POEM: At A Bus Stop

When I watch the children at the bus stop
They are boundless as water -
Wire haired with ruddy pink faces.

The parents, on the other hand,
Stand hunched, balancing coffee,
Hunkered down for the worst

Of what the day has to offer.
At what point did this change in you?
Can you ever remember

What it was like to be so formless?
To be a sentence fragment in need
Of a subject, and not caring a whit?

To let the day move on its own,
And leave time and plans and dreams alone?

POEM: Triptych

I The Want

Sometimes
Within the expanse that is who I am –
Sometimes
In the unspelunked caves of what love I’m capable of –
With no map in,
Inaccessible to any sort of GPS
Complete without fakery of any kind –
Sometimes it is here that I want to be wanted,
Wandering my days and nights through faithless deserts,
Dry and parched,
I seek love like water.

II The Solitude

In this place of solitude
With winds that try to learn my name
On this mountain kicking igneous rock
I face the unknowable God.

We hikers are like priests
Naming the sacramentals of Ash and Oak,
Of Maple and Juniper,
Of river and the curvy horizon,
Of sky drained pink
As sun begs night to sing its vespers.

III The Twilight

The intricacy of prairie life doesn’t shout at you.
Get down on your knees,
Stop in the gathering twilight
Slow down or you’ll miss everything
If you are just passing through:
The frills of long bracted spiderwort,
Fireflies that dance against fragrant wild alfalfa,
Inch wide blossoms that last just a day,
And the riot of the luminous that will not survive anyway.

POEM: What The Winter Is For

Winter is for planning a garden,
It is for verdant visionary quests.
It is a fantasy of mulch and raised planting beds
And for the relentless thumbing of dog eared catalogs of heirloom seeds.
It is for the hope that always dies around us and within us
It is for the chance to be nurtured back to health by an augúst harvest.

Winter is the dream reset
That white snowy carpet shushing the soil,
Stilling the industry of blue jays,
Chilling the heated speech of crows.

It is the shine of carry on, faith in sight unseen
It is a quiet faith in you and me and everything.

POEM: With You, Lying There

And now, with you lying there
Waiting. I think I should tell you how much
I want to stuff all your pockets
With every question backed up inside me -
Every question I ever wanted answers for:
About love and despair, about forgiveness
About living true lives and where music comes from –
But I also want to know why things suffer
And why things die in the first place.
I want you to carry these questions
I want you to carry my doubt so much, your
Pockets puffed out, stuffed to the brim
I want you to carry it all
Right to back to God and ask Him,
Ask Him true and unafraid -
Why things are the way they are,
And why after all this time there couldn’t be another way?

At the end,
I will stuff all my pockets too
With just how much I will miss you

POEM: When You Leave

When the shape of you,
When the length and very breadth of you
No longer lopes these noisy halls –
When the light of you,
When the very heat of you has dimmed at last
When the raucous din has finally past -
Only then will the drywall cry and turn wet with tears.
Only then will the building tremble
And promise to tear the floor asunder.
Only then will Autumn’s cartoon leaves lose their majesty
As the colors struggle to evoke such wonder.

In your place, you leave behind your smile
Where I will construct an altar to the
Patron saint of kindness,
To the gentle spirit and restless soul you are,
To the warrior artist of compassion -
Wild as huckleberry, loyal, and fierce and purple.

From now and until the end of “is” -
I will carry your heart in the folds of my own -
In the marrow of my most resolute bones
to harvest every grain of love we’ve sown
And marvel that just by breathing your name
How like the silent promise I make to myself -
Wide and sky blue my heart has grown!