When the world shifts
I must shift
or walk along the road
where time has gone.
My tasks and the world
shift under pressure –
when a small thing,
a stone in a shoe,
stops the big things.
Tasks remain to do
when the sun rises.
When night comes
I lay them down
to sleep and dream.
Portland, Oregon – April 8, 2020
Into our front window flew a crow
as I sat outside on a summer morn.
Toward me she came in slow glide
stilled wings brushing cool
the air that touched my face.
I turned to watch her walk
drunkenly down the drive
seeing in basement windows
her dazed and dazzling self –
black, beautiful, broken.
She flew away during the day
by evening she was gone –
mended and on the wing?
No. Flying low, again she came
landing hard near where we sat
her pursuers fast behind:
“Caw, caw, cawing….”
Evening’s light gave way to night
as I went outside to see if she lived.
There she lay on a path next the rose
while in a moment more stood and stepped
as I went indoors, trying to let it go
this drama in the life of a crow.
When morning came she was gone
so it seemed, all day long.
In the evening, cool drinks under shade,
I raised my eyes to see
beneath the rose, dead was she.
Close by me she had flown
came once and again and again
at last to stay where she chose.
Did she find sanctuary here
or just the dying light beneath the rose?
What can I know of death for a crow?
I can barely speak or know
my own hurt, disease, suffering,
or what I did to make it so.
Portland, Oregon – August 6, 2019
A day will come for me
not so soon, far away
I pray. I cannot know
no one can but for some
who choose, for them I weep;
when all the lights I’ve known
soften and fade into what was
and shall not be again.
We know of what I write
it is death and death’s delight.
Delight? Why say so?
Say so for, as with all things,
death has the desire to be
what only it can be
and when I enter death’s abode
I will fulfill its promise
to usher me into hallowed halls
where what being is left to me
will be and if there be
no being left of me
then, it will whisper my name
through chill corridors
up drafty stairways
through cracks in the walls
out the broken windows
where fresh and lofting winds
lift the limbs of evergreen trees
flow over the rivers and seas
at last to summit the mountain’s top
where hangs a springtime moon –
full and lustrous, old and cold,
floating serene in the ocean of night.
Portland, Oregon – March 20, 2019
Vernal equinox
Out of the depths I am
here now to tell of life and loss.
From the earth I came
walked the green fields
returned when my time had come.
I remember the swirl of life
light playing within myriad forms
spun in sensuous warp and weft
color woven into darkness
I, transfixed in the weave.
What might have been
had I courage, will, and love
enough to bear the world, wronged –
words of peace always on my lips
spoken with my dying breath?
Portland, Oregon – All Hallows’ Eve – October 31, 2018
My photo is of a terracotta/ceramic sculptural piece I recently found in my front yard. It was buried under an old fern at the base of a big tree. I found it intact and no worse for living many years in the elements. I do not know who crafted it or how it came to be where I found it.
As to “De Profundis” please see Psalm 130 and a profound letter from Mr. Oscar Wilde.
He was the oldest of us four.
Not long ago he died. He is no more.
He wanders now in the company of the dead
who have made their way to the shadow lands
where they know the reach of our love, our loss, our dread.
This night they walk through my thoughts,
those who have died, who found their way
on such paths as they chose –
to laugh and live, to love and forgive;
or, over roads they felt obliged to choose,
whose bidding they could not refuse
through need or greed, fame or shame.
However it was for them, they took one more step
and, thinking of their last breath,
took their last breath
while holding the hand of a loved one
or, alone, felt loneliness rise up as in waves
of despair or longing unfulfilled.
Either way, in their last moments they let go
of their precious and only life
for nothing else remained for them to do.
Goodbye and fare-thee-well, you souls.
Goodbye and fare-thee-well, my brother.
Portland, Oregon – November 1, 2017, Eve of the feast of All Souls.
Ashes fall lightly from an orange sky
pretty ashes in tints of dead gray
black and white ashes from deep forests
and time tendrils curling into darkness –
blown as gritty fleck and smudged scrape
through the screen, onto the windowsill,
my face, the thin needles of the front yard pine.
They are scorched ash bit remnants
flung by heated wind as memories of life
on evergreen slopes and their ravines-
until wildfire snatched them in flames
and sent them to us, memento mori,
as grit for sweeping from our shining surfaces.
Ashes. Ashes from the orange sun and moon
brushing over our human lives, burning us,
as fire blooms and ash clouds billows.
Portland, Oregon – September 6, 2017
The Eagle Creek wildfire, as I write, is devouring forested lands of the Columbia river gorge east of Portland. Ashes have been falling for days now. It has rained, here in Portland, only .7″ over the summer. This is only one of hundreds of fires blooming in the American west. This one, however, hits home, literally. That always makes a difference.
I was surrounded by trees when I was a boy –
cedars mostly and three apple trees with sad fruit.
In front, branches hanging over State street, lived two Dutch elm trees.
They had a tree disease and someone cut them down.
I knew those two trees as a boy –
squirrels racing along their branches,
birds flying about in their branches.
My father said, “they have Dutch elm disease.”
It meant nothing to me.
I came home from school one day and they were gone.
I didn’t mourn. I looked at the stumps then went on with boyhood.
Today, men came to my yard and cut down my birch trees.
They have a disease, they said, the bronze birch borer disease.
They are dying so they must be cut down –
nothing left but to make them into wildlife snags.
Bugs will live in them and birds will come to feed on the bugs.
It is painful being an adult, saying, “cut down those trees.”
“Those trees have the birch borer disease, so they must go.”
Now they are gone – the leaves gone –
the small spring green leaves, yellow autumn leaves,
the tangle of thin whippy branches.
Come on bugs and birds!
What’s left of my birch trees is all yours now –
I wait for you to come with spring after this long winter.
Portland, Oregon – January 10, 2017
Photo is my own, taken this date after the largest snowfall in Portland in a long time! The trees were cut the day before.
In Seattle, rain poured down in heavy salty drops.
From my office window I watched them fall,
listened to them pound on bus windows
on the day my friend closed her lovely eyes
and let her soul drop its beloved garment
to put on a glory familiar to us all –
its brilliance does not surprise us.
She walked in her earth’s garment with grace.
When she looked at us we believed we were beloved.
In her gaze a pardon came over us like absolution
as baptismal waters flowing from a heavenly font
and we were buried with her in the delight of God’s favor –
such was her rising in the morning with the desert sun
and resting in the cool of the evening beneath the heavens.
Blessed are we to have been given a moment of sanctuary
in the place she made for us out of the tender spaces of her heart.
O you scarred and wounded world –
look upon such graces as humanity bestows
in spite of the darkness that deeply abounds.
Remember there are souls walking the earth
who, but for their masks of mortality,
are but fingers of the immortal one
clutching hold of what was, is, and will be
forever and ever.
Seattle, Washington – November 20, 2001
I wrote this when I heard of the death of a dear friend – Marsha.
A deep and numinous grief awakens, disquieting,
thinking about my father
who worked with tools, built a house,
found a job at last that gave him peace.
On his hospice bed he saw visions of friends long dead
as if calling him into the past, welcoming him
to the place where they hunted deer and told stories.
What they spoke of he did not say.
Or, my sweet mother, hiding her smile,
who did not tell her story and we never knew.
She slipped one day on the ice at Silver Valley
and, at seven years old, I knew she was mortal
but the word I did not know.
Perhaps she told her stories to friends
as they drank bitter coffee at the drug store soda fountain.
If she saw visions of her friends in the nursing home, before her last sickness,
she did not say.
What desires, felt deep, of longing and remembrance,
could they not say;
stories of loneliness and fear
of someone they loved
but could not say
could not hold that hand anymore?
What dreams in secret float like clouds over the world
of those who have seen visions and passed on
taking their stories with them?
They could not say.
The clouds endless pass in sweeps, billows, and storm
round and round and round they go.
Portland, Oregon – March 5, 2016
Inspired by Gilgamesh, a Herbert Mason verse narrative translation of the ancient and noble Babylonian epic. I highly recommend anyone to read this great work and especially this most poetic translation. Here is the particular verse (p. 54):
“For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death.”
I am digging a hole in the earth to lie in
using the tools I’ve been given –
morning sun, drifting moon,
spaces between places
when I remember
to see where I am, recall my task.
“A life and death situation”
she said, across the bar, overheard.
Even these, spoken words from across a room,
of a place I’ll never see again,
I will take with me to the place I am preparing.
All the bits, the lost fragments,
the billion forgotten things
I string together to make a tool,
a pitted spade to turn the earth
to dig a hole for me to lie in.
May, 2013 – Des Moines, Iowa (sitting in a restaurant/bar while on a work trip.)
In Cascadia 