Complete

The eyes that see, the hearts that beat--

How will blood answer the mind's command?

The dark and the light are what make us complete.

Every virtue an advance, each sin a retreat,

street voices scrape, compel and demand

the eyes that see, the hearts that beat.

The dictator was once a baby, so sweet--

Evil in us, like cancer, shrinks or expands,

fills with the dark and the light, makes us complete.

The angel is tempered by anger's strong heat.

What will you censor, what should be banned?

The eyes that see, the hearts that beat?

The conscience that guides, the urges that eat--

Stay hungry, search on—how much can you stand?

The dark and the light are what make us complete.

That baffling place, where reason and desire meet--

Will you fling a fist or offer an open hand

to the eyes that see, the hearts that beat,

in the dark and the light which make us complete?

Damaged Muse

When evening light will reach and fall just so,

and animated shapes emerge from lines,

with the darting brush's quick, sure flow,

and the artist briefly stops the rush of time,

your incandescent waves of falling hair,

a face that's so possessed of dark and light,

a complexion held in stillness fair,

is captured, held complete—not quite.

The broken smile still has the will to charm.

I give this haunted art what it demands.

It holds me, too, for now I'm free from harm.

This oddly frozen hour--cold paper in my hands.

How I have come to learn the artifice in art--

True seeing comes not from eyes, but heart.

Slow Spring

In the pre-dusk hush, the
mind slows, studying the 
snow which knows
stillness, and the thaw
and melt, drawn back
into the earth, no sound
in the soft ground, where
there is something 
green or wanting to
be green, while, above,
through cirrus wisps,
more light every day, 
while arctic wind disagrees--
wait, with the patience
of a tree in winter. 

#42

The silver maple was shorter then

and more sun surely reached in

the windows and the old lady

wasn't so old, and maybe

her husband was here too

in this house where I now sit 

and wonder. Words gone up 

like the heated air, through rafters

and out, scattered and diffuse,

sounds of laughter, love, life, loss--

for sure, grown children came

and took stock, discussed, maybe

argued about this or that antique,

the house empty and clean,

bereft, waiting for a new set

of stories that grow sometimes

as slowly as trees but just

as deliberately.

Dusk at Round Lake

The rain of tires on Route 9

fades to abstraction as

wind stirs water, light

reflects here and not there,

subtle mirrors, pink fragments, and

the cold air's rousing call

on my skin—a turning

from the linear, from the

rush and crawl, to Round Lake,

clouds like calling fingers,

and a rounding moon.

Light's Travels

How many lenses have we

passed through, how many

times have we bent in darkness,

felt gravity's capricious hand

alter our course, all the while,

light driving out dark,

one thin strand at a time?

What The Light Says

That moment when I

enter your eye, know this:

I am not the light you see,

this wave from deep space,

this beam of particles

pin-pricking your night sky--

I was molten hot, swollen,

roiling, violent, swallowing

worlds like yours, then

collapsing inward,

dark, dense, inert, spent.

All I am now is energy, a thin,

unbroken reminder of what

was, what is. It matters not.

My wisdom is this:

You are dust from us,

deep in a red-shifted past,

and you will again be light,

in this universe of

flight and capture,

running and returning.

River

I am a river,

cutting across man-made right

angle roads and fields,

willful, stubborn, to be worked

around, and not to be changed.

Peaks

Granite mountains rise,

evidence of violent collisions.

Sandstone erodes, the

patient work of wind and water.

Either way, peaks at which

we gape. What else is life

but adding and taking away?

Wind Thoughts

Mesas of my mind, arid plains

and the jutting forms rising from them,

sunlight and heat rousing the air,

causing my wind-thoughts to sing those

familiar songs of love and loss,

friends and joys, fears and comforts,

over and over again. 

Time and Landscape

Once, Paiute and Navajo lookouts, surely, perched on
the edges of these mesas, naked sandstone now
colonized by cell towers.

That cross carved on the hillside over there symbolizes
nothing more than four-wheelers’ earnest scramblings,
rubber into soft stone and rusty dirt.

The layered mesas, banded in shades of color like a paint
sample, are working on a different clock, saying to anyone
who will look long enough, that time isn’t what you think it is.

Zion: Only the most recent name for these gorges and walls,
lush green life next to barren stone, enough of a temple for
anyone of faith in anything, sure as sunlight.

More comings and goings. Close to the road, a recent strip mall,
stone over wood frame, holds a drugstore and mortuary—
no euphemisms here. A sign out front, billowing in the wind,
says FINAL DAYS.

True, for some, but not all of this.