Out Like a Dozing Lion

I woke up thinking, "You don't know; you can't know.
You don't know and you can't know," as Sarah tossed
and the black sky shouldered a lavender glow.
A flitter of white startled me, a small moth.

I dreamt that our imaginations ran wild,
but they're the offspring of our tame surmises,
whereas every new moment is its own child,
undreamed of and full of its own surprises.

It's brass daylight by now, too bright for moths outside.
Another white fleck, a butterfly, flies by.

Hobble Creek Oxbow

This broken tree
and the stream
and mud and weeds

around it--everything
about it is beat-up,
beat-down, scruffy

and accidental. Still,
the wan sun shines down
as weakly on it as on

any rising great palatial
forest, as if saying
there is no failure

or success in striving, only
being in the end, and then
in the beginning, again.

The Gods Aren't in the Details: The Gods Are the Details (and the Devil, Too)

Our stories are
Our enemies.
Inasmuch as
We are our own

Stories, we are
Also our own
Worst enemies.
We're inficted.

Even the sacred,
Demonstrably
Non-narrative
Pure gem-like flame

Of the holy
Idiot's dream,
This lyric poem,
Hides a story,

A child's serpent
Gobbling real toads
In the secret
Garden of verse.

Lavender Oil, Epsom Salts, and Limoncello

One of the many foolish
joys of being an old
man married to a young

woman is allowing
oneself at last small discoveries
of the vast treasure horde

of lovely feminine things,
like a delicious afternoon soak
in an overfilled tub fragrant

with scents of organic
lavender oil and rosemary,
buoyant with epsom salts

as the steam rises through
the open window into
a windy blue spring.

Doing Laundry in Australia

Is there nothing less
intrinsically poetic
than cleaning one's own
non-metaphorical linen?

Stooped over an errant dryer
with an armful of wet flannel
and a mind full of soggy
sentimentality, I'm reminded

improbably forcefully
of a dull town in the Outback
of Australia's NT,
where we stopped to cram a week's

worth of camping-soiled
camping clothes dumped
out of our rented, red-dusted
deceptively elderly truck.

The proverbial hole-in-the-wall
of that notably wall-free, fence-cut desert
was a cinderblock establishment
run by an Asian immigrant

family marooned behind the front lines
of ancient dark and reddened pale,
where Euro descendants looked
suspiciously at the scattered

sullen Aboriginals who dared
scarcely ever to glare back.
It was hot. It was dusty. It had flies.
So much for the travelogue.

I've been washing my own
clothes and bed-sheets since twelve,
although I'll admit that
I've never acquired the knack

of beating them clean on river rocks
or hanging them neatly on the line.
I'm a lifelong habitue of the worldwide
demi-monde of laundromats:

Long Island, New Jersey, Michigan,
Montana, Georgia, Alabama,
Utah, Canada, Namibia,
Et cetera and Australia.

Yet here I am, reinvented
again, a married man,
father of a fuss-fueled infant
with marvelous irises

like those of her infinitely
(or damn near) patient mother,
and it's time to pull the sheets
and boxers from another

rented
arrant
dented
machine.

I Love You (Even Though Neither One of Us Sleeps Anymore)

I have two abstract lines
going through my head
as I lie, concretely, in bed.

One declares that all of my
mind is a theater, shows and play,
the other insists a million years

have passed since yesterday.
Baby Sequoia chirps and stirs,
and I roll her over to me to wake.

You've been up ten times or more
it seems like since we tried
to get ourselves to slumber.

I take our tiny culprit out the door
and change another diaper.
Sun in the morning, clouds afternoon,

while I prep classes, you keep
the chubby little rebel awake,
in hopes tonight she'll sleep.

Finally we get out of the house,
you for a run in the red rocks,
baby and me for a drive.

We make it home more asleep
than alive, but you strap her
to your belly and start to cook

and I sit back down at this
damned excuse for not
writing a book, when you say

"I love good wind chimes"
and my dull brain, ancient
and dazed, spins backward

instantly, to another globe,
the first time I heard chimes, this
boy from suburban New Jersey

where plaster statues on lawns
were the norm, not little bells
that clamor of incoming storms.

It was October in Missoula, Montana--
the night had gone suddenly cold
and mean black as I walked home

down a street of old houses
that was eerily empty by my
East Coast standards, and the wind

whipped down the shabby alley
to send off a glimmering tunnel of small
brass and bamboo wind chimes

on both sides of the barren street.
The memory was sudden and sweet,
and I told you about it in the kitchen.

"You didn't have wind in New Jersey?"
you joked, and I loved you like crazy,
even though neither one of us sleeps.

Embracing the Day Both Ways

Dawning . . .

In the middle of it all
one volcanic plug
of basalt sticks up a cone,

cold now for more forevers
than humans have ever known,
than all the primate generations

behind us. The big picture,
grand and aloof, the great clouds
racing over the gracefully

crumbling stones of eons,
and the small picture
of the wood peewee

with three chipmunks
dashing around the nearest
broken rocks at my feet,

scrambling for just this one
morning's quota of birdseed
the jays didn't sequester first.

. . . and Dimming

When we
like it,
it keeps

going.
When we
do not

like it,
it keeps
going.

Wanting
it slow,
wanting

it fast,
wanting
it still,

it keeps
going
on, still,

always,
still on-
going.

Still, it
does go
away,

without
ever
leaving

even
one stone
alone.