Today is like all the others,

gray like a barren winter sea,

the sun a pale and heartless orb.

And it’s on days like this,

that I feel certain my journey

is nearing its end.

Captain Ordinary arrives,

as if from out of nowhere,

in those moments when something

unusual seems about to happen.

He is not summoned by the glow

of a signal in the sky, for that

would be extraordinary, not his thing at all.

With a brush of my hand

I turn the light

to darkness.

And in that moment,

as all the images

fade to black,

what remains are the bits

I was there for a time,

until I was not.

But in that moment

between the there

and the not there,

something arose,

almost like a feeling.

Mirabelle weeps with the coming of dawn.

She does not know why.

Nor does the dawn.

She knows only that she smiles

upon the rising sun each morning,

and it smiles back,

but with a glow reserved and pleasing,

It is months, brother.

Months we’ve been at this.

Nigh on a year even.

And are we any closer?

We have searched

every nook, every dark corner,

only there’s no way out.

It was none of my doing.

After all, what did I know?

Only that it was my turn,

my place and time.

A chance to blaze a trail,

carve my mark on the face of it.

My father prowled

the plains of the Serengeti,

crept stealthily among the vines

of the Borneo jungle.

In those long blacked-out

grand mal moments,

as he lay broken

I planted two roses this evening,

and they seem content enough

with their places in the garden.

Out of sight of one another,

so no cause for jealousy.

Leave it be,

the alabaster egg,

alluring as morning,

tenuous as rain.

Touch it

and the mother

will never return,

The stories that we tell

one another are stones

buried deep in the ground.

We need only unearth them,

wrench them from

the moist clutching soil

Everyone says so.

Just a lifeless floating orphan,

adrift on gravity’s tide,

clad in gray regolith dust,

barren and bereft.

Peristalsis is the heart and soul of this poem.

If you know what that means,

the poem conveys one thing

to you, and one thing only.

If you don’t know what it means,

It’s that damned cloying song again,

rising slowly in the distance

as his boxy white truck approaches.

The tune itself varies from place to place.

For me – Turkey in the Straw,

but only four measures,

On the faintest of breezes

the glowing white cherry blossom

in my backyard garden,

final flower of spring,

quivers and breaks free,

twirls a time or two

descending on currents unseen.

Damn it, I am going

to sit down

and I am going to

write this poem

if it kills me.

Heaven is beneath your mother’s feet.

A friend said this to me,

and though I smiled,

I did not understand.

It means many things, she said.

Many things to many people.

The dogs stand at the window
and bark at the deer outside.

Two a.m.
and this is what I wake to.

Every night.

and not a moment too soon,

let me tell you.

The trenchant and tremulous

words and images

that gave so freely of themselves

to be a part of this poem

Deep in the throes of moonless sleep,

the beat of cicadas syncopate

with the sough of midnight wind.

From far down in the well of my dream

vibrations rise up, and, like anyone,