Estuaries: Coming May 2011

There is an estuary
where streams and wild rivers meet
and mingle with the salted tides.
It gathers all the water to it
like the afterlife of rain: inevitable!

I too must be an estuary of confluent tides—
this earth-body of antlered thoughts,
the decay of leaves: my branching mind.
Tumbling with stones and salmon toward the sea,
the rivers of the Earth move through me.

—Jason Kirkey

Resurgence

I am thinking of water
     tea-gold, clear
     full of light—
     see stones, wet
     with algae
     like fur.

Suddenly!
     hear the fountain across the room
     left on, lying in bed,
     trickling away and
     river capturing
     these thoughts.

For a moment the mind
     was water,
     listening was being,
     sight meandered
     like a stream
     across inner tide flats.

The Dao—
even mountains
     hearing it
would flow!

Eating the World that Eats the Self

A moment ago the sunlight draped itself
          golden over grass—
shoot, leaf, flower, and seed
—all lit with the fire of life.

Now it is gone.
The fields are silent with dusk.
Nothing is bereft:
The mint is still fragrant and refreshing;
hummingbirds flicker like fireflies,
          rose to rose;
The nectar of the sun now set
still sings in the light filled lungs of green.

The world consumes itself.
This metabolism sets the Earth on fire,
sits in the garden grazing leaves of mint—
one day the world will eat this body too.
It doesn’t worry me.
I already make a meal of myself
to broader and deeper things.
Eat this…
          poem
          these words, this song, this heart
          cracked open like ripened fruit.
Then, you too, collapse and feed the Earth.

All these words molding away;
all these bodies about to decay.
The sun rises and sets.
Now rise again
to quench the plants with light
and feed the poets
tossing fish to the hungry sea.

Estuary

Come one year westward
under fog and shadows,
the Golden Gates spread
open on a lapis sea
like budding leaves—now
falling, crackling, dry with wisdom
and waiting to mold away.

The hills around are burning;
fire passing—not destroying
but creating, loving everything it burns.
Step through the waiting gates again
and open inward toward the shore.

The bay itself, an estuary
where streams and wild rivers meet
and mingle with the salted tides.
It gathers all the water to it
like the afterlife of rain—inevitable!

I too must be an estuary of confluent tides,
soaked by rain on Market Street—
caught in a torrent of emptying clouds
which hung above like a blanket of bogs
or a dripping chain of mountains.

Some things simply stand as they are:
the rain has nothing to say for itself
but “wet”
yet nourishes the thirsty earth.
And I am too full of mind
that wants to say itself
and say the world around me.

Covered, drenched, dripping
with rain
the world says me instead.

Pass the burning gates again, water
steaming in the flame graced heat
like incense in a temple.
Wildfire licks the soul and
tempers heart and mind—
pulls them taut like skin on a drum
so the fire and rain can play them.

A Study of Seasons, Abstracty

Autumn has come again; the trees are shedding their memories of summer in red, or yellow leaves. They fall softly to the earth to be covered, one cold morning, by the hoarfrost of arrival … and then, Winter. Winter cannot be seen, covered as it is by the dark of our gestation, swelling like a belly, and soaked through by the falling flakes of sharp clarity. They play a game of contrast with Japanese brushstroke branches. Spring edges in slowly, but sure to one day lift its shining head of tender sprouts, up from its underworld of contention. Everything is born today in the arms of a cherry blossom on the breeze—the wind reminds us, even as the leaves stay, of impermanence. When Summer comes it is with a close sun, thunderstorms, and sweating brows. Aloof until the solstice of its own impending death, as night again wins over day.

Autumn has come again; the trees are shedding their memories of summer in red, or yellow leaves; and I, I am not just passing through, but too travel in the company of sun, and leaves, and falling snow.

The Dervish Dances

“Walk out three days in the desert,”
says the dream to the delusion,
molting the psyche
and planting tender kisses on the cheeks of the heart.
Everyday I pray to fall apart,
a death-wish for life and obliteration
into the ecstasy of passion.
Spin dervish, spin!     I want to die laughing.

Who is the Poet? Who is the Pen?

Anything can happen in the bare lines
stretched before us, waiting to be made
whole in the fluid motions of the pen, the
emptiness of the page like the emptiness of time
stretched forward toward the note of our death.
And we could fill that page with anything,
its quality measured by the attentive heart
so that we must tend to the falling of our steps
walking on toward the next page and the next,
listening and faithfully writing what we hear
even as the ear strains and the tongue falls short
until the book is written, gone from the imagined
to the real, beautiful even when it falters
because it is honest and the voice of the pen
our own— and even when we are gone
and others find that book, finding
through its lines some permission within to sing,
they will remark how true the voice to the page;
“But who is the poet whose voice is the pen?”