Except For This Poetry

 

Except For This Poetry

Nothing exists except for this poetry,
these perfect words with lines and curls
I once would have written with pen.
I do now and again
but I fear they will be misread
or
others misled by their
meaning.

Look into my spiral notebooks or the
first journal I carried on a plane in 1972
and you will likely conclude
I was a teenage boy with long hair and
sad eyes.

And yet
if you read the files on my computer today
you might conclude much the same except my
age is nearly reversed. I wrote better 60
years ago.
I colored well outside the lines and if I
could not find the words
I invented them.
Now I just write about what I did back then.

What I know for sure, the molten elements at my core
have not changed in half a century. The tectonic plates
have shifted,
the tides have lifted driftwood from islands I will
never visit.
But magnetic north has not slipped far enough
to matter.
Liquids, gasses, and solids play the dance we try to
solve instead of romancing the turning of the hours.

Everything exists except for this poetry,
these scribbled words never green, but blue or black
between the lines without a pencil or eraser.
I do not fear another misreading. The last thing I write
will only be misleading

If you have not taken the time to scribble some
of your own.

I Reach For

I Reach For

(“I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand and say to you, ‘Don’t be afraid; I will help you.’” Isaiah 41:13)

Before melodies reach the boundaries where snow and
summer meet
I reach beyond the arid breath for someone’s forgotten smile.

The heat of uncertainty and the chill of maxims

leave me shoeless to cross the expanse of cracked earth
riverbeds. The petrified trees no longer wave in the breeze,
while gray lizards examine the painted desert as if they had
imagined every stroke of the brush.

I have loved more and seen less,
have ached deeper and floated so shallow my legs
dragged the bottom of flooded ponds. It all depends
on the weather this year, or next. Or the invitations
to dine on a wraparound porch (which I would likely accept)

Except

By the time we arrive my pain beckons me back home inside.

But the melodies will not cease, though they are harder to hear.
The monotony increases the white noise, the silence creases my
affections in perforated sections torn by the distant vistas unvisited.

Shall I stay quiet and go along for the ride? And yet the Mojave and
its wildness
invites me to find the others who wander out of time. I might have
been inclined to join them, or climb the butte, or descend the canyon

before the criminal pain that squeezes me dry became my calendar
and clockwork.

How shall I appease the voracious cry for more than sitting inside?
How shall I embrace a dearest friend when I have only a few minutes to lend?
How shall I explore, discover, seek and find what I started as a mission
and now is stuck dry?

How shall I know that the hand I reach for has already reached for
and taken mine?