After Goodbye


Loneliness comes down
with the twilight
and settles quietly
into the room,
while silence in fine particles
drops like dust
sifting through air,
settling too,
till every unmoving thing
is covered with it.
I wait for dark,
and sleep is
my only escape from
the absence of you.






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Lost in Transit


"It was my twenty-eighth year to heaven
woke to the morning of year's turning,
from open dreams
unfolding like the patterns
on a Persian screen..."

the poem began, but was lost again
somewhere in the bowels
of the De-troit Depot
of mother Greyhound,
and lost forever
with the rest of the flowers of my youth
that the birthday everyone forgot,
even my grandmother, marked the ending of.

But endings, the poets say,
are always beginnings;
and that one began a more honest kind
of candor,
the kind that comes of
finding yourself flat up against
the hard reality
of four a.m. in some Bus Station
you don't know for sure where's at,
and damn well for sure don't know why.
It just is  like it is ,
and while you're in it,
there's not much you can do about it except
maintain.
And that's about the size of it,
the poet said.





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Morning Ride


Riding my bike
down Wildcat Canyon
and back up again
is my meditation.

If I ride too hard
and focus on that,
I miss the beauty
and the bright sounds of morning
rising from the canyon
as the mist burns off
and the pale cool sunlight
floods, thin as water,
into the deeps and darks
of the canyon floor.

If I don't focus enough,
the ride can be dangerous.
What I am doing
and what I am feeling
both count.

The grandest reward
is not the easy part-
flying downhill
like a streak of life.
No, the best is the climb,
where the body knows itself
in intimate agony
and its human limitations.

The goal is not winning,
the crest is not the prize.
What counts is the climb.
You struggle upward,
breathing hard, hanging on,
and finally, finally,
finally win.
The truth is this:
every inch, every moment
that you hung on,
you won.





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Petit Amour


We lay on our backs
on the top of a hill
underneath the sky.
We touched each other
so eagerly,
but only with our eyes;
my eyes green as the riverbank,
and yours, the color
of a storm at sea.
I loved you then and I love you still,
mon cheval joli.






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Poetry Is


Poetry is when the soul speaks,
and the mind hears it.
True poetry always tells the truth,
even when it's not beautiful.
Truth comes always from the heart,
and from the heart only.
The mind is simply a bystander,
and I, an onlooker,
amazed to be there
to write it down.





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Riverwalking


God give me tomorrow
and I'll live it as well as I can,
with a heart as clean
as a shiny river-stone,
worn smooth by the tumbling
of turbulent waters.






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The Honing Edge


Look at October's brilliant skies-
they ache with beauty;
with fluttering flocks of yellow leaves
sailing down the wind
like migrating birds.
The heart must wonder
what the winter will hold,
for winter is the honing edge
that sharpens the soul.

I see you changing love,
though I've tried not to see.
I always thought we would change together,
grow together,
like the ivy and the cypress.
But nothing in life is guaranteed,
and nothing is more constant
among living things
than growing and changing.

And so we find out
that life is not so easy
as it always seemed
on those long, long golden evenings
of timeless summer.
Come November, the gold becomes silver,
and the air is thin.
The dark comes down so suddenly,
and if you're caught out,
the chill after sunset
can cut you to the bone.






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