How We Love Again

How We Love Again
(Dancing With Rilke)

Say it again, love.
Tell me the truth as if you
were before the cross
swearing, holiness
at your back. Look at the stones,
the upright curling
whispers of the stones.

Hear them ease out songs, true tales
of the old abyss
in the core of love
and how we love anyway,
again and again
standing as trees stand,
colorful flowers blazing
in the wind of fall
though we know snow comes,
though we know the weight, terror's
weight, moaning dry wind,
and still we lie down
together in sere gardens,

again and again
wedded in love's way,
you and me and all the rest,
again and again,
how we face the sky.

‎December ‎10, ‎2010 6:50 PM

A Green Dream - A Magpie Tale

Image offered by Tess for this week's Magpie Tales.
Click here to go to Mag 262. There you can browse the list of this week's contributors.

A Green Dream

I've dug my way out
from beneath the roots of oak
and scrub onto green
framed sand paved forking
paths to who knows where they go.

Certainly I don't.

I call it "Follow
The Dog" because one of my
youngest memories
was doing just that,
going somewhere new to me
trailing an Irish
Setter who roamed free -
1949 that was.

Now, here, on my own
I've gone to a dream,
a screen atop the expanse
of my current hope.

‎March ‎22, ‎2015 4:21 PM

Red Crab

Here I am

I sit in corners,
try invisibility
on for pensive size,
wondering if I
must fight on this day or that,
or if it ever
will work, this sitting
in the world's pensive corners.
I have little grit,
tarnished purity,
and frayed integrity
Lord! I do worry.

Once I ran away,
all the way to Chittagong
where red crabs look past
you and crawl across
your sleeping form on the beach.
The monsoon will come
next June 5th. I will not wait
that long to get up
or whisper my love,
and I will not go to war.
I will not go there.

December 13, 2010 6:58 PM

Dog Dreams

Irish Wolfhound - Stella who lives here is shorter probably by a third and darker.

Dog Dreams In Winter

Canicule dreamer
of the hot days, the dog days
dreams of canorous
moments, dogs and birds
and the lazy river run,
the noonday still life
except for birdsong,
occasional far birdsong
piercing snow's bound dream.

December 5, 2010 3:45 PM

Two words, "canicule, canorous", are very far from my normal speech. The first refers to the dog days, the hottest days of summer, from canis which is Latin for dog. On the other hand in the kind of twist that English (and Latin) gives to sounds and meanings, canorous does not come from canis but from canor and is a rarely used word which means pleasantly melodius.

My Inert Self

My Inert Self

You shine so brightly
I wish to call you stellar
though you hug the ground
of my inert self,
lay across me, a fallen
leafy limb digging
in to my edges
as if I am fine wet sand.
I so love your light.

‎November ‎30, ‎2010 1:08 PM

I haven't had a lover for so long now I have to make them up. Life is hard. Then you die. Alone.

To be real about things, I live alone in this basement arrangement. The fine lady who lives upstairs and rents me this portion of her basement is my long time friend and former lover of five years. It has been many years since that time but she has seemingly promised to keep me company as I age. She returned from Canada to remodel her house and take care of me while she does that.

I also share with a moody calico cat and I am visited often by one of the kindest dogs in the world who lives upstairs too. She is somewhat large because she is half Irish Wolfhound and looks it. She is stocky and loves bones. There are other people upstairs too, so I can be as social as I wish.

Currently there is a barber who works nearby and three trained young men, singers. They all specialize in opera. They are in town for several months participating in a program to present opera to various groups, mainly children. They travel all over Oregon to do this. They offer scenes from The Barber of Seville and perhaps arias from other works too. They have to hump their own stage sets.

I get out and about as often as I like, but these days I am motionless for long stretches of the day. Oddly this is like I was when I was working - in the same place for weeks on end, doing much the same thing every day, among the same people.

I had a cubicle and all the tools and devices I needed to produce engineering drawings of mechanical equipment and support structures and I sat there most of the time while I puzzled out solutions. I was free to move about the bakery (factory) but I had to have a reason because drawing production was my job and that could only happen at my desk.

In The Lab

Theoretical Science

I thought I had it
whipped, knocked, made when you came by
and casually
asked me the single
question that tore me apart,
unravelled me to
shreds, to thin tatters
of myself, except of course
you are simply wrong.

‎November ‎29, ‎2010 3:20 PM

Far Apart

Far Apart

They still say the cold
will increase this next winter
and then they suggest
the vultures stock up
carrion for icy days
certain to descend
from the frozen shield,
pushing all the marine air
back out west to sea.

Oh wait, that's true here
while I guess for you winter's
a different deal,
cooler and drier,
but still not frozen, not high
enough latitude -
though your vultures, vain
and otherwise do rise up
into stretchy sky.

‎May ‎29, ‎2014 10:31 PM
Modified March 16, 2015 6:55 PM

changed the title and two words:
the title was "Vultures Soar Above" while
"...vultures, vain" was "...eagles, bald"

Another of the poems that were written as part of last year's collaboration with Ms. Irene Toh. We are indeed far apart. Ms. Toh is resident in Singapore while I hang out in Oregon in the US of A.