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…

Fire . On Saturday I supervised a change of state: a pile of brush two-years high had reached the point it couldn’t wait. In our field beside the tracks where berries would be planted soon my job’s to make sure nothing changes state without intention that might need a dousing intervention with all-out sirens and…

Art Here is this tree before me whose skin is as fissured and split as the landscape of the Rockies as if a network of rivers had, for centuries, by force of friction, sculpted canyons into its surface; bark beaten by torrents of rain, dried by torch of sun, torn by whip of wind, but…

Do Top Dogs Care I place my body — life, in hands of corporate heads and engineers I am in my seat perched above a wing and through this little porthole peer. I slide my sight along its graceful lines, to its distant tip, vague among clouds. We’re far from earth up here. I know…

—“For all practical purposes a lie is as true as the bias of its believer.” —Roshi Bob Plum of a Lie If I told you a lie would you believe it? ….. Will it be a true lie? Will it ….. pierce my bias to the bone? Will it ….. meet my need? Does that matter? ….. As sure as…

Bread Upon the Water Every book just speaks, and every light just shines, and every touch just feels, and every look just finds, and everywhere just is, and every road’s a line — So, throw your bread on the water and beat your feet to the chimes and if you have a daughter and count…

Blink . . . In a blink the sun comes up over mountains sublime and the sea laps it’s rim like a pup . . . regal elms come and go . . . splayed trunks broken by blight, . . . limbs corrupt future and past together abide, winds whistle side by side, bodies…

Compost wonderstuff of summer declination that’ll grow my beets and beans and other rations browner than the mere idea “earth”, archetypical as sacrifice, more wonderful than virgin birth more promising than the phantom wealth of nations more essential than human beings of highest stations shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon sifting it through hardware cloth, screening stems &…

Standing Under Without Understanding Horizon’s circle, beyond which you can see no further in any direction other than up, hems us in, but looking up you can see forever, or as far as lightspeed allows, or until more time passes or, more accurately, until it shifts again, now. But by then, you yourself may have passed, whatever that…

Replacing the Gates If I’d broken the laws of light— if I’d been caught by a black hole and sent to prism, would you visit me with spectral frequency and split waves with me? Would you help cleave white into colors and set them free to carom off of everything in sight replacing the gates…

Stardust —on a celestial photo look to the spiral arc of stars of which the nearest star and you are part and see your milky way and climb your finite climb and run your finite run and whirl and turn and wind while they spin their finite spin and glow their finite glow and give you…

What A Moment Is A moment’s a poet’s take of a singular blur as tentative as an airborne bubble and hard as a hammer blow to thumb, the smallest thing able to contain an unimaginable universe, a universe able to imagine the smallest thing. Her’s one now, notice how quick— joy, gone. Hear’ s  another, …