Balance
Navigating
by stars,
one ball
buried,
another
gathering,
the dung
beetle
straight-lines,
maintains
position,
forever
looking forward
and up.
“Balance” first appeared here in February 2016.
Balance
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Category Archives: nature
Mushrooms I Have Known
Mushrooms I Have Known
Reticent and tired, withdrawn,
dejected, I return.
Emerging overnight from nothing,
then withering back to zero.
Does light incite you?
The shade?
I walk by and say hello.
You do not speak.
Tarantula
Tarantula
The patience of stone, whose surface belies calm.
Neither warm nor cold, but unfeeling.
It digresses and turns inward, a vessel reversed
in course, in body, in function, the
outward notion separate but inclusive,
darkness expanding, the moist
earth crumbling yet holding its form:
acceptance of fate become
another’s mouth,
the means to closure and affirmation
driven not by lust nor fear
but through involuntary will.
Neither warm nor cold, but unfeeling.
The patience of stone.
“Tarantula” first appeared here in February 2015.
Moths
Moths
Small moths stir
in the darkness.
I feel their
wings brush my
face, my hands,
remembering the cry
of something unseen.
It is windy
again this morning.
* * *
“Moths” first appeared here in July 2015.
Forever
Forever
Our dogs hide under the bed,
escaping thunder.
But the sun shatters
a cloud and I know
we will live forever.
Each hour is the sky,
every day, another
star. Now the trees
join the wind
in rejoicing. This
is what we make,
they say. Only this.
* * *
“Forever” made its first appearance in July 2015.
In the Fifth Chamber Lies the Hour’s End
In the Fifth Chamber Lies the Hour’s End
To fairly allocate irrigation resources, the Persians measured time with water,
sinking a bowl in a larger vessel and tallying the count with pebbles.
And what is time but counting, determining the number of units within a set?
The sum of beats between silences and their diminishing echoes?
Its symbol in the West grew from fig and ivy leaves, while early medical
illustrations depicted pine cone-shaped organs.
In most reptilians, the aorta receives only oxygenated blood.
Qanats pump by gravity. The hagfish’s second resides in its tail.
Recognize the empty as full. Squeezed shut, we open.
Contraction and flow, ejection, inflow, relaxation.
Emotion as electrical impulse. Murmuring valves. The color red.
The fifth chamber remains silent and undetected.
The primitive fish’s chambers are arranged sequentially, but in an S-shape.
Ancients believed arteries transported air through the body.
The Buddhist figure, too, originated in leaves, symbolizing not love
but enlightenment. The ache of failure confounds us.
Balance
Balance
Navigating
by stars,
one ball
buried,
another
gathering,
the dung
beetle
straight-lines,
maintains
position,
forever
looking forward
and up.
Nocturne with Flame
Nocturne with Flame
Not imposition, but welcome.
Another’s stirred embers, banked
and forming the kindling’s base.
Thus the licked paper curling with smoke,
stars shooting into the blackness,
and finally, exploding light
transformed to heat.
From one’s loss, another’s gain.
The flickering on my cheek.
Inhaled bitterness and memory.
The wait, the period before.
Like the owl in the live oak,
or the mice under our floor
returning, I celebrate the cycle,
and grow warm.
After Before
After Before
A return to that
time when silence
reigned. The neighbor’s
guinea fowl have long
departed, but three cedars
drop needles in the circle
even as reluctant growth
pushes out from the oaks’
limbs. Nothing circles
below the clouds, no
roosters crow. Feeders
hang still and empty.
The wrens remain
cloistered. You read
these events as separate
birdless chapters, all
hushed in the dappled
air, passages carried
yet confined by nearly
soundless threads
suspended from the
persimmon tree. You admit
a status as sentient
protein, one meal among
many, while you rest
and absorb
the soft ticking
of eighteen eager
juvenile mantises
on the porch screen.
The Stone Remains Silent Even When Disturbed
The Stone Remains Silent Even When Disturbed
In whose tongue
do you dream?
I fall closer to death
than birth, yet
the moon’s sliver
still parts the bare
branches and an unfilled
trench divides the
ground. Bit by bit,
we separate – you
remain in the earth,
recumbent, as I gather
years in stride.
Even the rain
leaves us alone.
O at the Edges 