The Music of What Happens The music of what happens begins with the bottom line of drums —percussion, the thumps of bass in sync with a wind of horns, baritone, bassoon, and in the whispers of brushed snares, in the round tones of tympany, and, in the rests; the spaces between, those silent shifts that…

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens ………………… —per Lao Tzu, poet, 6th Century BC _____________________________________ Lao Tzu’s Lament At first I think, I’ve got it! Then I think, oh no, that’s not it. I…

“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.” …………………………………………………. —Blaise Pascal, on his wager  Blaise’s Place Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip paved razor-straight through desert air many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path squeezed in a pass between mountains there, west, where the day goes down…

Fun In Space Call me nomad. Rootlessness is my routine. From where I stand space seems to beg for exploration not occupation. Occupation of space requires a military state of mind, armies train for it. But individuals grow dull and lethargic just occupying space ~~ There’s no substitute for dynamism when facing space. When I…

Purse Strings My mind’s a purse in which I keep my stash if its purse strings are loose I might add to its load when new coin comes to town but if I tighten down the purse strings of my mind they’ll garrote its capaciousness and all that God might have me be may be…

Damocles In perilous times we join the otherworld, the one that’s outside our bubble who’s driving this bus? who’s at the helm? who jiggles the joystick? we man our posts we soothe ourselves but one day must come to terms: I saw a cormorant, wings spread drying herself in the wind after lunch oblivious to the…

Rattling My Cage Are you looking at me? I say to the mountain which moves as I run the tiller down the row. But it may not be the mountain I engage. Are you talking to me? I say to the pale moon which sits upon the mountain like a ghost ball. But maybe the moon is…

Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller They believed consciousness resided in the heart, Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain through his nose with a spoon and stuffed his skull with rags assuring that he would not be thinking in the other world to which he’d travel by long boat being…

Whatchamacallit She’s dead, he said. So’s he, said she. Kicked the bucket, he said. Bought the farm, said she. Under the clover, he said. Crossed over, said she. Iced with a heater, he said. Sleeps with the fishes, said she. Taken for a little ride, he said. Gone to the other side, said she. Flat-lined, he said. Out…

“Alone” imagine the atomic affinities of the world these clinging particles of stuff that look like chairs or moons, that look like things that laugh and love, this vast, maybe infinite web of motions, these packets of energy that mutter and reflect upon their own protons spinning electrons off in breaths and sweat distributing themselves…

I saw myself a ring of bone I saw myself in the clear stream of all of it   and vowed, always to be open to it that all of it might flow through   and then heard “ring of bone” where ring is what a bell does —Lew Welch Down to the Bone If I…

99% Identical “All humans are genetically 99.9 per cent identical.” —Roger Highfield, Science Editor . “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” a poet said imagining friendly neighbors working their way along that which stood between resetting fallen gneiss and granite loaves and balls fallen to each to keep their wall intact while one…

Death of Star HD 62166 & It’s Nebula Although you are distant ………….. distant                  distant                      distant I can see by your past aura against a black further distance, the most distant distance I can see by your billowing…

‘Tis The Little Things ‘tis the little things, y’ know. the way we came to inhabit a sphere ninety-three million miles from a blazing star —a few million closer, we’d be toast ‘tis the little things, for sure‘tis a little thing the way I wake in the morning dreaming a new day, such a miniscule…

Celtic Knot maybe you think I do not know maybe you think I could not be surely I am not where I go surely I am here with thee but maybe moon is nothing old maybe sun is never new perhaps all stories have been one maybe there’s no such thing as through could be everything is…

Before I Entered Time I’m not blowing smoke, nor am I a sage. It’s a simple condition: The universe may as well not have been before; in fact, “before” did not exist until I entered time. There’s not one memory I can hang a word upon before I entered time. Before was just void, as blank as…

Getting to Know You I’m getting to know you. You who came with the first Archaeon’s spark Everything was new then, even you, you parenthetical tail of vital events, you old telegraphic protoplasmic stop, you callous caboose bringing up the ends of trains of eloquent clauses, small words, grunts and final remains, you little, but lethal, punctuational dot. You…

No Address —in memory of B.D. my oldest friend has left us he now has no address or his address is now not numbered there’s no street to be remembered there’s no place that I can place him and, now ephemeral, I miss him he was a bollard I could tie to I could call…

I Crane My Neck My view is of nothing other than the black dot of Icarus hung beneath the canopy of a wax wing in a field of grey, a boy suspended by invisible filaments thinner than human hairs strung (I must assume) from the canopy above now caught in an updraft drawing the careless boy…

Drinking It All In A long way up Bray Road past the point where the first of two small brooks cross beneath it came to me in a new way that you and I are still breathing four decades after we met at the threshold of the unknown, the part that comes after now and here…