Things

One

A thing no one can answer,
although many will pretend,
is how a thing's becoming
keeps becoming to its end.


Two

The thing I wanted
to tell you as we drove
past Sandy Beach

on the way back
from shopping in town,
near the end

of another one
of our windy,
sunny afternoons

following another
one of your endless
sleepless nights,

was, Let's pull over
here. There's no
one at the beach.

We can take out
the baby and a blanket.
We can sit down

beside the Colorado
River and a cottonwood
tree. We can bake in late

sun until we're done
or the shadows catch
us, expensive frozen

groceries be damned.

God Surrenders

So what if I did make it all?
So what if I'm making it still?
I'm slack-jawed in awe of the gall
of this world ignoring My will.

Everything that happens happens
within My field of awareness.
My merest thought flattens atoms,
or should, but they couldn't care less.

Truth is My thoughts, and My thoughts make
the whole of creation, but I
am not My thoughts and so can't take
praise for their lives, blame for what dies.

I am that I am, yet I am
not I within the tale of Me.
Only the null knows what I am.
Only surrender lets me be.

Relaxing Attachment

Bumper-sticker Buddhism
can be found slapped to the front
of cash registers, facing
out to paying customers:
"Attachment Is Suffering."
Joke or manipulation?
Probably a bit of both.

I wonder if the sticker
suffers for its adhesion.
Surely a little fondness
for certain forms of being
can't always be horrific.
Love the truth, but love it slant,
and forgive truth when it's not.

Crotchet to Self

The dusty rains left
myriad water spots
on every window.
Remember this

as often as you can:
any feature of this
world can irritate
or enchant as easily.

The views are ruined
by ochre obfuscations.
The views are enhanced
by filigreed lace scrims.

The same. Either way,
there's always more beauty
left within this situation
than you have yet extracted.

On Going

There's real alchemy
in this world--it's just
so ordinary
and so essential
we don't notice it.

The oxymoron,
continuous change,
comes closest to it.
No moment is not
another moment.

That's the alchemy
we try to call time,
although we have no
idea what time is
beyond metaphor.

We approximate
it in the limit
by mincing our steps
infinitely many,
infinitely small,

but can't slice it thin
enough to stop it,
catch it, see it still.
It is the Going
that is eternal.

A Million Years Ago in Moab

It's tempting to be impressed
with time in a place like this
where precarious boulders
as big as the pyramids
hang over interrupted
tumbles to the valley floor
motionless millenia,

where fluffy pastries of rock
pile thousands of layers high,
each of those layers laid down
one fine age at a time,
shoved down deep under epochs,
raised up high over epochs,
crumbling down through more epochs.

Such topography declares
a million years ago
might as well be yesterday,
even if the town below
scarcely claims one century
and the current occupants
manage a few decades each.

If so, then what's a moment,
what's a windy afternoon
in a green park full of chimes?
Dust scoured from dark sandstone bluffs
where it last settled as dust
a few hundred million years ago
settles without answering

in the pale buds and sepals
of the beginning of spring,
in our daughter's eyelashes,
in the weave of the blanket
spread for our short-lived picnic
on new grass beside those chimes
where children bang their musics.

Mad Improbability

We call them delusional
whose thundering monsters,
internalized chimeras,
defy the laws of physics,
but we're all just as haunted
by our own compulsive dreams
of the near impossible.

We don't believe our voices
are any less real because
they're so damned improbable.
As long as they don't command
us to consider ourselves
gods, ghosts, or Napoleon,
we find them agreeable.

We win every argument,
every challenge, every duel
in the moot court theatres
of our Shakespearean minds,
staged with the same worn-out props
of tattered recollection
we call imagination,

whether the current billing
is "Alternate Histories,"
"Conceivable Near Futures!"
"Courts of Public Opinion,"
"Disasters Will Prove Me Right!"
"My Tragic Heroic Fate?"
or "Plain Old I Told You So."

Most of the time we never
even stage the whole drama.
We put on our memories,
mourn, sigh, strut around in them,
take them off, put on others,
pick out the shiniest ones,
conjure futures out of those,

glance at the darkest costumes
and shudder before putting
them where we can't forget them
but don't have to look at them
too directly too often.
We're so lost we don't realize
that we're playing all the parts.

What we most want to believe
is that we command the roles,
the stories are possible,
and the direction is ours.
In truth the actors are ghosts,
the director is the dark.
We're just the stage, and we're mad.