Loose Change

Jesus is like loose change in your pocket.
You never know the exact amount.
Coins are tossed together like salt and pepper.

My words have dates on a farmer's calendar.
Harvest is a line between harness and moon.
Silver linings are planted in the unsung life.

The dimples of your smile are caught in the dime
cornering the rain.
The heartbeat of a coin is like two ears of corn
given to the boy who counts the money in a round word.
The value of a nickel is almost more
than the overlooked penny.
Those who find the two kernels in their mind
are closer to dust on a rainy day.
The cords are pulled like a match across the night sky.

Jesus is a Relief Pitcher

My worldly discussions are ready to be won
by a strike out artist without sin,
without an earned run to his name.
How can Jesus so completely shut down the opposition
in a contest that began with the national anthem
of the big bang?
We're beginning to get on friendly terms.
The conversation is getting kindled.
I'm climbing a tree to get a better view of the bullpen.
I'm watching a relief ace who was here before
the pastime was drawing crowds eager to see
the afternoon saved by the crack of a bat.
In the bullpen, the pitcher and catcher are having a toss
as casual as dress down day.
We are learning the game as it was discovered
in one of Leonardo de Vinci's sketchbooks.
Did the workhorse get his team through the initial innings
with his pitcher's will alone?
Whatever we have is not enough,
but someone wants us to place our trust
in a save situation.
     Jesus is a relief pitcher.
How present we are when we gaze into His specialist's eyes.
The Son of Man gets the call from upstairs.
He trots onto the field with many numbers on His back.
The opposition laughs nervously at His flowing robes.
It's an honor to strike out against the game's leading closer.
We go deep in the count as Jesus brushes the corners of the plate.
The pitches glide with the natural seconds of His reaction.
The letters of redemption are written across His chest.

A Grape

Modesty is to humility as mania
is to a babe learning to ask for more.
Our children are handed the future for a grape.
Be humble in the vineyard of our technologies.
Are we gods or caretakers or both?
This was all given us by a savage who also
wondered at birds.
He became the new Adam eating at the question
locked away in galaxies.
All wonder ceased.
It was as if the birds finally stopped singing
because someone bought the rights to their songs.
We drive by the play list every day,
however gas stations are not for praise,
but someday they will.
It became attractive to fly farm boys
and coal miners' sons around the great tree.
The girls would become teachers if it suited them.
Finally, the thinking is catching up with the music.
How plentiful a meal is when shared without packaging!
How would the blues sound if Mississippi
was another planet, and the earth was her only moon?

Fixing Up a Place

I'm fixing up a place next to heaven's castle.
You're appearing in the windows. I'm watering the plants.
You're cleaning the cobwebs from my mind.
We're sweeping the sawdust from the floor.
I'm feeding the animals. You're fencing in the cows.
I'm brushing the dogs and grooming the horses.
I'm keeping You close because you're my salvation.
You're my neighbor. I can see Your right arm from my door.
You're nourishing my roots in the soil of redemption
I'm polishing Your loving cup. It's catching the light.
I'm trimming the weeds from the property line.
I'm setting up camp. You're climbing the mountains.
I'm naming the stars. You're steering the ship.
I'm scrubbing the deck with the captain's verses.
I'm coasting into the output of Your books.
I'm reaching for a twist in the branch of Your freedom.

Mystical Shrine

Heavier than the pyramids is some conscience
we hold about the earth. Our planet, her sorrow,
and a sky remote in answers all call miracles to be worked.
     Take into account the bread of many,
     for answers are in all hands.
I am slow to sunder the view of the dunes.
These sayings have meaning as grass taking root in sand.
The child aspires to live.
Unfortunately for it, it is only posing as a code
for the body to unlearn. Bound to a puzzle,
locked to life, each signal in the sky betters his picture.

The greens in the salad are filling up the space in our
combined exposition. My brevity gives meaning
to your embellishment. The celery is stringing out the pith
of my argument. My humor is securing the home world.
The lowest goal will be the one that finishes.
The phases of conversation are pulling on more certain climates.

My body is useless until I wave the mystical shrine
through my embrace. Stride daydreaming into the midst
of reverence. Constitutionals are taken in the twilight
of my last endearing quip. Humor falls toward cause
in the paper of my unsaid philosophy. I am mime
to the unconditional love of my last logical footstep.
My essay is a world in which I sometimes order things around.
My poetry is a boat in the reply of my almost certain humanity.

The day unfolds. The map unfolds.
Bookmarks keep the day on course in three speeds.
The beginning and end of my life are inches apart.
Individuation is in reach if we just let the world follow us
like a little, lost dog.

All around the ranch the mice race.
By nightfall each mouse is a full fledged mouse
They are shipped to a great brain so big
it needs neurons the size of mice.

We cruise endlessly past orientation on signs always
coming closer. My goddess is just out of reach at the exit
to the next town. Finding reception is delicate, like traveling
across the radio dial. My cottage industry is fed by ivory towers
secure in their seclusion. I spin candle making wicks in the wax
of an unplugged moonrise.

I take sips of water that release tension everywhere.
The danger is that I buy nothing. The information I need
is projected around the city. I follow my favorite saying
into the night, documenting it with my camera.
Travel with your dots back to the time of form.
That is a good saying for the breakdown of the ego.
Perhaps other people are determining my life.
Let them factor in my dreams.   

One system is the beloved. The other is the wind
that sweeps him off his feet. His feet are two keys.
His shoulders are two bottles. His heart is one doorknob.
His suitor's hands shuffle the wild places of his face
and cap the bottles of his journey. My heart calibrates
the space between the lines. I bring my essay of twigs
and goodness into the house of the chief baker.
I hand him the bundle of dials.

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.

The Rake

The world is overcrowded, but the dream world
will never be overcrowded. Drag this world again and again,
and no ecological floor will be harmed.
     The epic battles have all been fought.
     There is no need to finish them.
The rake has been sifting through the decomposition for eons now.
Your players grow scales over their eyes until they drag
their fingers over the hewn stone of ancient fantasies.
I will turn your half eaten swords into ploughshares.
I throw dice with the neck of a philosopher.
The dice tumble into the valley of my soul.
The ocean pulls me between a language and a word.

Ring Upon Ring

The muscles of my face relax as I contemplate
the next few feet of the climb.
History is a picture of an event between two other events,
a climb between two other climbs. The mountain is a mandala.
Ring upon ring, our path reaches for our relation to nature.
Place the setting in the wild. I'll prove to you that it needs
to be portrayed.
The doorframe is close to a cabin open to all beginnings.
The preparation, the days spent making lists are personal history.
The natural world is forever shaped by human hands
     Once there was a perfect idea, but it had gates.
Our making of the world is only a wish to remove those gates.
A point doesn't really exist. Neither does a line for that matter.
They are only concepts. Ideas are not here to serve us.
In fact, we sometimes serve them. They have many lives
and often change their names. They are stoplights
changing on a dark, rainy night when no other traffic is around.

You Are Born

I'm eager to meet you. I hear you're about to materialize.
You don't have a name yet, but that will come in time.
See all these colors. They have names. I will teach them to you.
You are born knowing how to walk.
You are born knowing how to ride a bike.
You will come alive to the names of earth, fire, air,
and water because these are the four classical elements.

You will fill a pair of shoes, and they will take you places.
Look at the sign over there. It says you are about to fall
into a body that was once stardust. In a far land,
you will feel heat and cold for the first time.
You are not that far from the center of the earth.
The sunbeams giving you Vitamin D traveled two minutes
from your closest star. Tonight the stars will rise.
Look at the Big Dipper. That is how it looked more than
two minutes ago.

Every hair on your head is numbered. If you had a twin somewhere
in the world, he might be writing the very same poem.
Did you know that the concept of zero had to be invented?
Did you know that people only started walking for pleasure
in the past two centuries? It's called rambling.
William Wordsworth was the first. The garden of the world
was his office. He was the last poet to speak the language
of the common man.

Language and matter are born teachers. You may want to be
as tall as a tree. You may want to be as unyielding as stone
if that is where your heart leads you. Even grunting and groaning
have a tradition. The singing Neanderthals talked this way.
They put their vocabulary to song to make things more pleasant.
Everything is beautiful. No worries.
     You can feel the presence of a flower or a mountain.
Matter can neither be created or destroyed.

Your thoughts are actually energy from the sun.
Your ideas are making things that can change the appearance
of the world. Doesn't it feel motionless when you're riding
on a train traveling parallel to the freeway.
The best place to walk barefoot is on the beach.
Things wash up on the beach from all over the world.
A sand castle will last if you carry wet sand to build on dry sand.
     Reality is like a film.

There are no continuous actions, only frames.
The few who have traveled the roads of the mind report there
is a point and then another point, but nothing is connected.
These masters leave no footprints behind them,
but what about a novelist like Jim Harrison who creates characters
and listens to their stories. What if you didn't have a body,
but were only a character in fiction? Could you move things?
Could you smell a home cooked meal?
Would you have to eat and drink water to stay alive?