POEM: Promise

Today is earth’s damp gratitude
A spongy soil sort of promise.
It is that impulsive instinct
Dormant in every single atom:
Grateful for the loping boughs,
Of swinging pines;
Unrepentant for all the remnant decay
Scattered everywhere.

I pause to clip
A strand of forsythia branch,
And with my hands I bend that yellow branch
Into a wreath which I plant firmly on your head.

I kiss your lips as light as drizzle.

Beneath this canopy of spring,
In the presence of the sharper light
Of longer days,
We wed -
Each one to the other,
Then each of us to the earth –
Then both of us to every thing
That wriggles and crawls and flies
And gallops and walks -
In seasons yet undreamed by us.

POEM: Mystic

(On the event of John Patrick Thomas Nields-Duffy’s Christening,
Easter Sunday, 2009)

When they ask you what you believe in,
Tell them you are a mystic -
Tell them you believe in the miracle of the ordinary.
That simplicity glorifies God.
Tell them that work is how you pray.

Prophesy the whispering glint of each morning,
Your brotherhood with the pines and
The rapacious shout of each noon sun overhead,
As these are all the proof you need.

Trust what bubbles up from within
When you are alone, gripped tight
By the quiet footfall of a drowsy first snowfall
When your eyelashes catch the fragile white cloud shavings
That drop quiet as secrets all around you.

Closely watch the snowflake as it jukes downward
Into lumpy piles on the ground –
And that will teach you how to live.

POEM: A Good Buddhist

An enlightened Buddhist
Would put your kindness behind him;
Would hold the moment of your presence
In the palm of his hand and let it fly
Like unseen galaxies being born.

An enlightened Buddhist would never
Fold up your goodness into his wallet
So he could take it out to read like an old poem
Or share with others like a photo of a loving child.


But I am not an enlightened Buddhist and
I only aim to preserve the grace of you that overwhelms me -
One more pearl I string on the necklace that is my life.

POEM: Morning Glory

Leaning over in the dark April chill
Is the warm curve of you.
It is not a lust of the feminine I seek
In you, but rather the refuge
Of the turning into you, that
In the tempest of my sleeplessness
You are there – unaware – perhaps
Of all the sliding down that I do,
The slinking panic and the
Balled up fear that at times like these
Wells up in the vulnerable parts of me.

Still –
Leaning over in the dark April chill
I have the warm curve of you for shelter.