On Returning from Six Weeks Abroad

It is being born into a dream
who is strangely familiar.
It is forgetting and relearning
which key is the laundry room,
admitting you have no longer any use
for the skeletal subway map in your pocket
that held fast for so long the flesh of life
at one past corner in our flooding pool of time.
And you can't quite grasp the order of things
so your actions take on an air of superfluity,
an extra degree of difference, like ordering
another espresso just for the accompanying cookie
that they don't even have here.
In some cases, this sense of semi-permanence
may seep out in circles as ink in water
'til November days feel less autumnal and more like
Fall, as though the whole world was,
a playground at dusk,
emptying of its children.
But of course it is always
summer somewhere, though to hold this
in the mind's anxious eye
is like trying to track the flight of a single bird
the whole afternoon, which will render refulgent
the shadow-angle season change endlessly
conquering territory to frost,
retreating beneath May's bloom of birds.
It is choosing which old pain to forget
and which to wear like a soldier,
medals shining sun
resplendent scars
splaying soul
across Horizons
you're yet to see
but will

The 21st Century in Germany

The slow motion
forward, the creeping recognition who comes
sudden as the flood—like falling
out of love—your train has begun to move,
Boundless for Berlin. And in minutes
you've left Leipzig and her
soon to be ancient history
behind, concentrating only on
the white arms of what once were
called windmills, watching them
grasp wildly after something
they never fully reach
but always have.
In this way we are the same,
you and I, with our common language and hatred
of the times when only void flows through,
when the incorrigible heart and her allies
usher us only on
and never to.
But this is not now. Now
we are going back to Berlin, now
our only concern is the singularity of this
village road overpass we rumble across,
our only concern is who here knows
this small corner of being so well as
I know the walkway over US-441
4.3 miles from my childhood
home. Or at least that was
our only concern, before we were hit hard by the inscrutable
yellow brilliance of rapeseed in bloom,
flashing by like a plain of pure sun.
Hand in hand we bend our bodies into birds
and fly through the fields, breaking stems and stamens
as the pollen paints us
Gold.

That With Which We Name The World

When the seasons slip
Too fast like sand
Paper across our foreheads,
When our penumbra of pain crests to spill
Like a moon bleeding her dark light
Ink night all over our muted stars,
When the ever unassailable awareness of
That which will outlast us fires itself awake,
What else is left to do
But gather up our things
Write to those who need to know,
And sing?
Perhaps I retreat forever into the Transcendent,
Perhaps I am the only monk left chanting
To Myself in a once forgotten temple,
Perhaps the golden ice that drifts down in flakes
To shine the people and pavement
Alive is a myth, and comes not from heaven
But only from the tenuous delicacy
We call words.
Still all the questioning qualifiers can't
Pull the breath from my living lungs
Unless I command them out like marching soldiers,
Still my heartbeats will never be numbered,
Still the World sits as the trees breathe for us.

Striking an Equilibrium in 24 hrs.

Fighting couples seen on the street: 3

Toddlers ordering ice cream from their parents arms: 3

Times cut off by traffic: 2

Beautiful women seen riding bicycles: 4

Vices indulged: 3

Times made uncomfortable by bladder: 2

Courteous apologies from others: 1

Scowls from strangers: 2

Lost opportunities to do good: 7

Times disappointed in friends: 2

Times disappointed in self: 12

Children's laughter heard: 1

Feelings of insecurity: 37

Times proud of self: 3

Times self-conscious: 9

Feelings of guilt: 7

Children seen crying: 2

Feelings of doubt: 11

Times laughed at: 3

Times lost faith in self: 0

Times lost faith in people: 0

If you want to see your Clavicle, you're gonna need a mirror

In a white porcelain shower
that's still unfamiliar
I run a few fingers across my collarbone,
and it too seems a foreign thing
this primeval harness.
Though while the water hisses and trickles down
me, this ossified Collar of Esses
feels less like the reins of destiny
and more the foreign spike,
a bone-sword who pierced me from behind
three million years before.
Look down for a wound, but of course
I can't see; and this small revelation
is perhaps the only moment
throughout my adult life
when I've discovered anything on my own
that once was called “a natural fact.”
I rub the thin skin that hides it
and know, I'm always only millimeters away
from that which keeps my consciousness
afloat, feeling majestically delicate
as the water all around me
pounds itself into steam.

on refusing the final merit

what was it he was hiding
that refulgent summer morning
behind lightning crystal eyes?
and what was it you couldn't say
trapped behind this concrete city,
plastered to the pavement like graying gum?
but then again, what more could be done to tell
how all the pretty pundits platitudes fall prey
to the simple profundity of the platypus?
and as the planet dances forever around its axis,
helping the dewy grass smoke to life
again, i pause to consider how
to give account of the unaccountable,
until i once more notice the way
the warm summer rain rolls
to and off the oak's cloak of firegreen leaves,
pooling perfect below.

The Lotus Position

was never comfortable, was it?
And when I was a kid
we would, both accurately and not,
call it “Sitting Indian Style.”
So that wouldn't do.
And to pray without ceasing
was hard enough on Mt. Athos.
Hell, it doesn't even work in novels,
so that was out too. Then I started to get a bit down.
I mean The Oversoul was all well and good,
and I still dig the fact that Svetaketu and I
are both made of honey; I sometimes picture us together
riding in the back of an old convertible,
his dad driving with one hand,
all of us resplendent in gooey gold
getting the seats sticky without a care in the world,
but when someone cuts us off and we ride up to his window,
I still struggle to see the honey in his eyes.
And that the Enlightenment
is already the name of an Epoch
passed is enough to make me rise from my room
to mount my bright red bicycle
and ride, fast and deep into the soft glow of an empty night
until the wind on my face becomes itself
the only prayer that I know.

19to20.04.10

When the morning comes clear as crystal, brilliant blue,
it is hard to believe
in the fragility of my being;
and perhaps that's the point,
sharp as the early air is
with sun and chill and spring.
And I watch
the windows across the way,
the steady stream of traffic below my own,
the clumps of cocoa that cake my coffee mug's
white porcelain walls, clinging like dark cliffs of Dover
above the surf, wanting nothing more
than to escape erosion one more day.
But when my window is thrown open
to give a little of Mulgrew's delicate piano
while taking in turn the syncopation of the street
the equilibrium feels fine,
and I feel myself also
flowing into perfect pace
with the piano and the people
below, at my staggering seventy-two
beautiful beats per minute.

Kastanienallee 103

An einem Samstag im April. . . .

With patience full of joy
I watch the linear boundary between shadow and sun
creep across my table outside this Prenzlauer cafe.

But as clouds blur the border
stark to soft
my coffee cools.
like a bathtub draining water.
until I feel far
from everything
in a way neither good nor not.

For a moment that gray abates
to resurrect the line
and I reach across the table
as for the hand of my beloved
and it's gone.


I gaze over a shoulder to read headlines
through whose syntax I stumble
like a child.


The clouds deepen.


Across the half busy street,
whose pace itself seems to slow,
the fruit seller and his apples, bananas, oranges'
colors cool in the cloud-cover.


And now, now with the border a pencil behind my ear
the Sun makes his Odyssean Return
and somewhere half within me
a familiar flame flowers
that will stay aloft all night.

In A Place With Love Locks

Here in this planned park
East of the Atlantic
small Eurasian Tree Sparrows hop and dart,
the same precision as their brothers
in the States they will never see

as cotton clouds uncover
the sun, flaming the grass green,
cumulus veil of difference drawn away
like dining room blinds before coffee.

And with a skyward squint
I glimpse the breadth of our sumptuous span
of life, and the wide and seamless human horizon
stretching out in all directions, illimitable
and in you.