Thursday, March 28, 2013

Potential

I drop a pebble into the well and sound out the past.
I climb down into the discussion.
The well is tall like a silo and wide like a meadow.
It is full like the archtype of a seaside town.
     Teachers whisper in the trees.
The eternal one completes something out of nothing.
The acorn gets something from something.

The genius delivers a rock to stand on while the ballet
is first pointing.
The curtain ripples while the dance is finishing.
I see creations yet to set sail.
I lose myself on the prow of their windswept decks
while walking restless on their stern.
Sail by the innocent, blue beginnings of their journey.
The quoted enlightenment vanishes into the emergence
of your craft.

It takes time to build trust with the elders.
I find a wire, meshing cylinder in the garden.
Its subject is rain and resonance.
I eat the spinach leaf, the good green energy of all artists.
The level secret falls into the labor of an hourglass.
Again you have twisted my net into the numerous catch
of the covenant. I agree to take my place in the orchestra
as it retells creation.

Pure, straight lines sail into the birth of your presentation.
Gandalf the Grey has waited a lifetime to see this color.
     You seduce the extremes of black and white.
An artist has written the code of sun and circle.
The kitchen is placed in the narrative.
Ramblers are all over the series of your pasture paths.
The Peace Pilgrim travels far into the harmony.
She walks without money in all seasons into the heart of the public.
She chooses navy blue for her sayings while you choose
a lighter color that reveals the dirt of plainspoken spirituality.

The fertilizer of your four seasons is left in the adjustment
of a blank piece of paper.
She reverberates with Zen in the coasts between your canvas.
The guest is in the fabric. The blinding white of snow and robes
     is somewhere in your brushstrokes.
Your retreat, an idyll meal between space and time,
has left as many marks as a child.

The telling ways of your studio have settled into geologic time.
The territory of your thought is effaced like a country road.
The poverty of perception is crumbling into the authority of the sage.
I play the new age blues in defense of your groove,
but your music is also older than the continent
it brings to the surface.
Broadcast the music that yet stirs my soul.
The sower is on the radio again,
planting the hint of a baseball game.
     My dad and I both followed baseball.

The Empty Cup:

Fate is like a venerable draftsman who clips the piece of chalk
to his reckoning compass. I am sitting in drafting class.
The circle is so perfect that for the first time I realize
there is something behind the blackboard, another life
where I am not really here but am at home,
helping my dad feed the chickens.
My dad taught himself chemistry in between doing the chores.
He learned the names of the elements in a one room schoolhouse.
Yes, he would imagine the men stacking haybales on the flatbed.
He writes on a chalkboard the formula for dissolving salt
in a sentence construction.
What if I have another life where I choose not to be a poet
but instead am the son of a farmer?
My dad grew up to be a physicist
who always wore casual clothes to work.
He teaches me how to visualize the structure of my best poem.
     My life, realized in the sunshine,
is to my parents the sweetest thing in the world. They see me
as the product of a dear succession of learning experiences.
I am with my dad at the office as he works late, but I am also the boy
who waits for him to come home so we can have a catch.

:The Full Cup

There is a coffee shop where we meet
as strangers who are not so strange.
Bring your meandering line to the well where I dip the empty cup
of our discussion. My father and I irrigate the wheat fields.
We harvest the undulating syntax of your experiment.
I approve of your twig grammar and the way you spell the new ways
     of a flower's final season.

Our speech is hidden in the unborn silver of your nets.
I gently fold the germ into words fit for the last day.
A missing page is found in the ebb and flow or your punctuation.
The streaks of your constitution are shelter
for the gentle pressure of becoming.