Jhananda: votes = 1
Apollo and Daphne
I dreamt I had become the sun,
and you were a wild iris, that
rose out of the soil awakened
by early spring rain and
my warm, bright days.
A tall stalk,
pale and slender
with a gentle nod
and a ripple of silk
the color of dawn.
You waved in the breeze
like smoke.
Holding a single blade
you wilted easily before my heat.
I wanted to pile
moist black earth
against your fleshy bulb.
But, you would have none
of that, as you put out
yet another flourish.
So, I became the ocean,
and you were kelp, with
long ribbons streaming
like Pele’s golden hair
below churning surf
with buoyant bladders
streaming bubbles that
danced in my amber light.
You let go and washed ashore
to become a cloud,
so I became the wind.
I shaped and molded
you into many faces.
I pulled and remade
you, time and again.
I pushed you against mountains,
and you became black
and fell gorging dry washes.
But, I couldn’t let you go,
so I became the dark, dark Earth,
and you a river winding
through my broad valley.
I contained you,
but you eroded my banks,
and churned me into
a thick, brown slurry
that you left in crescents,
where you became a tree
rooted deep into me,
and wild irises bloomed
in my black, black mud.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Dear Jhananda, thank you for your participation!
Your Perfect Woman sounds allusive and ultimately destructive, turning you into “black, black mud” while she flourishes. A beautiful poem…
*******************************************************
FROM HEALTHY VS. ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS:
//www.recovery-man.com/abusive/healthy_abusive.htm
Sometimes abusive relationships are easy to identify; other times the abuse may take subtle forms. The examples shown here can help you identify traits of abusive and healthy relationships. In general, abusive relationships have a serious power imbalance, with the abuser controlling or attempting to control most aspects of life. Healthy relationships share responsibility and decision-making tasks and reflect respect for all the people in the relationship, including children.
******************************************************
Is your Perfect Woman someone who harms you or are you expressing the complexity of relationships?
Thank you and good luck,
-Your Perfect Woman
November 27th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
for my ex-wives
Smoke whirls between the teeth
of a man with a grin looking
at a woman he wants to own
for a moment.
A bus roars by breathing black,
and humans in iron pass
in packs barking and coughing.
A police car whines
in the distance.
I dream of a river that cuts
through a million years of rock.
Where warm water oozes
from a seam
leaving white scale
on the bank.
A wild turkey giggles from a thicket.
I lived in a mud
hut, and dug
in the brown, brown
earth with my fingers.
Her must accompanies
the smell of willow
blossoms and greasewood.
But, I’m caught
in the hydrocarbon-age
where humans possess
everything, even the earth,
fire, water and air.
I hug my thin
nylon jacket at a light
where I gain
a moment of permission
to pass by a line of greedy
head lights that glare
at me impatiently.
I meet a friend at a cafe
next to a Circle K
where an angry man
points a gun at the clerk
who is one paycheck
from oblivion.
She asks me if I want to
“bump pelvises.”
I look at the eczema
that has been growing
down her arm all semester,
and see that anxiety
is about to consume her.
I think of a violet
willow flower nodding
in the breeze
over a tea
colored creek.
The cappuccino
machine offers up
a familiar scream.
Anxiety wont have its day.
I thank her for the offer,
and graciously decline
saying I’d taken a vow
of celibacy.
The shadow of man
falls away from me.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Spawning
When men stepped on the moon
I spent the Summer of Love
in a military school
with the children of
Central American dictators.
They said, “Su mama es puta.”
I found no reason to argue.
One full moon August night,
when a man left a foot print,
we were bused to the base
for a dance with the dames.
The boys in their crew cuts
and uniforms sat sullen
along the south wall.
The girls in their braces and
Barbie hair waited expectantly
along the west.
I scanned the line
for the cutest to conquer,
and found none worthy of war.
Having no sense of battle,
I took an eastern escape.
I was drawn to the beat
of the ocean to dance
along shining sand.
Waves of sea turtles
hatched and waddle
urgently to pulsing
foam leaving tiny
pleats in the sand.
One full moon August night
when tracks creased the moon.
November 29th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Stubby Wings
Lilith Fair, Portland
for Sara
On their stubby wings
swallows soared
in tight swooping turns
from the high rafters
of the Civic Auditorium.
Women of all ages,
but mostly in their late 20’s
in jogging bras and shorts,
held hands, and bought
books like, “Lesbian Erotica.”
Women in short sun-
dresses, like Grecian togas,
said to Socrates,
“We are to beautiful.”
I thought they would be disturbed
by the loud music, but
the birds looped
and barrel rolled,
in a winged dance.
I wondered how it is
for Sara to be just 30,
and mentoring a nation
of women emerging
from a 2,000 year
Patriarchy?
One swallow let slip,
from its beak, a large
moth as it climbed high
over the crowd.
An osprey glided slowly
over the swallows.
The late afternoon sun
shown through its large wings
as it circled, shark-like,
away to less joyful prey.
A placard wielding Christian
tried to bar the gate.
He preached, “Lesbianism is a sin.”
One red light in a bank
of white glared askance.
There will be no aggression today.
The scoreboard
said, “Pepsi! Pepsi!”
but this generation
said, “Woman! Woman!”
November 30th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
A Beautiful Life
for Czeslaw Milosz
I meditate morning and evening.
Morning and evening I meditate.
I meditate morning and evening.
I don’t work a lot.
Contemplate, write poetry,
honor life.
I don’t make a lot.
What a blessing it is
to live a beautiful life.
I had little.
Slept every night
under the stars,
bathed in canyon pools.
Witnessed uninterrupted
sunrises and sets over ragged
mountains behind
pointillist desert hillsides
covered with volcanic
rock and pin-cushion cactus.
Took vows of poverty,
chastity and sobriety.
It is a lonely life.
Now I have children.
They needed a home.
The DEA brakes down doors
and plants evidence.
My children said they wanted
to live with me. They wanted
their own bedrooms, and a TV.
It meant child support,
their mothers depended upon,
had to go to a bigger house.
Every channel has police shows.
I spent a year negotiating
with them while my daughter’s
grades went down,
then she started taking acid
at school.
The news is filled with violence.
Everyday my son conquers
an electronic empire.
He hit a girl at school.
In Littletown
25 children lie dead,
because children tormented children,
and adults did not listen.
I stopped paying child support,
and spent it on a house
with three bedrooms.
Bought a TV.
We vote in popular
politicians who get
campaign contributions
from organized crime.
A war broke out.
My ex-wives had me sent to jail
with drunkards, addicts and robbers.
The sun rose in golden diamonds
through bullet-proof glass.
I sold my car to get out.
Now I’m a middle-aged
dead-beat-dad on a bike
still working on a BFA.
A field of dogs sprouted
in the Spring. Greyhounds planted
in fallow cotton fields,
because they were too slow,
rose like white bulbs
under the moon.
One mother inherited $80,000,
and got her first full-time
job in twenty years;
the other got an apartment
complex from mommy and daddy.
She gets falling down drunk, and
brings home strange men from bars.
She has a short temper.
Eight Buddhist monks
And one nun, dead
Their abbot was hauling
China white, but
the DEA got the load
I ride my son to the bus
stop on the back of my bike.
He came home from his mother’s
with a black eye.
A state trouper shot
a man in the back
with a bale of pot.
The judge says
I have to get
a $10,000 lawyer
to prove she is unfit.
One Million people
are in our prisons.
The tax collector
emptied my meager
bank account.
The 80-year war
on drugs drags on.
The landlord
wanted to know
where the rent was.
The CIA sells drugs
to buy weapons
to sell to dictators
who defend fields of drugs
used to sedate
whole populations
into complacency.
I was thankful
I still had beans
and rice in the cupboard.
Forty-nine percent
Of the prison population
Is serving time
for drug related crimes
I think it’s time
for Bastille day.
My daughter is now over 18,
graduated cum laud, and
got a scholarship.
I watch the sun rise
and set over mountains
behind a valley
filled with houses.
The Border patrol rapes brown
women on dark desert roads.
Morning and evening I meditate.
What a blessing it is
to live a beautiful life.
December 1st, 2007 at 11:17 pm
the Family of Sun, Earth, Water and Air
The rippling skirts
of the mother ocean
lie just beyond
the horizon where her hem
blossoms and curls
against the sand.
Her husband’s heat
lifts her hem
onto the shoulders
of her son
who stretches her skirts
out across the land,
where she rains
down her love for all beings.
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:00 pm
A Calcutta Street Dancer
She dances for her Shiva
at night, sleeping with him late,
and making love
on the streets of Calcutta.
At dawn he slips away
to his wife, and she awakens
to find her Shambu gone
once again.
In her own private world
she bathes on the street
before a brass faucet
burnished gold from use.
She opens her vermilion pot,
to renew her marriage vow
of the red moon on her forehead,
and finds it empty.
She seeks her husband,
the merchant, who would
not make his Shakti pay
to keep the wave of her full lips
red below a cinnabar moon.
With bright red lips and talik
she accepts golden saffron
and dhall crested with a white dollop
of raita from her Shiva who’s wife
strikes the pot with a wooden spoon,
and glares him into submission.
At carnelian dusk she finds a street-band,
and dances for her Shiva.
Her ankletted bare feet pat the
cement imploring his embrace.
A stranger passes and she is drawn
by the graceful roll of his broad shoulders.
She cries out “Shambu,”
with such longing that he turns.
Instantly he is intoxicated
by her sweet smile and
the crescent moons in her eyes.
She draws him to her with
graceful gestures of long
delicate fingers, shoulders
swaying, hips and head
jutting, and the innocence
of a winning smile.
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Passage Home
On a moonless night
my husband and brother bound me,
tied rocks to my ankles and
dumped me into our reed boat.
They paddled out in the
deep lake near our village.
I was called Star-Woman
because I dreamt I came from
an ocean of stars. A place where
every bright point pierced me with love.
My star-friends told me to give the love
I felt from them to my people,
so that they would be healed.
Those I healed, later talked
about me, and said I was a witch,
because they feared my power.
I could only see that they
feared my love.
My brother accepted my punishment
because he was afraid they would not
let him lead the fishing in the spring.
My husband wanted a younger woman.
They lifted me like a wagging fish
to through me over the edge
when I saw resting on the seamless
surface of those cold black waters
the radiant night sky with
her dress of many shining stars
embraced in the powerful cream covered
breasts of our sacred mountains,
I became still.
As they let me go
I laughed because I saw,
it was a doorway home,
back to my beloved ocean
of glittering star-friends.
December 4th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Things Are not Always What They Seem
When the Sun eclipses the Moon
The Moon thinks She is the Sun.
She teaches her daughters
The ways of War.
They become Red Venus,
And will admit no Man.
At first, Mars seems angry red,
But on closer inspection,
The God of War
Is only a frozen world
Where a web of canals turns
Into impact craters, and
Faces turn into mountains.
And, cool, white Venus
is an angry furnace under her veils
Melting lead on her skin,
where Mars must dowse his flame
In her liquid metal pools
to win her love again.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Graceful Power
from a dream
They came out of the darkness.
Gracefully, She sat naked
on the back
of that great dark horse.
Her long black hair hung
wave upon wave
down to her thighs.
Dancing, his powerful legs
reached out
to the night sky.
I stood behind chain-
link afraid that black
horse would trample me.
She danced and cartwheeled
upon my barbwire fence
as she passed by
indifferent.
December 7th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Loving Spider Woman
Like desert rain
she comes rarely,
and most often
to another mountain
where I see her draw
her curtains, and dance
on his hill.
I catch her scent
drifting down an arroyo,
a desert rain musk
of creosote, dust and mud.
I hiked a narrow
trail up a steep
canyon wall,
switchbacking
endlessly, to dance
with her.
But, her lightning
pranced along the other
ridge as her thunder
beat against my chest.
I wanted her fat
drops to pound
on my mountain
eroding me into thick
mud like chocolate
churning down washes.
I wanted her to leave
me buried in an alluvial fan
beneath saguaro and agave,
but she only smiled at me
as she danced with another.
December 8th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Wild Horses Still Run
The courageous independence
of your upraised head
surprises and frightens.
For in your fierce eyes
can be heard the crash
of your thundering hooves
as they tear at hard soils.
I know, it is only a brief
moment of playful
curiosity that you let me
run beside you.
The wind streaming through
our manes, tails held high,
hot breath in our faces,
and our hooves beating out
the desperate rhythm
of two fiercely
independent souls.
You will soon throw back
your head and, with barely
a glance, leave me admiring
your grace and beauty
as you disappear down
one of the many
labyrinthine canyons
of Mesa land.
December 9th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Escaping the Heat
I took her to the top
of my mountains
where the ferns grow thick
under tall pines,
and the grass is bright green and wet.
It was a hot Spring day
in the Sanoran desert, and
I was courting a woman.
I mistook the wisdom of years
in the few strands of gray in that black,
black hair, that boyish cut, that fell
in her face, and I wanted to lift
the hair away from those eyes
that looked at me with a smile
that said they liked what they saw.
I wanted to trace those black brows.
I touched a ragged
old scar on her forearm,
lightly, the way her mother did not.
I thought we would not just be lovers
when she offered me a drink,
and when she placed
fiddle fern on my bread.
When she said “I’m not
looking for anyone.”
I remembered saying the same thing
a few days earlier, and it seemed like
love can come when we least expect it.
It was a hot summer day,
and we lay on green grass
under cool pines
and shimmering aspens.
December 10th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Contours of My Heart
You are beautiful, beautiful.
My eyes and hands have
caressed the landscape
of your body, and found
the contours of my heart.
Your Irish white, white skin
slipped beneath my peasant’s paws
between yellow mustard oil, scented
with juniper berry and ginger.
What part of that great
white rolling landscape
with a sealkie’s black, black hair
could I not love?
But, of all that breath
taking scenery, it was
the graceful curving
horizon of your lips,
that my eyes
could not leave.
And, when I dream
we are two rainbows
entwining like snakes,
and springs rise
upon the desert floor.
I know that I am much older
than you, and I would have only
appreciated your beauty
if I knew that you were so much younger.
But, mother Maya played
a silly game in her web
of illusion, when she made
me look younger
than I am and you older.
I know that the body
can know things
that the mind cannot accept,
and when the mind resists
the body, it becomes a headache
that will not go away.
Please forgive my touch.
Sometimes my body forgets
that we are not lovers.
It is just our Taurus moons
that orbit each other
with the magnetic pull
of the touch
we have been longing for
all our lives.
December 11th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I’m a Fool for Love
I dream of ants caught
in a mechanical maze,
and she says, “I’m not
interested in you.”
The astrologer says
we’re made for each other.
She is what I’m looking for, and
I am the same to her,
and it sure seems that way.
We hike to secret
canyons, swim in hidden
pools, and massage
each other under flickering
cottonwoods.
I read into her willing
smile that she enjoys
the same throb
in her heart,
but she says she doesn’t.
I think she is fooling
herself, and maybe she needs
convincing, so I write
her seven poems.
I stubbornly plod
down the same path
from my mother’s house.
She says, ” How sweet.
You should have a girlfriend.
She would love your poetry.
How could a girl not.”
In deed, how could a girl not.
It’s beginning to sound and feel
familiar, and I dream of ants
plodding through a mechanical maze,
but the name and face is different,
and I’m a fool for love,
so I write her another poem.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Lost in a web on a Full Moon
To erase the memory
of a lost love she buried
the feelings of her body
in a pot fog.
When I came to awaken
her from that bog
the reason for her forgetting
had been forgotten.
Imprisonment in relationship
had worn her ragged.
so, she left men
for the company of women,
and found unchanged the lock.
I found her another sleeping
angel to be awakened,
but she says she doesn’t want to.
So, I sat at a cafe
waiting for guidance.
In the company of a lesbian couple
with eyes only for her,
a young woman strutted in,
hips a-sway,
with the kind of body
that silenced conversation.
She teetered heel to toe
on black stilettos
contemplating the menu.
A seam rose behind the curve
of her blackened legs
like columns of the Parthenon
to meet her zipper
which was impeccably
positioned down the cleft
of her ass.
When she ordered,
the boy at the counter stuttered
over her tight, tight blouse
that barely covered her
bras-less perky nipples.
When she leaned on the counter
her short, short skirt
rose high up her perfect thighs,
and an inaudible sigh
rose up in unison
in the back of the throat
of everyone there.
The moon of her belly
waxed and waned
with her breath
beneath her tight silk blouse.
My knees shook,
and I thought of the six
months since my last
love-dance.
It was so simple.
We are such suckers
for a pretty face
and a tight body.
Who cares what is inside?
December 13th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Walking with the Lioness
My loneliness covers me
like a familiar blanket.
There have been times
like this, when I held on
only by a thin gray line
on white, white paper.
It is some comfort to think
life is a river,
and we are rocks
being worn to sand.
I know men are long and sharp,
and women are smooth and round.
And, when placed together gracefully
there is nothing more beautiful.
She hangs out
catching a rub from guys
pretending to be
massage therapists
to cop a lonely feel.
She thinks she doesn’t want
a man that gives a damn.
She just wants them to touch
her, and leave her alone.
My mother never weaned
herself from that lonely
bottle.
I want to love her
like no man has ever,
but she wants a mate
with an image,
and I’m just a man.
She responds to my touch
like a snake to the sun,
but she thinks she’s dead wood,
and I’ll burn her to ash.
When she touches me
my body surrenders
to her touch,
and it doesn’t matter
if I am a man
or a butterfly.
What difference does it make?
When I’m a man,
I want her.
I took her to a secret canyon
where I placed her on a smooth
alter of water warn rock,
before an amber pool
of desert scented water
seeping from a cleft
of stone.
If you are unlucky in love
as I am, you will have more lovers
than you can speak of
in one telling, and yet,
I cling to the belief that
I can still have true love.
I dreamt I led her family
patriarch down a coal seam,
and filibustered for her
freedom.
She is a sturdy woman who
artfully moves from her wide pelvis,
while her hands and eyes flutter
about the kitchen.
I see my young children
orbiting her hem.
My body wants her
to be the mother of my children,
but I see she is with
a woman warrior
in a battle against men,
and I don’t much like just
being the sperm donor,
and paying monthly
for the honor.
I kneel at the alter of woman
to accept her sacrament,
and hope I’m not in for
yet another fantasy fuck.
My heart says, It’s OK
to walk with the lioness,
but my mind says
I’ll be eaten.
December 14th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
A Circle of Inflicted Wounds
We dropped her dog
at the vet
for a castration
while we lounged
by a pool in a canyon
massaging each other
beneath flickering
cottonwoods sounding
like rain in the dry wind.
A week later I took
her to my secret spot
along the cold Gila
river, camping with the dog.
Still licking his wounds
of betrayal he jumped
on her in the water,
and inflicted a similar injury.
Romantic dreams of lying
together under the bright
solstice full moon sky
were replaced by hours
in a one-doctor reservation
emergency-room, where the nurses
compared tattoos and told jokes
over the curtain, while the doctor
stitched up her pubis.
On the way back
she talked about ex-lovers,
and future possibilities.
I found myself missing
from the list.
I don’t need no roller coaster
romance or Mary-go-round
love. I need a steady lady.
I don’t need no
“I think I love you,
maybe I don’t.”
At home her ex-lesbian lover
doted on her while I cut up
a cold, wet watermelon.
I took her to a movie,
and her lover joined us,
and sat on her other side.
My car was on EMPTY,
but I spent my last buck
on her lover’s ticket.
I see her seeking love
where it isn’t offered,
or where it doesn’t come
without hooks and glue.
Finding being with her
a one-way street,
I think of my mother,
and give up on filibustering
for love.
I choose to walk
down yet another avenue.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Mating Lenses
from Adrienne Rich’s “Stepping Backward”
When we met your life
was an old shack
that wreaked of a man
like stale spice cake.
It was the familiarity
you wouldn’t let go of.
I was an artesian well
flooding green rice paddies
That laid over lazy
with fat grain.
I heaped wild
rice on the spice
cake, and interpreted your life.
It was the Royal Cambodian
family’s Rosetta stone
set in rainbow type.
We made love
in the thick, black mud
of flooded paddies.
I thought you would bind
the wound of my loneliness
but your need for aloneness
caused an infection.
I brought you to the garden
of Eden, but you could not eat
from all the betrayal,
rape, and violence a drunken
father, a philandering husband
and a stranger could make.
When I think of me in love
I awake against the crescent
of you, and leave and come back,
and leave throughout the day.
And, you go and come,
and go and return
punctuated by a touch,
a smile, then I lay down again,
against the crescent of you.
With cracked and chipped
mirrors we reflect the
prismatic colors of selves
at odds with what we hoped
would become familiar.
So, when I say good-bye
I part with the pauses
that bracket what has become us.
I say good-bye to that reluctance
that has become your greeting,
and that carefully tended
separateness that has become
your mission statement.
The pot of tea
I thought we’d share
often has become
an offering in a temple
to coffee attended
by strangers.
So, I step back
from the simple temple
I thought would be us.
This morning I saw a middle-aged
couple walking to the Country Fair.
Their gates matched
in the way mating lenses
are ground together
until not even a wave-
length of light can part them.
An optician will match
the glass for a mating-pair
of lenses so that one
will not wear away
the other without
itself being conformed.
I wonder if I’m just
too soft a glass.
Too yielding.
for us to be
a mating pair,
Because you hold
too firmly to the mountains
and valleys of your life to grind
them against mine
into a uniform curve.
Without grinding,
two scratched glasses
are only a foggy aperture
through which to see the world.
With a matched pair
of lenses one can see far,
or the very near.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Rotations of Rosaries
In memory of Arjan
The day Arjan fell from the sky
into Box Canyon, I dreamt
I flew soaring loops
around the Bay Area,
using my will for a rudder.
After his memorial,
in a field of desert poppies,
I fed you soup, and made love
to you like a pilgrim on Shiva
Ratry, then we fell asleep,
I dreamt your thigh
had become a field fallow
with yellow wild
flowers, and five white
rabbits with pointed
ears nibbled.
It was your back
that became a river
with fat trout swimming lazy
under flat rocks.
Your hip was a harrow’s
disc turning over black
soil, and I wore your dark
mud, a mantle upon my altar.
Outside rain fell like the flood,
and I found I could regulate
it from my dreams.
I awoke to find your body
wore the gold of dawn-
gracefully as silk.
Reaching for metal
my tongue counted
the rosary of your skin,
and I cleansed myself
in the pool of your belly-
that rose like tide
on ancient worlds.
December 20th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
The Bull and The Raven Dancing
She was dry like cracked
wheat and a raven’s wing.
She was sinew and sand,
roots and tarot.
He was hot water and bile,
sweat and sweet potatoes.
He was tongue and fingers,
lace and liver.
They were wet clay.
The knotted toll-rope slipped
through his fingers
like wet sinew,
when the bell rang loud.
She was wracked
with resonant spasms
by the touch of Taurus,
and rang like a bell
that had waited decades
for the toll.
Her fingers fluttered like
wing-tip feathers on a black,
black night.
His round back heaved
as he bellowed.
He was mud under her fingernails,
and she was a spider’s web.
They danced improvisations
of feathers and hide until 2 AM,
when the bull and the raven
met on a moonless night.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Mars Dives into Venus Pools
In my tiny, ground floor,
inner-city apartment
that I shared with my wife
and new-born daughter I dreamt
I was a young Azteca sitting vigilant
for many days of fasting,
chanting and wakefulness.
Striving for spiritual illumination,
I conquered my material needs.
One pointed on my destination
my mind was poised, life-times lay
suspended before me.
Gathering power, I inhaled
the worlds through my finger tips.
Reaching out with every fiber
of my destiny, I sprang
off the high cliff. Arching
my young body, I dove
gracefully, determinedly
to Venus crashing below.
I pierced the surf, and
transformed into the liquid
power of salmon, free
to streak through the water.
Many creatures joined me
along the fertile ocean currents
in our mass seasonal migration
to the rich Arctic waters
of the far north.
December 22nd, 2007 at 5:03 pm
The Mother’s Gift
a long time ago,
on one full moon night,
I had a dream.
Facing south, my footsteps
traced the path of the pilgrim.
We walked a dark path
up a black volcanic cliff
to her cave.
Others brought little gifts
of shining black stones
and small brightly colored boxes.
Standing in her cave,
surrounded by many gifts,
her black eyes touched
me with a smile.
Feeling like a neglectful son
on his mother’s forgotten birthday,
I said,
“Forgive me Mother,
the only gift I have to offer
is myself.”
Smiling, she gently held me
in her palm like a small
and precious gift.
She extended her hand
from her heart,
and released me.
I fell from her loving safety
like a bubble drifting
effortlessly
to the sea raging
against the rocks below.
Coming to rest
I became formless
sea foam and limitless ocean.
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:13 am
Dreams within Dreams
5/4/2001
A moth rang my mediation bell
this morning, at 3 AM,
it woke me
from a lucid dream
in which I relived
the entirety of a single lifetime
with all of its minutia and visceral details
Just before the bell rang
I had been weeping
With the deepest grief
over the death
of a woman I’d loved
most of my life, all in the
fragment of a moment
of a dream.
She was a perfect woman,
because it was her very nature to love
and serve her loved ones
completely.
We were dirt-poor farmers
in rural India, and we lived in
a single room adobe hut
on the edge of the fields that I worked
to feed my wife and family.
When a moth crashed
into my meditation bell,
which sat on a windowsill near my head,
I instantly moved from kneeling on a dirt floor
By the body of my beloved wife
in rural India 600 years ago
To the present, which shattered
my sense of reality and linear time.
I felt like Narada
who had been awoken
from a lucid dream just as
his dream-wife and children
were being swept from his grasp
by flood waters.
And, now it seems so strange
to have grieved the death
of a lost lover, then
a few hours later
be sipping tea at a café with friends
not knowing whether to laugh or weep.
Now that I have already loved a perfect woman
I find no need for another.
Will the bell ring again
to end this dream?
January 29th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Melting Amber at the Tucson Poetry Festival
My first sight of you
in that crowd of people
was the thick rope
of your amber braid,
With streaks of world weary gray,
it was captured under your gold
Ethiopian cap, and hung
down your thick corduroy jacket.
Your army fatigues sagged
over black laced high-top boots.
When you turned to face
me, I stood dumb
by the dark beauty
of your heroically lined face
that told me the years of revolution
had warn smooth
the hard lines of your heart.
Years later, at Allison Deming’s
early Sunday morning session
I was just about to introduce
myself to the others when you entered.
The dark wisp of your hair
swayed for that moment
while you pondered
your interruption.
I was stunned, again
in awkward silence
by the pink mottle
of acne scars that
only made you
more beautiful.
Our eyes met,
and in that moment
we told each other
of our mutual lust.
Later, I saw you with a man,
and by the proud feather
that peacock wore,
I could tell you were lovers.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The River Styx
in memory of Derrick
The day Derrick died
Monsoons built clouds
that dwarfed our 10 thousand
foot mountains, and my finger
tips touched a woman’s in the exchange
of money and a smile.
I saw a ring on her finger,
and tried to make nothing
of it, but wondered
how it is that we bind ourselves
to one person who later will
have us thrown in jail?
White mountains spread out into gray ranges.
The power company turned off my house.
Afternoon turned black,
and rain fell turning streets into rivers.
Trucks plowed and dumpsters floated by.
I opened all my windows and doors
to let the heat spill out, and regretted
that air-conditioning did not run on gas.
Kalika said, Derrick died, morphine murdered.
Rain fell heavy, and thunder snapped
in a burst of bliss that turned
a tree into burnt wood and splinter.
My lover paged me to pleasure her
for two hours after a walk along a dry river
that had turned to moving mud.
A large owl flew up in our faces,
and crossed over the bright moon.
I brought posole and a fat
slice of four grain.
She is a twig I’m afraid I will snap,
but she is hard wood.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
Mortar and Pestle
Bisbee
The morning after I ignored
the flame of your body
you asked me if I’d ever
had too much love.
For nine months I studied
the secrets of your body
like an alchemist seeking
the philosopher’s stone.
But, no amount of rubbing
would turn your lead into gold.
Two dozen wounded women
flipped through my mind,
and I realized my sad choices
met their hopeless longing.
I’ve whittled on this stone
for 25 years, but it seems like
rain wearing a mountain
to a sandy plane.
Even though I change myself
the world doesn’t seem to.
No amount of rubbing
turns their lead into gold.
Your question left me
feeling like Charon
in a lonely wooden boat
on a dark, dark sea.
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:43 am
The Truth or Consequences
of a Full Moon Christmas
We left Tucson with it’s frantic
mid-afternoon cappuccino jitters
from last minute Christmas shopping
for our last Gemini journey.
A white blanket hung
over the belly of the mountain,
Pregnant Woman Resting.
It followed us to the round
Pinaleños etched gleaming
white against dark shadows
by the late afternoon sun.
A lean silence hung
between us.
Hungry hawks, waiting
for fresh road-kill, sat
on yuccas bowed lazy
from cold winter.
The sun set in lavender veils
over Dos Cabezas nestled
in the jagged teeth
of the Chiricahuas,
Where we met
at a shaman’s funeral.
A huge red moon rose full
over the low curve
of silhouetted mountains
that reclined
against the horizon.
It was blood red
like the eclipsed
moon we made love
under in a desert
canyon on the bank
of a monsoon swollen pond.
I had been too busy
to accept the eclipse
that had settled between us,
when she had asked,
“What are we doing?”
and I had said,
“I thought we were doing love.”
Bright stars rose over dark
hills and drifted, then
meteored passed on a black ribbon
that twisted through
full, mesquite lined sienegas
and glistening wet playas
covered with brown tuft-grass.
Water and its words
and states wove
us together and
had eroded us.
In Truth or Consequences
we sat in cement tubs,
overflowing with steaming-hot
spring-water trying to shore
up the erosion on Christmas eve.
The moon glared bone-white
through wisps of ancient hair
and shimmered on the rickets
of the Rio Grande.
Accepting duality, Christmas day,
we soaked in hot bubbles rising
from rock lined pools
on the bank of the little Jemez creek
in Bodhi Mandala’s Zen garden.
Boxing day the sun rose
late over vermilion
and ochre cliffs
illuminating brilliant patches
of snow lying against talus slopes.
An offering was made
to the competition.
In his mother’s kitchen,
Scott Momaday fed us
the pasole of “the night before
the execution of the mad dog
at Gobernador.”
Mid-week, mid-journey, mid-life.
Gila Wilderness hot springs
leaked steam, like a mad dog,
through ice crusted creeks
below the Seven Sacred Caves.
At Faywood,
in private tubs
of steaming sunrise,
lavender brightened into
peach capped breakers
on a Caribbean sea,
while gold blossomed
on the horizon
between dark breasts.
It was New Years eve.
The end of a year together.
The last journey.
The last meshed dreams.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Joan of Arc
We met in the spring,
When warm tropical winds blew,
Bringing out the
Sweet sex of orange blossoms.
When warm tropical winds blew,
She was everywhere I went,
Sweet sex of orange blossoms,
And we stalked each other.
She was everywhere I went.
We fell in love naked as children,
And we stalked each other
Playing water polo at a potluck.
We fell in love naked as children.
She hid her tall grace in baggy men’s clothes,
Playing water polo at a potluck,
Leading the intent against industrial atrocities.
She hid her tall grace in baggy men’s clothes,
resisting corporate monoliths,
Leading the intent against industrial atrocities.
Falling in love terrified her.
Resisting corporate monoliths,
She reveled in her power over men.
Falling in love terrified her,
So she had sex with many.
She reveled in her power over men,
A Mata Hari for the Earth,
She had sex with many
Driven stupid by their desire.
A Mata Hari for the Earth.
I found one long, black memory clinging.
Driven stupid by my desire.
We met in the spring.
February 6th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Mars in Taurus with Venus in Virgo
Mars lay bruised and beaten
from endless battles with man and nature,
when Venus found him laying
in a field of stubble wheat.
He was Red Sand, grain and grit.
He was man and beast.
She was the moon dancing
on the bank of desert pools.
She was a nun in white,
and he was a red monk.
She walked across his back.
Her toes scribed circles in his flesh.
She pressed her elbows into the hollows
of his buttocks and her knees into his quads.
She traced the ripple of his spine.
He was Red Cliff and ancient alluvium.
His meridians returned to gentle flow.
She pressed her body against the lever of his,
and rocked him on his sacrum.
She turned him like soil in her garden.
She ran her fingers down his ripple and wave.
Traversing contours he had become Red Clay.
She plowed and disked,
rolled and tapped, needed and cupped.
He became Red Mud.
Then she said, “Pleasure me.”
He was Mars in Taurus, and
she was Venus in Virgo.
His toe caressed her instep,
and his finger tips
touched her neck.
He held her hips against his
as a wave propagated across
his body and through her.
They were hog backs
of curving sedimentary rock.
They were wave
upon slow moving wave.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Shaman Woman
I first saw her drumming
Around the night fire
At Christmas Star.
An African shaman
Beating out a spell.
Fire glinted off sweat
On her powerful arms,
And glowed in amber eggs
Nestled between her full breasts.
White carry shells embracing
Her round hips kept
A hissing rhythm.
I smiled at her power
Over men, and followed
The call of the desert’s
Night silence.
I wrapped myself
In the sky’s radiant robe,
While the distant camp throbbed
With the magic she wove.
Her spell was spent
As the morning star jewel rose.
Dawn brought me to my knees,
And her to the Bedouin tent.
She shape shifted as I bowed
To topaz on the horizon.
Later, we past on the path.
The sun exposed
Her blond vulnerability.
I sat before a circle
Of those seeking a healing.
With grace on my fingers
I touched one tired soul,
Found it was her, and knew
Spirit had opened
Another path to the heart.
February 8th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Retrograde
We met at the Rialto
dancing contact to electric blues
the way I knew we’d make love.
It was the renovated theater
where, as a boy, I bought quarter
movies and dime candy bars.
She’s a face painter,
but I have no face.
It was a hot day,
Mercury was retrograde,
and the moon void of course
when we aborted a drive
up the Mountain
because my beater
broke down.
A raven tipped its wing
at my radiator.
At the flash of black
she said, “What’s that?”
I was being flogged by my boss
because of a mis-
understanding,
so I said, “Ouch!
Well, I’m not much
for the manicured lawns
of corporate America anyway.
I guess I’ll just rattle a few cages
before they send me back to howl
in the bush where I belong.
You can just tell them,
“It’s the heat and the natives.
It gets to all of them.”
It’s not really that I’ve gone feral,
I’m one of the natives just wearing
pants for the boss-man.
I was born under
a retrograde Mercury,
and a Saturn apposed Mars.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Fire in Wildcat Canyon
It had been a moon
Since we last danced,
So I left my home
On a hot summer morning.
The valley was covered
In the gray haze
From forest fires
In my red streaked mountains.
Along the way
I passed stretches of scorched
Desert with shriveled saguaros.
The entire Southwest was ablaze,
And I courted a shaman
Who lived in Wildcat Canyon.
I arrived at midnight
To find the ridge above her house ablaze
With orange and yellow flames
Leaping from tall pines.
I massaged juniper scented
Oil into her golden body,
And she wiped the road-
Weariness from mine.
Sunrise brought
A yellow fog
Over the canyon.
To tempt the flames,
We ignored the fire
Break to watch a brigade
Of planes bomb the burn
with large buckets.
Three days, adrift
In a sea of dry, brown
Wheat, we watched the fire
draw closer. Finally the brigade
And wind drove it to the other side.
For the fire’s wake,
We rode bikes to the break,
And danced naked
On black ash
And charcoal trees.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:10 am
A Flash Flood Come to Rest
On a moonless night
I took my goddess to a dry
canyon where coatimundi
fractured into a dozen
innocent eyes and danced
like water flowing up hill.
We lay our blanket,
mid-wash, on dry
sand, for love-making
under black cottonwoods,
beneath a dark
sky, glistening
with stars.
Summer monsoons flashed
in the mountains and echoed
rippling over our bodies
and down canyon walls.
In post orgasmic silence
we heard him coming
in the rustling of wind
through unmoving trees,
that turned into stampeding
of invisible deer, and became
brown foam twisting
over dry boulders as
he danced into a blackened
pool wearing stars on her skin.
They surged and swayed
against the sand.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Preface
The morning sun gleamed
through late monsoon clouds
like rippled silk in gold
draped over the Pregnant
Sleeping Woman, Resting.
Mist from soggy desert
drifted into her crevices,
and I thought of water dripping
from a cleft in granite.
I drove glimmering streets
that struck at her heels,
and remembered a pool
and a cottonwood rooted
into sand and rock,
and my lover lying
on curved stone that twisted
like sinew and water.
The Sun made tiny rainbows
in the water beaded
in her vertebral dimples.
We ate ripe mangos
in the sun, and bathed
naked in pools of clear water
splashing over smooth rocks.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Ghost Dancing on the Edge of Absolute Zero
They broke the tree in two
and gave it to me to carry,
a gift of peace
to the white conqueror.
Assembled mortise
and tenon, and held
together with a peg.
I slung it over my shoulder
with a silk rainbow.
The burden was light.
My medicine bundle
became the tree of life
polished to amber
by centuries
of reverent touch
by people numerous as stars.
I bowed to Spirit
as a line of the dead,
like children for hard
candy, passed to touch
the tree
one last time.
On my way to therapy,
sanding from splinter
to strata of grain,
I passed the house of the woman
I would have lived with
all these years.
She would have had my children
if I could have overcome
my inherited shame.
Sawdust drifts about my feet
like deep snow.
She remains with the father
of her children
because they are that way.
The chill in my heart
reminded me of a place
where on a winter’s night
only liquid helium flows
from contraction cracked
oxygen glaciers.
And, the blackness is split
by starlight powered
helium fountains
erupting from frozen
nitrogen caldera.
It is the Milky Way
that brings a brief
summer to melting
hydrogen icicles.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Rain.
Man Dreaming Eagle, Dreaming Salmon,
Dreaming Woman
before dams and canneries
Released from the prison of density
I embraced the freedom of wind.
Arching my body in tight turns
Around cumulous mountains,
I flew through streaking cirrus,
And circled crystalline showers
Of water and ice.
Called back to my cell
I drifted down to the rolling ocean,
And dove into a joyful harbor
Where men and women danced and played.
My rainbow came to rest
On shining Salmon Woman
As she was scooped into a hoop net.
She is Sea Buffalo.
Born in the trickle
Of high mountain creeks,
To graze in liquid meadows,
She was carried out to sea.
Along warm ocean currents
She swam for years.
In the rivers
Spirit of Rain roars
Through thundering falls
Calling her back
To the laughing waters
To spawn only once.
And, me called back
from my rainbow body,
swimming in rivers of stars,
by a cry in the wilderness.
February 24th, 2008 at 12:05 am
took a dog … on castration LOL wtf hehe