poems

Eternity
for Forouz

Staring at this empty horizon
of broken mesas and standing rocks,
staring at yellow desert grass
and sagebrush and spiny yucca,
plants married to hot sand and hot wind,
I bend and touch your feet.
We have been married only three days
and we've stepped into eternity.
The desert in its enduring grace
stares back at us with a burning eye,
inviting us into an expanse
where the dance of hawks and desert rats,
of cactus and rain, of rocks and wind
has its own beauty, uniting them
in a marriage of sand and sky
as eternal as our own embrace.
In these first days of love and faith
a desert may be the hardest place
to begin living with each other,
but a desert knows how to survive
and that is the best thing we can know
as we walk into eternity.
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The Veil

I wish I could speak without a word
please you like a flower, or a bird
a burst of color, a song that flies
delight your senses with such surprise;

I'd turn eternity inside out
if I could offer you such delight.
Beauty’s not always as it appears:
your beauty is a veil God wears.
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Morning

Your face that I love, with its moon eye
one way and its sun eye the other,
this is the first thing I see each day.
I wake up and look at snowy fields
washing the feet of distant mountains.
There are some horses, crows, barking dogs.
A woman, her arms filled with firewood.
An old man, not as old as the wind.
They are only the parts of your face.
A few clouds are blowing through your hair.
Your lips kiss the valley with morning,
with the yellow blush of your grace.
There is a salmon sky in your face,
your face that I love, with its moon eye
one way and its sun eye the other.
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Spiritual Light

As every bird's nest begins to sing
in the green leafing out light of Spring,
As pale, sulfur-winged butterflies play
and yellowing dandelions are gay,
I see new joy in these morning skies
as sun rubs its rosy waking eyes;
As earth and heaven wildly embrace
in all the wildflowers of your grace,
I keep on turning from place to place
like a sunflower towards your face.
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Extra Virgin

When our eyes meet
I remember groves of olive trees
on the Italian coast
where the sun gazes on the hillsides
and the sea
and cannot choose;
it must kiss everything.
And when our bodies meet
the energy that is pressed from them
would be labeled "extra virgin"
if it was oil from those olive trees
offering up the best of themselves
to the sun.
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Time

This day is the beginning of time.
We walk across the slow green turning
of spring in these high desert grasslands.
You give me the names of creation,
Juniper, bottle brush, winter fat.
Your eyes draw ravens in the new sky.
When you reach for my hand, your fingers
touch me like the beginning of rain.
Here we follow a coyote’s tracks
towards the rim of a river gorge,
and see its depth in each other’s eyes.
We know these moments are a promise,
and do not know any more than this.
Young vines of dry wind climb around us.
Trees talk to us now in the earth’s green tongue.
There is no end to a day like this.
This day is the beginning of time.
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Address

My son, the one who walks on mountains,
carries two drums with him everywhere;
one has the yellow voice of the sun,
with the other he makes the moon talk.
His hands are always full of stories
and his feet are always finding more.
There are birds who come to teach him songs
so he can sing when he is hungry,
and he is hungry most of the time.
Sometimes, just when you think he will sing,
a laughing bird flies out of his throat.
He has no explanation for this.
My son, the one who walks on mountains,
has kissed the earth, and thrown away shoes.
His heart has wept in a woman's hands.
His eyes know how to love what they see.
When you ask him where he is living,
he gives you a smile as his address.
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Unheard music

Sometimes there is music no one hears,
formed as coal is slowly formed from ferns
or as wind shapes trees in the mountains.
I can see that music in your eyes.
You were born with those eyes that could sing;
it was your fingers that had to learn
the labor of giving birth to songs.
You came here with the earth's energy
and the voice of gentle rain and storms;
it is a voice for music, not talk,
a voice not born to explain itself
but to sing of your heart's mysteries.
No one could teach it another way.
No one could teach the rain to be wind.
Sometimes I think I am your father.
I see us walk with the same footsteps.
But when you step into your music
ancient faces come over your face,
their old voices grow loud in your voice
and remember songs with your fingers.
You have fathers far older than me.
And yet, we are made of the same name.
The mysteries of your heart are mine
and you have awakened with my dreams.
We have healed each other without words.
Sometimes there is music no one hears.
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Fields

Today's wind is loud with talk of snow.
The tall grasses argue against it,
bent over like old women who know.
By afternoon the wind is biting
at dogs, horses, cattle in the fields
and beyond the fields along the creek,
scratching the last dead leaves from the trees.
No snow follows the wind's prophecy
and the silent fields ignore its wrath.
When the wind lets up it's almost night,
and it turns out the grasses were right.
I see intelligence everywhere,
in the dead stalks of grasses and weeds,
in a raven's wings slicing the air,
in the chiseled stillness of horses
just before they dance into daybreak,
in the soil's flexible attitude,
and in the rock's resistence to change.
To know the mind of even one field
you'd have to be the worm and the bird,
the winter snowpack and the spring flood,
every molecule of grass and mud,
to become part of the field itself,
to feel the urge of its seed in spring,
and know a calf's first hunger for green,
and the patience of bones after death
giving themselves to insects and earth.
Yet every field has its own idea,
whether grazed or harvested or wild,
of what to deny and what to yield.
Coyotes cross these fields like stray thoughts,
birds settle here, then scatter in flight,
prairie dogs climb from their catacombs
and pause to meditate on the light,
the cows meditate on what they eat,
the horses wheel in their wild ballets.
They all seem one field of consciousness;
only the dogs and I don't fit.
I try to explain these mysteries.
The dogs bark just for the hell of it.
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Faith

A sun still smoulders in the charred clouds.
A fringe of flame licks at the edges.
At last, the day scatters its ashes
in the shadows of these blue mesas.
April days don't die easily here.
Nothing does. Old seasons, old people,
half dead trees with one limb leafing out,
old dreams, strangling their dreamers like vines,
old houses, the crumbling adobes
held up by habit and scraps of straw.
In this village the fields and houses
are made of the same mud and manure.
Here everything is everything else.
Morning begins with the wrap of shawls
and slow scuffle of shoes towards the church;
there is the chance for another prayer,
the chance of another sunrise.
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