On the sociology of Cranes

Cranes mate for life, and
After doing their courting dances,
Make large marsh nests from local supplies-
Cattails, sedges, burr reeds, bulrushes, or grasses-
And other sturdy nearby terms.
Together, they hone the nest which she
Usually designs while he supplies. They both
Guard their eggs from coyotes,
Owls and others by spreading wings
And thrusting their legs at their enemies
In a grand show of protection
After fledglings fledge
The parents move on
To hang out with other
Empty nesters. And they
Venture on into
New adventures
Together alone.

Trees tell us our names to us if we listen.

Tonight, the trees are ours
Love. These trees must know our names by now.
In case we forgot them. Or they, their’s.
This blue green silent slick glow of misty evening on leaf tips
memory knows itself
Well enough to know us, still, I’m sure.
On their christening evergreen branches, hanging under unseen weights-power lines and man-made magic-on our own behalf.
Silence and the knowing of our names, speaks freshly in wetness
Eternal us, the trees in our streetlights
Certainly see and re-call Face to faces us.
For we named them as kids
And now rejoice in recalling our own names again,
Called out by our older elder tree
Friends. We all
Broken iced branches at night, sing our names despite us,
Fall slowly as poems through mid air, forgetfully unread,
As rain at night through the branches of an old cold tree.
We each have names, and trees tell us ours on certain nights,
If ya listen well, at least to trees my Love.

Baptism

Growing up church
Christ haunted
Steeples already leaning
Like lightening towers
Impaling and protruding from my gut.

I wanted what it was hiding.
The church was surely a billboard for something.-what
Was it advertising?

Still,
my life was nearly baptized before I got here
I nearly drowned in the water of my grandmother prayers
Before I was here.

Womb waters like mercy. The womb like love of God called Mercy
Was where my contours formed, I’m sure. But I needed water
To go under something. I needed to nearly drown to know.
The tadpole me knew. That much Yet,
I was up to my neck before I realized
The Name of water, even.
Much less my own.
And then, the Jordan River. The warm sinking
Into ancient memory mineralized liquid
Where Jesus went under the first time,
And was recognized…
And, just then, my young nubile body, along with the nibbling fishes
On my knees, skin tingling in desert warmth,
Knew it was loved by something, and so bowed down under something
Bigger than buildings or languages, or the tender hand of my father
Who sent me under. More like
How a baby looks at your face
In babbling wonder when it first comes out.
Or a thousand sermons
Compressed into one haiku of you, one
You can actually listen to-a homily
Of immersion into Love’s sweet wetness…
Before you know Comfort’s kind naming
Or the great dunking, drowning yes to life.
One has to die to know their name.
We submerge to emerge into our names, in The Name of baptism.

Exile and return:

The merrymakers sigh
We say good bye
The tambourines slip off our gowns
Now to night and silence, and
making signpost back this way…but
For now, these warped harps, strung out on bushes, will wait to
play again as friends do.
The Circus is meant to leave town
So it can return.
The women and kids
Will bare tambourines again
And the wine will make merry
The souls of men and women again.

When I met Robert Bly at Harvard
And we spoke of death and Jesus
And he dedicated a poem to me.
His was the renaissance bard’s attire
Red velvet vest, a sideways turned
Bard or clowns cap
He looked like he was secretly working
In the French courts of years ago.
But he also had this infectious twinkle in his eye.
He was a charmer.
And loved what he was reading-mostly his own poems
But also other’s. He read them both with the same fervor
And pitch of nearly glee.
He was a poets poet.
And I’d only met Ginsberg
And Kinnel and Philipe Levine up to that point.
He was more playful than them
And more performing his life as he lived it.
I’ve come to emulate that aspect of him.

Brubeck pressing tenderly towards for us all!
Davis gliding in glory and wet lament
Coltrane making new worlds for them all.
All worlds of the week, collide in confluence
On Saturdays
We need each part of day and night
To make it through.

Tree empathy, after cleaning up many tree limbs today:

After a storm
Trees lament
Our loses. After being iced,
Trees have their own releasing
Sigh, worth listening too well
As we scurry to clean them up
For our own sake mostly,
And keep them praising heavenward.
The roses, though persnickety, ironically
Made it through with no complaints.
Beauty is tenacious like that.
But we need the trees’s raised limbs
To remember where we are
And how to bow well.

Baptism

Growing up church
Christ haunted
Steeples already leaning
Like lightening towers
Impaling and protruding from my gut.

I wanted what it was hiding.
The church was surely a billboard for something.-what
Was it advertising?

Still,
my life was nearly baptized before I got here
I nearly drowned in the water of my grandmother prayers
Before I was here.

Womb waters like mercy. The womb like love of God called Mercy
Was where my contours formed, I’m sure. But I needed water
To go under something. I needed to nearly drown to know.
The tadpole me knew. That much Yet,
I was up to my neck before I realized
The Name of water, even.
Much less my own.
And then, the Jordan River. The warm sinking
Into ancient memory mineralized liquid
Where Jesus went under the first time,
And was recognized…
And, just then, my young nubile body, along with the nibbling fishes
On my knees, skin tingling in desert warmth,
Knew it was loved by something, and so bowed down under something
Bigger than buildings or languages, or the tender hand of my father
Who sent me under. More like
How a baby looks at your face
In babbling wonder when it first comes out.
Or a thousand sermons
Compressed into one haiku of you, one
You can actually listen to-a homily
Of immersion into Love’s sweet wetness…
Before you know Comfort’s kind naming
Or the great dunking, drowning yes to life.
One has to die to know their name.
We submerge to emerge in baptism.

Religion is a supermarket
The clerks have fled the registers
The manager quit last week
And people are grabbing avocadoes
Like they never had one
The echo of the sacred
Is barely heard.
The phosphorescent lights are blinking
In the inorganic section.
An old lady
In a wheelchair is praying
Silently to herself,
On aisle three.
I announce
Over this
Loud speaker
Dangling as it is
For any old voice
To say
At least
Something
Of value.
I had to speak
Before it’s all
Gone.

The merrymakers sigh
The wine won’t make happy
The tambourines have fallen from the dancer’s hands
Each stone is cursed
And the falcon is dizzy
The steeple has fallen
A host of god run the streets
Like greek gang members
Jesus never left
He’s just obscured
And hangs at the corner car wash
Waiting for extra change.

//
After 911
Life was heavy
Traveling wasn’t as innocent
It got serious fast.
The pretty girls left the party early
The morning birds waited til noon to sing
Less and fear, more depression
Swept the elections. And
The earth groaned
And us merrymakers
Sighed.