What All the Writing Was For

What All the Writing Was For

(“Stand up! Shine brightly! Now your light has come! The Lord's glory has risen to shine on you.” Isaiah 60:1)

It wasn’t the suffocating clouds that stopped him from breathing,
nor the ice wind that circled his feet.
He could not quite place it, perhaps the solitude had become
his undoing. Perhaps it was not the retreat he needed.
He saw as many stars as
the men in the next valley.
Though hidden, the same sun would crack the sky
occasionally, a hint that things moved the same
direction as they had from the beginning.
But the winter captured every hope and,
reversing course,
froze his loneliness in place.

He loved to see the eagles atop the douglas firs,
the cows and calves nuzzling in the fields. But
the threads
that ran from friend to friend were
too fragile to bind much together these days.
He feared they had broken, and loosened,
had floated with the northern breeze. He
feared they had been dropped into the river.
And he was too weary to weave new tapestries,
too late, too far, too distant, too afraid
to see them unravel again.

So he wrote. He would send it to every pair of eyes
that had ever seen him truly. But they would think him
far more needy
than the man they knew before.
So he wrote. And sent it like paper boats on
the river to
the ocean to
the continent next door.

And he would not be disappointed that
no one answered. How could they know what
all the writing was for?

Dear Friday

Dear Friday

Dear Friday,
I’m writing to say that if I walked into your room
and all my senses were filled,
I could swear it was the first day of summer and not the last.
I smell jasmine and orange, hear jazz and motorhomes
escaping to the lake.
Nearby someone served up strawberries in chocolate,
the boys next door are shooting hoops like they meant it,
sage reminds me of the long days with native friends
just south of Canada. I’m writing to say
that
though joy is bubbling through every sense
there remains this ache,
this loss,
this wince where time has taken its
best shot at my chest.
I want to walk to a downtown with neon signs
that have letters missing.
I want to find a bar where no one knows me and
treats me like a guest.
I’d prefer, to be honest, the company of all the
rest that are too far by geography,
too distant by time,
too removed from my simple misunderstandings of
living ahead of the clock and
behind the calendar that dates my appointments with
no one in particular.

Still, I will sit on my deck this afternoon, start in the
sun
and
end in the shade.
My playlist keeps me company, my chihuahua licks
my fingers before warning the Huskie next door about
wandering too close to her terrain. Not to worry, though,
it is all enclosed by ranch fence. She finally settles in
her favorite corner in the sun.

It's Nothing New

It’s Nothing New

(“Know that the Lord is God—he made us; we belong to him. We are his people, the sheep of his own pasture.” Psalm 100:3)

And here I am, it’s nothing new, everything I’m writing to you.
I feel like a camel, not a sheep, hump ugly and dying to get out
of the heat.

I hear too much about kings and cravings
out here in the backlands. The coast use to be clear,
but now the continent hides the waves where my feet
cooled, where my soul grew like a hot air balloon.

I’m writing to you who
leave the 99 others as soon as the 1
has wandered like a feral cat. I am not feral;
in fact
I’m far too domesticated for my own good.

So bring me back to pastures, I only ask
you give me green and mud,
delicious skies and oceans,
elderly trees and apples barely hanging
like Christmas bulbs late January.

Here I am, it is still nothing new, everything I feel is due to
your absence, or a brain that cannot connect with the arms you offer.
Everything I feel is due to my absence, my soul in limbo,
my worship of pat answers dead on the floor,
my travel stymied by dust and pain;

Otherwise I would stand on the porch of my friend
and knock and enter before he invited me in. But old
friends
(who I still love as deep as adolescence)
are as far from me
as I am from them. This damned vast country

Will not give up its treasures I’ve scattered.

Here I am, still saying nothing that’s new, but you can read it to review
my complaint; and I’m sorry to complain. But I’m just another one of a
hundred
who needs the frolic of the flock, and for a line that stretches
before and during, after and soon, empty and captive, embraced and strewn
across the dimensions and lassoing the clouds.

Am I allowed this miserable silence, these noisy doubts,
and will you take my solitary tears before they run out?

But Your Words

But Your Words

(“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will certainly not pass away.” Mark 13:31)

My magnificence, my manuscript,
my masterpiece, my sheets of handwritten lyrics
and longings double spaced on the old Underwood
were boxed away once I left home for the first time
and from the time until reminded what words meant to me
once I inked them out of mind; it was 20 years.

Sometimes I bragged about them, sometimes bereaved over their loss,
sometimes remembering them, my tour de force, other times
(considering the source) I knew they were derivative,
clunky as bricks and cheap imitations of the poetry gurus
who always caught my breath.

But Your words, paper or heard, can still bring tears
where other words quickly incite new fences around
my acreage.

But Your words, always and now, know the corners of me,
better than the mourners of me who have conditions for my improvement,
who have eyes fixed on my every movement,
who never dissent, but with a turn of phrase, a well-placed accent
distort the courage I crave.

But Your words, spoken unfeigned, wash over craggy blocks
of desert cliffs, the heart held siege by drought, until
shadow and sun, until green leaves appear. The tears
are merely the heart’s irrigation.

I have lost more words than I have written, but never
have forgotten the face that inspired them,
the planet motions that conspired slim volumes of day.

But Your words, laughter or sad, are truer than faces I’ve forgotten,
tracing hope like a halo, a love so fearful I sometimes shudder
and wonder why I think even one word I’ve uttered
is worth remembering

When Your words, thunder and still, find the wound
and without lecture, pierce the callous and soften
until I hear better what I have heard so often.