The Last Line

The Use of Waiting

 

It’s the season of wishes and I’m a dilettante,

Dreaming about lions. They paced about

My brain all night: A way out of time?

A forgotten injury I must remember?

When they awoke me, it was still dark,

But I sat with the lamp and watched its light

Faded into the Sun. . .Still, the lions walk

While I consider their meaning—waiting. . .

For an inconsistency, or a slip, when

They will gather, pounce, and grant wisdom.  

 

Centinela Creek at Daybreak

 

There is a harrier reflected on the surface of the creek—

I see him there in a kind of unfurling disbelief,

An odd angle on a thing already beyond me, still

Of eye and certain of purpose, shaping the sky

With white shoulders. . .Then, only the sky remains,

The constant sky I see in the-water-without-

The-hawk. The unlikely meeting of all these things

In my eye: the light, the water, the sky, the bird—-

All unlikely stillness (the creek), movement (the bird)

And physics (the eye); the importance of the invisible,

Too: The ten thousand things I have to dismiss to see

The harrier in the water, to see some blindnesses are a

blessing.

 

 

The Pink Raven

 

You are telling me the image isn’t possible—

I say I’ve made it so; this is a world the color of snow:

He fluffs and preens on a birch branch, bold

As his blue-black brothers. There was no blood

Orange before I held one in my hand, is no moon

Until it rises. A raven is black / A raven is pink. . .

 

A schism with my understanding of myself,

With the Raven I had, by sustaining, sustained.

 

 

Samskara

 

Tangled in the tumultless routine of today,

I’m like to forget where I came from, or you,

Or the moments when I see you and my heart

Soars like the flute’s notes, sent on the breath.

It’s December, but the yellow hibiscus is blooming

And will keep blooming—Seasonless, a mystery.

 

A model, perhaps: Why shouldn’t we be so?

The crenellated petals twirl to a crimson

Heart—It’s how it shows its love, of course:

Blind to its own beauty, my admiring, shining

In Winter without Awareness. The best that I

Can do is guess at you; but I can glimmer,

I can love, and you need not know.

 

 

The Crow King Grants a Boon

 

They crowned the Crow King with a circlet of silver

Forged with the captured light of the waxing stars.

On the morning after the night of the new moon,

We vowed to serve; but the river bending made

The river too wide to cross. Ready and watching

At the well, I shook the sleep from my eyes and shed

The cocoon from my soul at last. The Minstrel brought

Money, but it was his violin I wanted (in exchange

For some of my sadness—even trade). Love was

A fallen bird on the forest floor. It was the frozen

Smoke of words said in coldness. I asked the King

For laughter, the thing the Crow King best bestows,

But instead he gave me the gift of finite patience

And a circlet of silver made of the waxing stars.

 

 

The Kestrel Over Culver

 

To Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

In the first light of the first day of Autumn

She slides in the air above the boulevard

That skirts the wetlands of Los Angeles:

The poem appears. “A windhover,” I say aloud.

Silently flying but herself unmoving, a master

Worker of the Santa Ana winds: With little

Adjustments of flesh and feather, will find

The perfect resistance.

                           One of her kind

Inspired the words she now evokes in me,

Writing to you, the literal line and simile

Settling down together for a chat; an echo

Of an echo of a voice, flesh-made words,

Words made flesh—having been seen, both of us, Being.

 

 

Ink and the Word

 

The orange gladiolus are blooming

In the vase, even though they can’t be seen.

The difference between chance and

Meaning is a distinction in tone:

I can evoke the petals spinning open

In time and space as the Dance of Shiva

If I so choose, and I do. I’m speaking

Of light and how it can make the air

Visible, so that you will understand

In the words I write what I mean when I say that I love you.

 

 

Goldfinches

 

Under the elm branches the feeder sways,

Swagged with gold birds, a singing chandelier.

Twice a twelvemonth they appear, coming / going:

The full Moon / The new Moon—-passing strange.

We only know what we learn, yet

There are things the goldfinch sings

I believe I understand. There is a shade

Of Yellow on the wing I had never seen

(And may never see again), from this place

(Even if it returns), with who I am.

 

 

 

Word Count

 

Another in a limited number of Autumns comes:

When the sun slants through the sumac at noon,

I see the last summer light slipping under leaves

Tipped in pale gold. . .But it’s a fine and welcome

Light, still warm through the window panes, motes

Spangling the room like stars. I linger here so

I can watch the night approach me, study each

Increment of change, and feel no loss. The words,

Too, limited and fading, finding solace in silence.

 

 

Woman with a Lute

 

In the raking light of time the foreground’s hard to see,

But we can surmise the chair is wood, lion’s head

Roaring eternally. It’s not the art of light and dark

That gives the girl such anima (we witness

The pause between breaths, the short-lived

Note of the lute no longer hanging in the air;

Even the birds have paused, deferring to Vermeer);

It’s the air he’s painted, the air manifested

In her hair, fingers, gaze. Chiaroscuro

Is a ghost in the room, the intelligence of silence

Defined by light: The grace of each moment,

Now and now and now. As if the artist was always

Present, now, capturing on canvas this ekphrasis.