The play of shadows on a summer lawn,
sprinkled here and there with flecks of light,
somehow brings a feeling more forlorn,
than shadows of the darkest winter night.
The amber afternoon is all athrob,
with summer sounds, a song,the droning bees;
a distant laughter, poignant as a sob,
is wafted by, and lingers in the trees.
Yet - as I gaze upon the patterned floor,
where a late, late sun, in still pools lies,
a nameless longing, blown from times before,
flutters, and escapes me with a sigh.
Is it an ecstasy too sweet to bear,
or some unuttered sorrow, lying there ?

A grinding wind grates across the desert.
Four days,
the friction of its hot breath
buffs scaley exposure to fine dust,
winnowed from rock.

Intemperate glaring gaze
of lidless sun -
strips all of civilized facade,
leaving only bare, weary, determination to survive.

Fine arts and civilities diminish,
replaced by weathered grimaces,
acknowledging the common bondage
of a suffocating prison.

In the breathless, stifling heat
of the fifth night,
stupored eyes rouse
with lightning flashes over distant hills,
advancing banners of cool, damp, air,
crashing approach of thunder.

The fierce absolution of a rushing storm,
becomes violence redeemed.
No longer a threat.
Now, a dark deliverance.
Welcomed.

She stood so still in the cabin door.
Despite our speed, I saw enough.
Leaning there in the heat,
poverty piled like a stone fence around her hope,
the girl spoke eloquently.
I knew,
that the eyes were distant,
cloudy and glazed with longing.
The world moving past her door, was going somewhere.
Somewhere she could not go.

I knew,
while cars whizzed by, dogs barked a harrangue,
children fretted and cried,
summer gnats agitated the whole tormenting atmosphere.
To her, it was a stewing pot.
There were kind hands there with the girl -
behind her, in a dim, heavy room with no clear air. -
uncomplaining hands,shuffling supper on its way,
performing immediate missions.
That kind of love, she would come to understand, later.
Now - other hands beckoned. Hands not so faithful.
Illusory hands, and far-off voices,
vanishing phantoms she was unable to reach.

That night we stopped in New Orleans.
Awake in the dark, I thought about the girl-
the girl with dreams in her eyes,listening to distant drummers,
while the life of here and now,
courses through days of half-sleep.
And I wondered,
if we aren't all a little like her,
in some ways.

Stalking clouds,
unloose on desert lands.
New rivers flow from the hills.
A reckless wind,
ricochets through valley halls.
The spate flows wildly around houses,
eddying with threatening sound.

Suddenly,
as it came,
heavy silence falls.

Only the sliding hillsides groan.
Torrents of muddy water cobble the streets;
dig long fingers into the land.
Timidly,
desert creatures emerge.

Only the water
babbles its waning tirade into dusk,
all else is silence.

The sun withdraws in silent dignity.
Birds fly homeward,through the gathering dusk.
Enfolded in a mauve serenity,
a drifting moon displays her wanderlust.
Hurried sounds of the city fade away.
The highway hums in meditative drone.
A pensive loneliness begins to play
its plaintive theme. Why do we feel alone ?
So wistfully alone ? It has no cause
in actual fact, or visible circumstance.
Amid the crowd, we sometimes sigh and pause.
With dearest friends, we sometimes feel its glance,
like quiet eyes, across a noisy room -
calling us to remembering - too soon.

To attend the days with borrowed smiles,
is never enough.
Carrying about an awful emptiness,
while at the core,
like a wistful child at a window,
something waits.
Such long, deliberate, waiting,
isolate in a vacuum,
unable to attain the traction for release.

Through all the habituals of living;
things done and said, because they seemed expected.
In even the small, throbbing harvest
of spontaneity and protest,
still - that awesome suspension within,
where something ancient suffers to be born,
and the soul remains -
uncostumed -
at a masquerade.

Like shadows from a wishing well,
ghosts of the past arise.
No fairy tradition can dispel
their sad,and pleading eyes.

Little hopes, without the strength
to find their way to birth.
A misty procession across the length
of a cold, and barren earth.

No mighty and alarming
host of fiery sins;
just a wistful little army,
of ragged might-have-beens.

But time will prove they can attract,
and glisten like a star.
Collected in some redeeming act -
they have their Avatar.

Walking away, it seemed fantastic clouds
hovered and nestled around the timid glow
of eyes like nestlings, wearing the nest as shrouds;
forfeiting flight in fear of the brown below.

Holding the tongue, a wet and tremulous life,
fluttering weakly against its dark confines,
too weighted with failure to offer the needed strife.
A thousand suns cool for every one that shines.

Standing the ground, the shadow, face to face
with summoned will, will stammer out a plea.
Fling the timid heart into Love's embrace -
though he conquers, he conquers tenderly.

Seeds are falling, falling like summer rain;
soothingly, searchingly, face their yielding time.
Blowing along the wind, tomorrow's gain,
spatters the Earth, with sound of golden chime.

A horseman,
riding along the shore,
threading the thin line ,
between land and sea.

Off the ground,
yet not in the air.
Wearing sunlight,
moving through it,
something of its fire within.

Reminiscent of -
a jewel in its setting -
surrounded by, aloof from -
Yet -
more than a frozen jewel-
motion in delicate balance,
along the brink of two worlds,
on a trembling bridge,
of constantly mingling elements.

Stranger lands than this have climbed the sea,
isles of darkness, carnivals of flesh.
Relentless hands weave light, a hardened mesh,
walling airy strata futiley.
Fiercer winds than this have rattled free.
Stars have spun in colder brittleness,
and powdered beneath redder suns than this,
where fear has crucified timidity.

Tides are endless, no wave is the last.
'Now'is that eternal in-between.
Breath is flow. Ages, whorls of green;
Life swims circles, nothing is the past.
Maelstroms sing a wisdom earthly dumb:
'live rhythmically - stranger worlds will come'.

There, where the silken moonlight flows
in deliquescent rivers,
summer shivers.
Suddenly a rose
bends - laden with a dew of dread.
It seems the dead
have,stealthily (as savages surround
the unsuspecting splendor of safaris homeward bound)
slipped up unseen, and hover in the air,
clammy hands suspended, waiting there -
for summer's winds to bear them on -
to where ?

The wine-warm pulse of summer,chills to gloom.
South winds sigh,
one long, last,fragrant breath,
and die.
The cricket hushes.
Gardens lie -
silent, where the purpling shadows loom,
and dripping, drooping mosses -
hang like doom.

Trees of Autumn, lords of yesterday,
were gentle in the pathos of goodbye.
They made a golden glory of the way,
in Nature all things pass. A quiet sky
of broad Septembers was a harvest hand,
laid in heavenly splendor on the fields,
and in the golden yielding of the land,
was something of the way a true King yields -
in dignity that leaves the victor bare -
of conquest of a Kingdom. Only stone,
brief, cast-off raiment, and the lifeless stare,
from sullen eyes of subjects not his own.
Poor barren prize, for what had lived, has left.
Victor is vanquished; winner, and bereft.

Something is written on the Scroll of Wind.
Something ancient. A history of Earth ?
No - something of a much more distant birth -
the one of Spirit.

When some magnetic whirl unfurls that Scroll,
and it flies free, with rippling delight,
over seas, desert, prairies, valley halls,
eddying from mountain height,
with vivid power, it unlocks some sleeping sense,
and we can hear it -

cascading -
tinkling with prismatic sound,
shaking the crystals of a distant knowing -
showering down -
musical and glowing -

quickening ancient memories -
awesome visions we cannot name -
cannot contain -

can only wear,
in silence that is wise,
like a beacon in the eyes.

Downstream from desire, the pace is slow -
filtered light, translated to a gleam
by arching trees aligned in pillared rows.
This passage is the substance of a dream.
Distant mountains, cool in robes of snow,
articulate in silent promenade,
pass like ages known, and yet to know -
glittering with sun, enhance the shade.

Ancestral pulse of those who went before,
whispers through the green-aisled forest halls.
The heart would linger - let the tired eyes close.
Yet, something that pervades it all is more.
In the distance floats the thrush's mystic call.
Winds move on. The silent river flows.

Turning in a wilderness of Time,
memories circle with beating wings,
above lush jungles of latent longing.

Darkly, they are silhouetted,
against a moon of reverie,
until

settling on the still pool,
they shine in fullness,
white and remembered.

So often shoreward,
in the night,
a breath, a spirit, a promise,
bears toward the beach.
Suddenly turns,
in whirling indecision.

Is this flux in itself ?
Or only the land's inertia,
resisting passage ?

Tomorrow's white promise,
surges, glistens with sea-salt,
flickers with starlight -
through ages,
seeks marriage with Earth.

Rebounds against rock,
which wears away -
so slowly.

Yes - we grow weary of sonnets and stars ;
flesh is too subject to troublesome time.
The waning of youth, and the terror of wars,
is not lessened by star-maps and delicate rhyme.
Yet - many a soul in a storm of despair,
has drawn comfort from still, starry skies;
and many a heart that was choking on care,
found a poet's cool water perceptive and wise.

Nectar's too rich for the weak and the fallen.
The world is too cluttered with dissonant clash.
From the pages of Time, old companions are calling,
in empathy's verse, and the heavens' slow flash.
The simple compassion, that says-'I've been there'...
and the orderly stars, can console our despair.

I remember summer in the hills.
Long roads open, winding through the green,
brown-red dust, soft rains in-between
lunch and supper, the evening still.

Rocking chairs on the porch in southern dusk,
conversation, mosquitos, and the heat...
summer in the hills, and the slow defeat,
emptiness, heavy in the hush.

To polish a moment - how is it done ?
Why is the promise always ahead,
or scuffing along behind ?
We said - 'how dull', and now it is dripping sun.

Arrested in passage,
Time is caught -
sifted like sand through the fingers.

Waves are crashing.
Seasons brought.
Only memory lingers.

Tides and times,
are the fabric of soul,
vesture of Becoming.

A white moon climbs.
Ages roll.
A pulse is drumming - drumming -

Slanting ray,
of a distant sun,
far, invisible light,

obscure in the day,
when fevers run,
clear and still in the night.

Flowing along the window-sill,
softly golden morning light,
like precious oil begins to spill,
dissolving shadows of the night.

A subtle essence fills the air,
annointing corners of the room,
trickling across this quiet chair,
with dew-washed dawn's remote perfume.

Stirring expanses yawn and stretch.
Sniffing the air, man, bird, and beast,
awaken to splash in tincture left -
by dawn's broken vial along the east.

Dust drifts down the idle roads.
Long days, the hollow windows,
stare blankly into the gardens.

Where music poured from the branches,
and full pools trembled,
beneath many summer moons,
emptiness grows dark and silent.

In the heart -
many leaves
fall.

Hit with the fist of a sleepless night.
Harrangued by a mind that will not rest,
thrusting its garrulous nonsense
into the weary brain.

All the tenants of your body,
bang on the pipes in protest.
The building of your being,
rocks and surges,
with collective confusion.

Rescued only by grey troops of dawn,
raining pellets of weary resignation,
and siren winds,
that scatter the intruders.

Dimly, the light comes.
Fitful, the wind.
Trees, in a spiral of air,
whirl, and sway, and bend.
Dark clouds portend.

A stormy morning,
advances before the sun,
invading the fields, surrounding hills.
Flickering lightning runs
ahead of thunder's drums.

The wild oleander twirls,
thrashes and darkens with rain.
Deep in its rocking branches,
a small bird folds wet wings,
and wistfully sings.

The road into the hills,
beaten and glazed with light,
winds through yucca quills,
imitating flight.

The watertank sentinel stands,
silent in rain or sun,
and silently shelters bands
of birds, when day is done.

Distilled from summer, and its reckless flow,
Autumn arrives, with quiet contemplations.
The rubied rose, the wine-warm winds that blow,
through summer's halls, subside to hesitation.
That torrent of luxuriant, flowering dreams,
which crowded the night in wild, entangling vines,
is sighing down; a gently flowing stream,
later to well in pools of mellowed time.
More distant - more mellow - golden rays of sun
soften to tempered light, in wisdom's fashion.
Guardian now of seed, it has begun
to hallow the fields with quiet, cool, compassion.
Touched by distant rays of Timeless peace,
leaves fall in a rain of calm release.

Birds huddle in their nests.
Streets are dark and silent.
The crescent moon
has followed the sun's cloud-cloaked descent,
hours ago.

A restlessness moves us through the rooms,
seeking a calm not delivered by promising beds.
It is the mind that cannot rest;
that whinneys and paws the soil of our solidity.
We are agitated with its wanderlust.

Tethered to a weary body,
both are worn by the conflict,
until - at last - heavy exhaustion
sinks down to hard, numb,
rock-heavy sleep.

Flakes of Autumn sunlight,
drifting down,
settle on stores and pavement,
of the street.

Gold coins
of Van Gogh light,
adorn the passing crowd;
unaware they are spangled people-seas.

Only the Artist
can spend these.

Out of the tumult of the cities,
they come in weariness,
to the wilderness anew.
Communing again with mountain, stream, and forest;
finding lost dignity in regal hills,
and peace - long overdue.

Hills and streams - companions of the ageless;
quiet, untroubled air,
offers silent solace to the soul,
lifting the dull ennui; the anxious care.

The Winter storm may bring its fury,
carving rock and land, through endless time;
streams may swell and roll; creatures contest;
yet - it is Nature - awesome and sublime.

There is purpose in Nature's ways.
There are conflicts, seasons of frozen fate;
violence, compassion, and death.
yet -she only acts to compensate.

They come again, the weary sons and daughters,
building rustic cabins amid the trees.
As companions, they join the wilderness;
share its creature's wealth; its rhythmic ease.

New Pioneers ! Pioneers of the Soul !
Friends to the land of ages, ancestral, and strong.
A thoughtful, reverent host.
A guarded plume of smoke from a cabin chimney,
signals the sky again;
the Indian Ghost.

The Moon's face, veiled,
in silver and purple sheen,
flashes intermittently on the fields.

Cool white,
her gaze remains serene,
open and calm,
above the watching hills.

Shifting shades
move silently through the night;
a robed procession, on pilrimmage,
with their Queen.

The desert flows,
sleepy with cool delight.
Our dreams emerge,
and drift into the scene.