Featured Poet: December 1998

Morning Sky

Pour your tumbling infinite
clouds onto this soft eye
that would watch until bored
and return tomorrow for more

apparent darkness:
its dog chasing shapes, mystical light
and elegance finally seen not reckoned.
Illumination grows

for another jogger who comes,
suddenly not my enemy
though I've spurned him
for self-preservation and called him
silent names, (an old man too,
showing me sharp clouds
not hiding your smooth face).

I hate and don't know him
but would despise better
if we were in cars
and I saw intentions to thwart me.
(I'd underbid his overprice.)
We don't acknowledge
and I can't tell if the pain
in my head or body is soul,
its agony, unfinished sex
though neither complain.

More of your blue light perfection
and hundred mile clouds.
They are perfect in place,
line, direction, content
and exactly right the first time.

So I'll move under no death's way
exercising health and minding less
I'm a slow learner
after being so fast with it,
because you unravel this
when I leave without trying.
One thing, you're here.

MEMORANDUM

DATE:   
TO:    MOM E.
FROM:    This one here
RE:    You
CC:    Those without knowing how you are here

For smoothed fastened
righteousness
and dense strips of what
used to be,
we cut sharp deeper rocks
as deserted jewels
not lost or unremembered.
You are measurable. We are not
utterly immense.
Malignant, any earthen sore is
not veiled leprous,
a scourge
of that which is not a puzzle.
You are here and end there:

The direction behind us,
the challenge of sky
by trees and swelling.

Each footstep disappears
on you unseen,
in certainty, vanished
before taken.
We don’t see the unmoved
anymore than we notice
hard merit and fine scrub
on grace dry rumpled skin,
or defining clouds
for better seeing, as fire,
shooting your face straight up
like molten nerves
racing beyond any inside ridge.

Show us the frightening
information.
Take bristled cones
to the ruin that cautions
ignorance,
the blur between end and
beginning effects,
nights disguised by
justification and poetry.
Swirl lose minds!
Make them clay!

We plant
our hearts and bending
doubts away from you
over and over without the pale
(like safflower across your body)
needed compensation.
Please, despite our crimes,
because of their darkness.

We hurl ourselves originally
over thy curves
in forgiveness sought.
Don’t omit us absent you.
You, mom, perfect lover
under first light,
holder of gray seed.
Let us crawl upon your secrets
in pursuit of the many colors.

40 days

within a month
i became stuck
in desert at the end of the street
looking past heavy afternoon glow
and sky-splitting vipers
about metaphysical day 17
sand highway interchanges
and sagebrush infrastructures appeared
and by supernatural day 20
the sunken rectangular box
of a high desert dry lake
with washes running through
its middle became a
spectacle big enough as a hidden
field for the lost play of scraps
jack rabbits or the lucky
around the 37th day i think
i let my dog out she always leads
me to the door then circles behind
to avoid its opening and my approach
she can't do it any other way
but i always smile
and life was half over before i chased
rainbow colors
they defined
purple green yellow orange
at night moving to and fro
in the heavenly bite
a foot of virgin snow had the dog
and me talking and watching
the next gray
slide the sierra world away
we rolled a snow ball till
we could roll no more
and from the magic in winter skies
used your picture as a mirror
to see left sides sadder
than right
and from being wrapped
in quaking weaknesses
wished to leave our old names behind
as we wondered through
the 40th day because though
it was better than being hit by a truck
it wasn't as immediate

[untitled]

Green, let me in
though I am great
with contradiction,
writing poetry you
love to rewrite,
seeing and
there’s so much.

1.15 mph x 34 knots = 39.1 mph
without swells

Orca pods wind VICTORIA's SEA,
flat center of the universe.
Cormorants swallow lighthouses
from Olympic West to Cascade snow.
34 knot cat waterjets
amply grind darkly planed
even wrinkles.
The blended cosmos plotted line
shifts trusting Seattle bound.

Imperial spoken British Hudson's Bay Co.'s
beaver pelt Victoria Inner Harbor;
Spain's Juan De Fuca Strait and San Juans;
Admiralty Inlet words -- Point Wilson,
Port Townsend, Marrowstone, Widby Island's
1895 Spanish-American War's "triangle of fire,"
Hood Canal, Possession Point, Kingston and
Puget Sound's Elliot Bay stand on
sushatsht -- tetosena -- tsat-so -- seya --
siehu -- kworeshten -- alelo of the S'Klallam and other
water connected earth
or residential flower counting and bird estimations.

2 and 1/2 hours cross God's
many-faced changes and underworks.

Mountainside Zen

Neither am I pure of heart, nor do I have love,
even on a Zen mountainside with dogs
that hike and wander now that I sit
like a broken icon, but not far.
And I indulge you with the repetitious pronoun.

You'd find every vertical rock in the ridged back bone,
every pine, whiteleaf manzanita leaf,
perfectly placed around you, me.

Thirty miles or so east along another valley side,
some ridiculous son of a bitch hunter, the dipshit
he imputes others to be, acts out lustful God Almighty
making boulders one breath on the other.
My erection gulps each sweet moment's trace
and feels better than any, anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, allergic to mind
and beyond mountain sex or mine,
this quiet side and I are one,
stretching absolute selfishness
and voyeurism -- identical twins.

Are you? Yes, for me. We need not talk, or even
see each other, like dormant sagebrush.
Sit just below my feet before this very edge.
Practice.