences. A field of purple loosestrife alongside which a declaration went unanswered. Yet history can make you happy, can't it? Nobody attended the gift shop which was just as well. Some Jesuits limp into the future, others stride, and some never die despite the pyre they last prayed upon.

Something Into Which I Would Pour Language

2011-10-22T04:06:00.000-04:00

Four a.m., wan light of quarter moon, the road stitched by tree shadows. Let us praise October, let us slip like falling leaves.

And the big dipper perched on its ladle, upending its contents in the cosmic soup. Friends both here and there.

The dog rolls studiously in fox scat. My life resembles artful graffiti on a water tower.

The plane bucked before righting itself coming in for a windy landing over the highway. Water glistening in the ditch.

We pointed our flashlights up and argued where each beam ended. One can dream about dinosaur hearts.

Yesterday, in the art gallery, I felt briefly comfortable. The way to peace involves accepting all cause as in the mind not the world.

One begins a study of solipsism, long misunderstood. The baby coos in the other room while we love in this one.

A dog barks, heedless of Sir Oracle. It is not quite right to say that when you don't write it's a silence but it is something into which I would pour language.

Thus, I am never not not quite free. God discovers us as we discover him?

Cattails stand like casual sentries where the field ends and I stop to pray. Soon I will have to leave and then what?

Grief is an Elegance

2011-10-21T05:46:00.000-04:00

The clouds drifted north, contrary to expectation.

It rains.

Typing in the next room while children try to sleep.

I have never seen a ghost (but you wouldn't know it by my face).

You sit in a shadowed space and offer comfort.

One waits to be hit by an invisible hand.

Childhood recalls the cosmos.

Drunk at dinner, struggling to compete.

Here is the ninth sentence.

Here is a circle of Hell heretofore uncharted.

We don't have relationships with people but with our ego.

What feels sacrificial is not.

Absence of indication is a salve.

Here, then, is the fourteenth sentence.

We are like wheels rolling down hill, aren't we!

We are like baby carriages at a tag sale.

Spiders, hoof prints.

Grief is an elegance.

Here is the nineteenth sentence.

Here is the twentieth.