Rather

 

There were birds (bards) lifting

 from the saltbush (settlement) like crazy

There was a magpie, was she between

 the leaf (hedge) and the fence (window)

There was a night blooming cereus that bloomed twice

and twice, even trying, I missed its opening.

 

There were a dozen chores and I wanted to do them all at once

There was a birthday on the doorstep and I staggered over it.

There was Thursday in the old house

and they made the word threshold

There were new words in the Oxford English Dictionary,

staycation, ginornmous, frenemy

 

There were so many beauties (beatniks) falling off your face

There were enough deaths in Haiti (helacious) so we forgot Pakistan

There were people (alligators) who went back to New Orleans

There was your face (your heart) with your eyes closed,

the way you smile best

There was your face for forty years.

 

There were other faces and after

a death which face remains.

There were clues (crumbs)

and there were giveaways

There was water running

 through my body (arroyo).

 Summer 2010

 

 

Unpunctuated Awe

                                      for WS Merwin

So beautiful today

I don’t know what to do with it

I can’t be outside it’s too perfect

the morning glories are too too without

even ingesting their known iota of trip

The Maximillian sunflowers are poised

to bloom and even that potential is wildly

enticing into too beautiful The dues we paid

After the fires after the wind and smoke the terrible

canyon fires of Santa Clara watershed tears shed

I could cry again today for the world we earned

paid its dues to too beautiful too beautiful

beautiful datura beautiful the Jewish New Year

I am already lamenting I stand naked for an hour

in my greenhouse watching the cereus flower

prepare for night blooming I stand naked before

my shower and after my shower  another phone call

from the too beautiful  I talk naked on the phone

because I don’t know how to manage today

with how I love too beautiful the note in the mail

from you how I love poets and painters who make

the world shine me I never want to set foot

inside a classroom with no windows

I want to speak poetry to those finches

and to the kale I will tell the kale I forgive the aphids

you are so greenly beautiful I love my body today

because it is the vessel that carried too beautiful

soon departing for other beauty don’t mention

it you say but in the too beautiful death

is already sharpening its scythe on too beautiful

its harvest of basil scent  a mint too many

tomatoes and a glut of cucumbers and I forget

that I know how to preserve   I am doing it now

 

Published in Odes & Offerings, anthology from Sunstone Press