STUDY FOR 3 GRACES

stripped away
the cave venus juggler
with her tummy flopping
right down to her mons

how many millenia
has it taken us
to get so close
to the bone

how hungry we still are
will always be
we mustn't show
the old signs

childbirth's stretch
smoothed over
hills valleys
softness lost

airbrushed out of the picture
even the knot
just a spot
for a bauble

THE SEA CAVE

Each time we reach the far end of the beach
we reach into to the cave with our feet
or at high tide our minds
always our coming and going does this
today we turned before the dark mouth
that always pulls us in
next thing I know you're on the sand
back to the lava
the smell of seaweed strong today
the vision of its bright green fringe
still vivid around the pulse of stone
always I recall how it came
oozing down
when
so long ago
hot molten earth innards
from where
a pu‘u
an opening
an eye wet with fire
a goddess enraged
I can't say
so here we are
you on the sand
so much new ground
your hand touching a smooth washed place
and I follow
a novel thing
a change
a matter of timing
serendipitous for us
for the tide
I can't say
today's moon Mahealani
one of the four full Hawaiian moons
yesterday Hoku before that Akua
but who's counting
I sit next to your exquisite sense of now
and all is quiet calm a gentle breeze
an idyll in the sun a moment's magic
engendered as we press our backs
to the rage that cooled long before
who knows how long before
was it a rage I keep wondering
or was it so hot fierce primal and core-driven
so inner planetary honest that it truly defies
my anthropomorphizing
so I bask in you
our instant sanctuary
our nest of beginnings
when around the corner from the public beach
where stick figures mill about along the strand
with umbrellas buckets sunglasses token coverings
a man and a woman enter
surprised to find us there just sitting
and you thought you were all alone she says
en route to the cave
it's purple inside
he says as they leave
and another woman leads another man
if she doesn't come out I didn't do it he says
and we look at each other both understanding
it's time to go

SHARD

for Kenji

White porcelain piece thumb-sized
fractal of a bowl thrown by the potter
on say an island off the coast of Kyushu
a cross-hatching all that remains
of the blue house where she once waited
for his return the glaze now a thin study
of what endures perhaps wagon wheels
horseback who knows and the long voyage
into the rising sun to the islands located
at 19 degrees latitude themselves shards
broken like her heart like this bowl
that served so well a man who stayed
worked hard and never returned
I know this because today I found it
in the gravel above Kenji's place
not a stone but a made thing a small
keepsake outside the house of one
who combed the shorelines of Kohala
a land once covered in sugar plantations
canes cut down for the world's cravings
by men who never went home again

BREAKING THROUGH CRUSTED SNOW

Breaking through crusted snow
in the woods surrounding your place
sugar pine and Doug fir you’ve taken care of
more than half your life

not once not every time we sink
suddenly a comedy routine laughter
and we feel our way onto the surface again
no longer solid ground no more

the illusion of easy going
whatever we were saying about our lives our loves
we keep walking till we reach the creek
a runnel snaking through trees and brush

icicles reach into space along white feathered edges
snowmelt you say by early summer gone
how you discovered that first hand
setting up the tipi trusting

the sound of water to see you through
now that memory’s marked by stones
the pit fire circle’s enduring shadow
and we climb from there to the clearing

where your propietary neighbor
placed a grey wing of bleached dead fall
on a grand uprising of rock
a found monument or more quietly

a lichen-covered sentinel a boundary marker
taking our eyes
to the snow-capped Siskiyous across the valley
how we stepped through now and then to reach here

laughing each time laughter we knew
would fade and die if every step
were to break the rhythm
and pull us through an untenable trail

pull us again and again
into endless snowdrift
instead we’re just wet around the ankles
a couple of guys in our sixties

we can laugh as we step out on the surface
and head back
we can forgive the unpredictable
so sparingly measured out

and we can be forgiven for thinking
the uncertain layer of snow in late spring
is the ground
until we ask what is the ground beneath

THE CROISSANT

The croissant innocent there upon its circle of white porcelain
is the sculptress I lived with on Colney Hatch Lane the girl
with a smile who operated the follow-spot. The Lane led
notoriously to a madhouse but I stayed south with my bicycle
dripping light oil on the knotted cord carpeting just inside
her front door an English racer with taped handlebars
tamed and accounted for like Picasso’s head of a bull
an escaped simile in this short chant dedicated to the metaphors
of my time in Sam Wanamaker’s tent theatre on the Bankside
the Bull’s Head a fantasy pub where I met Chaucer’s ghost
as he pushed his ethereal head into the table distraught
with his next tale the tent theatre my nomadic life in London
Archway to Greenwich to Clapham to West Hampstead
to the aforesaid Colney Hatch Lane not to mention
all the other rectangles of linoleum cold to the touch
in Notting Hill Gate for example where the carnival
taught me how to dance to Reggae between pub tables
my formative years a place for elbows and wet pints
of Guinness their circular kisses overlapping
in Venn diagram fashion room for breathing
getting smaller and smaller the linoleum
the backdrop the ever present back cloth
where all my dreams came to life at night
and returned to their flat world by day

BLUE AGAIN LIKE MORNING

BLUE AGAIN LIKE MORNING
for Slyde

Blue again like morning
but never mind—breath is my friend
though I’ve neglected her these months
while the doctors looked for my throat

Give me my horn I’ll take it up
and summon up that long sigh
the one I gave the first time ever I saw
you walk across a room

Voices in that place still fight
to be heard face against face
plenty wine tequila cocaine
give me that blue again

If we had pain then we never knew
how long it would take to reach
the high notes without each other
breath is my friend, sister and brother

Days pass kids are born
their kids—news torn up
thrown in the fire in LA
or on the road

Give me my horn again
I hear that riff on the piano
I see your smile from the door