Beautiful in its glory, the mask as thin as gossamer
as fragile as the mist rolls in, as vagueness is its glory;
the child leaves the hospital without a mark upon her
but the cipher of her living is the mark she carries in her
and she staggers as though broken, she’s the standing-stone forever:
so their quicksilver and cameras could find no trace of dying
while they wonder’d as they wander’d through the mirrors of her hallway
on the mask as thin as gossamer, the mist that we call beauty

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
not fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

As though an apple fell
on my head I stopped
what I was doing
looked up

Oh - it’s you

Sometimes a prayer is answered
before the words are said;
but since you were not listening
you say them anyway

The apple falls
when the earth calls
for its seed

Oh, it is you

And when your prayer
is met with silence
you curse
the miser god
who gave you everything

Love
my last and greatest companion
this heaviness will pass…
just a salt wind from the ocean
stale air before the storm
that seems can never break
will break

I thought once that the source of our creativity was the height of our joy – but then I found it difficult to write about joys without writing also of sorrows. I found it difficult to kiss without also feeling the tears, or dance without feeling the pull gravity somewhere in my heart. It slows, you know, the heart slows in its beating, as though it were in less and less of a hurry, has less somewhere to be, or less desire to be there. I found it difficult to smile without remembering…

Here’s the script: from an early age your interest in intimately knowing what my daughter would call the Greater Spirit (I like that) drew you to science, to the arts, to T’ai chi and yoga, to cooking and foods, to learn, to learn, to learn.

And along that wild and sinuous path, you do learn - or at least, you make some decisions: these things I hold true, for now, until further learning modifies or disproves them. I have written poetry for some years, well, since I was a boy, so now it is lots of years. And it dawned on me (that’s a nice turn of phrase, if you think about it) it dawned on me that a poet’s poetry rests on the fact that everything is in everything else, that all the things around us and far away from us are made from the same stuff of Being, and so being, has at their core a common thread. When a poet opens her mind or his mind to that broad ocean, metaphor isn’t only obvious, it is inescapable.

Under the cover of darkness, or in the blaze of mid-day, there are the brief encounters with the teacher: the real teacher. When we are young or when we are misinformed, the lessons are ignored or avoided. As though that final test could be dismissed, no thank you, I prefer not. It cannot be dismissed. Under the cover of darkness, when we are most exposed, or in the blaze of mid-day, when we least expect it, we are offered these little practice sessions. Just listen! It is Guará come back not to haunt, and neither to taunt, but to instruct.

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
-- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

With even a few years, the act of creation begins to blend itself with the feeling of loss, as the cycle of seasons turns round and round. Some traditions have seen the wheel as pain, where what is given is taken away, and what is made crumbles. It is perhaps the habit of all living creatures to associate the pain of loss with failure, and a single tear in the eye washes beauty away.