Plot Summary for Next Week's Episode

Suddenly the story lurches forward

Along with a quickening of the pace

Concentric circles alone

Don’t make a champion

But hitting three rings on

Your first go is no

Cause for disgrace

You had hoped for
A golden scarab
In the dead of winter
But all you heard
Was a stink bug
In the rafters high overhead

This is one of the early poems from my new collection, which is being written in the form of notes that I'm sharing, in real time, with the show-runner for the upcoming season of my life.

For Mom - after a first visit to Academy Point

With a command view

Of the Mystic Harbor

End of life is a time of life

With an idiom all its own

As the fire banks lower

It shows us how to re-calibrate hope

Downward moment to moment

Taking comfort in the ebb and flow

Of the Mystic River itself

*  *  *  *  *  

It's all assisted living

From the midwife's first slap

To our dying embrace

The passions we lay claim to

As our own most assuredly

Are merely borrowed from

Some ulterior place
All the closer to which
You now reside

The Reprobate's Son - less than wholly transformed

It's not just anyone but
The reprobate's son who
Has been less than
Wholly transformed
Across several lifetimes of regret
In each and every case
Having waited patiently
To see just how long
Virtue was going to take
Before taking good hold
Still waking up stoned and
Occasionally dreaming of Zhuang Zhou
And otherwise alas still
Seemingly possessed of
A passably translucent
Pair of butterfly wings
For whenever they might
Turn out to be needed

Sitting in Chan

Sitting in Chan

Open to stillness

Is both the hardest

And easiest thing to do

It's the event horizon

Where discipline and

Effortlessness converge

And where intention all

But disappears while the

Center reigns supreme

Songs for the Here and Now (for Osip Mandelstam)

I

Here and now come
 Little magnolia buds

Set hard against

December’s frost

Saving their best

For springtime

In truth the future can’t

Come soon enough

Once they have laid down

Their downy nubs

II

As we journey along

We strive to be
Better attuned
To the here and now

Yet sometimes that too
Seems overly confining
 As if we’ve been trapped

Inside these two boxcars that are

Coupled together and rolling
Along a circular track


III

Peering out through the slats

 What we truly yearn for
Is to soar like the winter geese

Wherever they may be bound
We too ultimately belong
Only to the cloudless sky

IV


The noise of time
It comes and goes
The more we hurry
The louder it grows
Until it subsides
In times of repose

But even then
It will flare up again
And can't be denied
We must surrender to it
Like a tinnitus
Rooted deep
Inside our brain

Poem for a December Morning

A beautiful morning on December 1st.  The sun rose in the east much as expected.  Diadems of frost shimmered atop the spare stalks of winter grass. Was it a slug on its last prison walk that had drawn the dazzling paisley pattern on the sidewalk before me?  A troop of turkeys gathered and dispersed as I advanced. And for no good reason I thought about William Carlos Williams and composed this little poem.

The news that may be found in poems only

Faintly resembles the silence broadcast daily

By the blade of grass and ear of corn

So you may peruse some verse 

If you wish to be informed

By second hand whispers 

But only wordless in the presence

Of nature can you hope 

To be truly transformed

Photo courtesy of DeviantArt

  

Poem for Thanksgiving

Buried alive in the blues

All the ways you can choose

Wherever you look there’s

Bad news and thick smoke

Just hold onto some myoho

That may be the best

One can aspire to

Yearning bears the seeds of forgetting

Let the dying yellow bleed into pale green

Late autumn now looks indistinguishable

From early spring when everything

Is said and done

From the meridian

We stand equidistant

The trees all but bare

With a blush of hope

Either before or after

The most vivid colors

This is the point to

Which we have come

It’s all in the giving

The expectancy for tomorrow

That faint lump you feel

In the back of the throat

********************

On this morning's walk I was struck by the incredible resemblance of late autumn to early spring -- something I never noticed before -- when the leaves are all but stripped bare, it's the moment when the dying yellow bleeds into pale green.  That's what this Poem for Thanksgiving is all about.