Do nothing and everything will be done,
that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago and
now his books practically grow on trees
they're so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women would
rush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That's the way it is, I guess: humbling.
I don’ t say things I don’ t want to say
or chew the fat with fat cats just because.
With favor-givers who want favors back,
I tend to pass on going for the ask.
I send, instead, a series of regrets,
slip the winding snares that people lay.
The unruffledness I feel as a result,
the lank repose, the psychic field of rye
swayed in wavy air, is my respite
among the shivaree of clanging egos
on the packed commuter train again tonight.
Sapping and demeaning — it takes a lot
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
I.
Stoplights edged the licorice street with ribbon,
neon embroidering wet sidewalks. She turned
into the driveway and leaped in the dark. A blackbird
perched on the bouncing twig of a maple, heard
her whisper, “Stranger, lover, the lost days are over.
While I walk from car to door, something inward opens
like four o’ clocks in rain. Earth, cold from autumn,
pulls me. I can’ t breathe the same
Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn
The language of the trees. That’ s done indoors,
Out of a book, which now you think of it
Is one of the transformations of a tree.
The words themselves are a delight to learn,
You might be in a foreign land of terms
Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome,
Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth.
Very soon the Yankee teachers
Came down and set up school;
But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it, —
It was agin’ their rule.
Our masters always tried to hide
Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge did’ nt agree with slavery —
’ Twould make us all too wise.
Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light,
That both doth shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
And think how evil becometh him to slide,
A gust roused the waves,
leaves blew into the water,
the waves were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.
It was good for my heart:
there my feelings were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.
The breath of wind brought cooler air,
the waves of mourning brought separation:
autumn and autumn
befriend each other.
Wahiawa is still
a red dirt town
where the sticky smell
of pineapples
being lopped off
in the low-lying fields
rises to mix
with the minty leaves
of eucalyptus
in the bordering gulch.
We lived there
near the edge
where the orchids grew huge
as lanterns overnight
and the passion fruits rotted
on the vines
before they could be picked.
As the doors glide shut behind me,
the world flares back into being —
I exist again, recover myself,
sunlight undimmed by dark panes,
the heat on my arms the earth’ s breath.
The wind tongues me to my feet
like a doe licking clean her newborn fawn.
At my back, days measured by vital signs,
my mouth opened and arm extended,
the nighttime cries of a man withered
child-size by cancer, and the bells
of emptied IVs tolling through hallways.
Before me, life — mysterious, ordinary —
