I Hear I'm Here

I laid my head down those early nights in Boston, when I was
still not used to how the street lights would seep in and bathe

the ceiling milky blue with an incessant, vigilant light whose
subtle warmth softly burned and blinded through the eyelids.

In those nights I pressed my eyes tight and my ears would
widen to hear that the wind was still while the cars still went

and in those passing wakes, they issued a sound that echoed in
my memory as the gentle crash of waves on shores I left behind.

And as the last trolley gradually trucked and thumped the bumps
and rails of Comm Ave, I could hear how squeals of the wheels

and the squeak of lines could recall in some rare way birds and
crickets I heard on rural evenings with solely stars for company.

With familiar tones and timbres the city could almost compose
a home out of its unacquainted places. But upon returning here,

to the birds, the bugs, and waves, I have found that when those
same sounds echo in me, the cars and trollies rarely come to mind.

Though they meet my ears all the same—whether they come from
here or from there—my soul listens closely and can tell me how
they belong to the one but were merely borrowed by the other.

A Sunday Sketch

My success lies in Sundays,
when the sun lays its rays
warmly on me reclined,

while my body hums a
eucharistic hymn and my soul
remembers how to sing.

Bread and wine linger in
my flesh and memory and
I wonder if what could be
did in fact happen to me.

I take stock of myself and
all there is while the breeze
breathes and my collars lap
like waves upon the shore.

Blessings are measured in
grateful sips—a mug lifted to lips.
I spill ink and I will think
of how richly he arrays my days

and when the sun's light dyes
the buildings rose and gold
I know the eve is not far

with which he dazzles the eyes
today as in those times of old
with many a precious star.

When A Tree Falls in the Woods

I am a once-great tree
that has fallen relieved
in your welcome woods.

I held within myself many
homes and hidings for others
while I leaned upon empty air.

I stood for many years
tall and mighty, and alone
until your love felled me.

The answer, by the way, is

no, I never made a sound;

that is, until you where here.

I am poor today, but break my bark
and tap the sap that surges sweetly
from rarely open and broken me.

My branches bounty, my rent roots,
have held for far too long what I have
never tasted, though it's mine to share.

I don't care what becomes of me—
if I sink and rot or am cut and burned:
to house and to sweeten was enough.

For, as I fell before your eyes
with my trunk cracked, exposed,
you can see my fragile matter.

All my rings sing as though
they were pages of countless letters
tightly bound around my core,

all addressed to you,
your woods, and

even your axe.

Grammar and the Beasts

English teachers must not understand that
grammar is what separates us from the dogs,
who are oblivious to the fact that subjects
verb adjectival objects in, out, and through
prepositional phrases, occasionally adverbally.

Most of their students tune in and out unless tone,
like the promise of a bone, rouses them with a
buzzword or phrase to which they have something
to say, though what came before remains unheard.

When philology is forgotten we no longer gnaw
our words in euphony, working etymologically
to the marrow of their meaning.  We simply lie
lazily until it is our chance to respond or to bark.

But somedays we fall below the hounds bellow,
are shamed by the bird's delightful and aimless tune,
and cannot keep still with the lap-cat's silent and
content life of silent observation and satisfied purrs.

When we forget that words were also wrought to woo,
our courtship will recall the obnoxious quaking of ducks,
whose copulation involves more coercion than consent—
though, there are really very few troubadours among beasts.

When has the pursuant squirrel ceased tree trunk chases
long enough to leave a sonnet in the cache, so that Spring
might yield romance along with acorns?  For that matter,
has the lonesome owl ever recited Neruda under the still
stars of a given evening?  For that matter, when have we?

Perhaps, someday soon, poetry and grammar will give
us the courage to speak ourselves and each other
above the cacophony of the crow's complaints, over
the lion's angry roars, and sad lonely songs of whales.

Break and Bloom

Despite never having asked for
—and my often attempts to shirk—
this state of being and occupation, 
I am a vessel from which Christ 
overflows. Not of the immaculate sort, 
but a simpler kind,  which serves as a 
thurible swinging along sidewalks, 
incensing passerbys with an aroma 
not my own.

Despite that fallen tendency to collapse 
myself and my world into something small 
enough to be thought, his image and signature 
are radiantly written in all that lives and moves 
(even the stones quiver with their vital role to play) 
although we do not take the time to marvel 
at the Word's work, the calligraphy of being.

We think the glory is somewhere else and 
it couldn't possibly be us. But we have much 
to learn from the unmoving and unwavering 
mystery of the flowers, who have no legs 
with which to leave their native soil.  The bud 
never asked for petals to flaunt.   
      
He was simply there, 
between the stalk and the air, 
and in just being there

he blossomed. 

We are where we are, 
between whence and whither 
and when we are open to the 
to and fro we can be like this. 
But we are always blooming 
bliss by nature of our being, 
where the saddest and loneliest 
are such because they write
epics no one reads. Our longing 
to blossom and to overflow 
is not so much in some kind of life; 

for, by living any kind of life 
we already do. Rather, it is to 
erupt in taking notice and giving 
thanks for what we have and are. 

All of us are there and 
—you might be startled to know—
it's always been here. 
If only we'd break off from busyness 
and break forth in bloom.

Two Wash Your Face

At the end of the evening fold the washcloth
in two as it drinks the warm water and let the
soap sing before it greets your day-worn face.

Scrub this face and follow its broad contours
along the ways of forehead, nose, and cheeks,
as if this land were foreign and not your own.

Keeping it moving until you can drop the
cloth and feel her ghostly and future fingers
tracing your face at the end of the evening.

Your appearance is not your own to behold,
but hers to enjoy; and her eyes are so unlike
the tired and flat ones found in your mirror.

Walking in the dark hall toward bed, her hands
still run along your face like waves crashing
against the shore of you, felt long after leaving

the beach at which you both have yet to be.

Imago Dei

Even the sharpest tool in the shed is just a tool dead and dumb,
having no will in its wielding, but always yielding to be used
according to the workman's intent. To swing, to stay; to be sharp,
to rust—there are no choices to be faced in the life of an axe.

Thus, another analogy falls of short explaining human liberty:
the axe is heaped with the stick and the stone and worthless
grimy coins—while free will and the human paradox stands
as a thing too bizarre to be compared with any other referent.

We are cursed to stand as unaccompanied anomalies, whose
every portrait is smudged and blurred. But this is to be expected
of creatures made in the image of the Undepicted; whose life lets
no image be its grave, except perhaps mysterious and mortal man.

Despite, and yet somehow even through, our frequent falls
he saves images, those broken but beloved analogies, restoring
his much-mangled form into greater clarity. He holds that stick
pushing the stone, such that his hand moves within the lonely pebble.

His face emerges as he polishes the past from an unwashed coin as
words are reminding through shining from whom the wealth came.
By now we see that it is still a forester's will, which sharpens and
swings. But without an axe, we ask, what work would be done at all?

While he could not be held in any meager analogy, he despises none
of the stories each tries to tell. To be big is to celebrate in the small
and to see one's character depicted in the discarded images. Perhaps,
we like-fated beings might, in every gifted day, humbly do the same.