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prayer

There is a little dirt road called Low Gap Road that winds into the hills west of Ukiah to the ocean. Not long after I moved into the Ukiah area to work for REBOL Technologies in ’99, I found myself exploring this road looking for a place pray.

prayer

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

Ever since I was a runaway, as I went through my various spiritual-religious phases, I would seek out remote places in the mountains to pray. Prayer has had many meanings to me throughout my life. It began with pleas for my safety and well-being and migrated steadily toward seeking out understanding, sanity, peace of mind, and stillness of spirit. Mixed throughout have been requests for others who have touched my life. Ever present has been a desire to seek out god’s will for me, and the power to carry that out—a lasting echo from my teen and adult exposure to 12-step rooms and precepts.

Throughout my life, while praying in the night, it has been rare that I would do so without seeing a shooting star. I can remember when this began. I was still 15, and not long on my own as a runaway. One night on the top of a mesa near Kingman, Arizona, I made ready to sleep and found myself completely overwhelmed by anxiety and hunger. It was cold, and through the little round breathing hole of my sleeping bag I peered up at the stars and cried, praying. The moment I told the stars that I just wanted to know that everything would somehow be okay, a star fell across the length of my field of vision. I can still remember the sudden calm that practically tingled in my limbs. And an instant faith. A faith I have never lost.

This is how my hilltop prayers began.

I had a friend who worked as the head librarian at Mendocino College, the community college just north of Ukiah, who was dying of colon cancer. She was a quiet yet powerful influence on my life, in ways I don’t quite understand, but in ways I can say with certainty inspired me to go the direction I went with studying and writing poetry long term.

One night at this place of prayer on Low Gap Road I asked for her to be healed, and just as I finished asking two shooting stars, bright with long arching trails, shot across the night just in front of me, horizon to horizon, one above the another. I must have misinterpreted this response because about a year later my friend lost her battle with the cancer. My own father’s death never struck me with such savage pangs of loss.

After her passing in 2002 I visited my place of prayer I think once more, and then all but forgot about it. And since then to now I have not sought out another place for prayer.

A few nights ago I remembered Low Gap Road, suddenly, as if a voice just whispered it into my thoughts. And I found myself filled with ambivalence at the thought of returning for a visit.

I decided to go. And once there just stood silent—for over an hour—playing my bansuri flute in the night. Finally I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at the night and found myself saying, “I guess I feel betrayed.” And went back to playing my flute.

A while later as I played, I turned to look west at the risen moon, and just then a shooting star fell toward the north.

I don’t claim to understand any of this. But this poem, my 23rd terzanelle, was inspired by my reflections on it all.

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missing

Sometimes when a kid runs away from the residential home for children I work at, I can’t help but be a little worried. Most of them are not capable of making healthy choices out there on their own, or of protecting themselves from the most dangerous of predators—the mammals that walk on two legs.

missing

what will become of you?

your meal-back waits silent
  cold as the grave

three slices of turkey
industrial green beans
  exhausted in a pile and
mashed potatoes
  tipping from the edge
  of the topmost slice
all soaked in brown gravy
  glistening in a dull dim pool
  from the styrofoam

at regular intervals
  AWOL marks your absence
even your ghosts have gone
  slithering off to whisper
  doubt and foreboding
behind your mud brown eyes

the roads are long
  the streets dusty with soot
  tapped from the heals of fear
and predation

you never took that one slow breath
  hands trembling eyes twitching
you never breathed down
  into the heart of your anguish
  giving it room to rise
into understanding

down the hall your room
  gapes in the stillness
bed neatly made
writing desk arranged
  the dorm radio outlined
  in hushed gray hues

the city’s cracked walls
  harbor a quiet will to
  cull out the weakened
passing cars carry menace
  sharp white smiles cheerful
  with an unsettling calm
anticipating indulgence

your meal-back waits silent
  at the edge of the office desk
  on plastic wood veneer
across the narrow room
  plastic fluffs the hollow
  gray of a tin garbage can
and it too waits
  for the nearly plastic cold
  of your neglected dinner

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craft

My 11th trisect—And pure metaphor, apparently. Segment one depicts the word, or more specifically the morpheme. Segment two depicts the line, as in a line of poetry. And segment three depicts the process of writing poetry. Talk about abstract.

   craft

   rock

pressed in ancient beds of granite, slate and limestone,
         latent meaning morphs through dreamless sleep,
   eventually to break the rolling waves and rise
      from out the heavy hollows of the deep.

            eons steadily reveal
   frameworks laid beneath the ground,
         raw potentials long concealed.

rugged hands reflect on broken bits of earth,
         weathered through millenniums of doubt,
   and dimly sense potentials waiting undiscerned,
      conceptions to be learned and reasoned out.

            soon flames are tamed in hearthstone mounds,
   grains are pounded into meal,
         and slings are armed with small gray rounds.
 

   artifacts

barrows seal the homes where bones return to dust;
         dolmens house the disembodied dead—
   expressions raised to honor dear departed blood,
      conveyed throughout millenniums of dread.

            boundaries birth a web of walls,
   stretched throughout diverse terrain,
         enclosing keeps and township halls.

hallowed chambers echo whispers, murmured rites.
         columns vault gray shadows to a haze,
   and effigies defy the cruelties of time
      amid the slow decline of ancient ways.

            castles rise on golden plains
   and mountain palaces enthrall
         ridge tops in the sunset’s wane.
 

   trace

ages past are carved and mortared into place,
         stacked against the ravages of wear,
   impressions left to echo long forgotten days
      across the centuries of grueling care.

            quarries reach through hidden lodes
   for raw materials to build
         nascent hopes and strong abodes.

waters feed the ducts of resolute invention,
         wind buffets walls of praise and grave regret,
   towers guard their gates from sinister intention,
      bridges keystone over streams and vales. and yet

            each rigid monument of skill
   brick by stone in time erodes,
         erasing every act of will.

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moods

My 128th ghazal, inspired by a woman with deep brown eyes.

moods

a clarity settles deep in her soft amber eyes
and peace wells up from nearly fathomless eyes

adventure lures the heart to the mystery
of sidelong glances cast from her earthen eyes

imagination paves her path with promise
where patience lightly walks with brownstone eyes

hope found refuge under the feathery green
of one long look into her mahogany eyes

she cheers the sunbathed home of inspiration
with a glittering veneer of cherry-wood eyes

love tastes of strawberry kisses beneath dark curls
coated with the cream of her dark chocolate eyes

compassion sways against the sprawling skies
praying up to the stars with terrestrial eyes

Instead of qafiya, or that species of rhyme that occurs just before the radif (refrain), I used words loosely hyponymous with the color brown for an associative parallelism.

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shimmer

I had maybe five hours sleep over course of four days when I wrote this, and I had just come off a 20 minute break at work, which involved a fitful nap fraught with sleep paralysis and vivid “dreams” that I mistook for actual goings on. An interesting mix peculiar to the narcoleptic.

    shimmer

          footsteps fall
across scattered dreams
     i hear your voice
  but see no face

          a radio drones
in a nearby half-lit room
     a body stirs beneath
  light brown covers

          something moves
outside in the dark
     creaking almost silent
  above the ceiling

          i try to ask your name
my lips won’t move
     and my voice grants no expression
  to the wind

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sunyata

A friend of mine, a scholar of Buddhism and traditional Chinese, has recently been talking about how ‘sunyata’ is grossly mistranslated into English and misunderstood in the West as ‘nothingness’, when the most accurate translation would be ‘evanescence’.

When he first mentioned this I thought to myself, “Well then, I guess that makes sense.” Everything about life and every moment has always seemed evaporative to me.

I didn’t quite know what the title of this would be when I started writing it, but about halfway through, ‘sunyata’ seemed like a perfect fit. Still feels like a perfect fit. So, my 23rd villanelle.

sunyata

fill with evanescent light
every momentary cell
coursed throughout imagined form

every vessel heart to limb
pulsing moments on to self
fill with evanescent light

illuminate each hidden fold
churning vapors through the soul
coursed throughout imagined form

every fiber bound to life
linking bone to skin be still
fill with evanescent light

elucidate this vital force
streaming like an endless swell
coursed throughout imagined form

every sorrow pain and fret
breathing mixed amid the silt
fill with evanescent light
coursed throughout imagined form

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Musing out loud

Been wanting to play more with imaginative poems that tell a story of some sort. So, here’s one. Going for the vague approach for the time being. I like vague. I like interpretable.

Musing out loud

I’ll wait for you here.
  I trust you’re not far.
          It was you who called me,
      after all.

I still remember.
  I lived in decay,
          the kind that can’t be overcome
      by strength or will.

In the cellar of broken dreams
  you shone your light
          and found me, emaciated,
      covered in cobwebs.

You left the old door open,
  standing just outside,
          and read out loud, so I could see
      stories in darkness.

Many seasons passed.
  But I finally emerged,
          lured to the sound
      of your lyric visions.

You placed one hand
  firm on my shoulder,
          and my knees nearly buckled
      from weakness.

You said, “Now you’ve come,
  emerged into light.
          And you’ll never return
      to the shadows.”

We walked.
  You talked of potential,
          of patience and study
      and time.

I listened.
  I watched the clouds climb
          where mountains reach out
      to the skies.

You talked of acceptance,
  the power of faith,
          a trust in the value
      of learning.

I listened,
  and built castles of sand
          and watched them return
      to the sea.

Then I suddenly saw it,
  the long steady path
          you had been hinting at
      with breadcrumb words.

It was covered in shrubs,
  weaves of poison oak,
          and the old fallen branches
      of deeply rooted tears.

And I found myself
  shifting the past years’ leaves
          beneath an uncertain tread
      of discovery.

Behind me I heard
  your soft-fallen feet
          hardly disturbing
      the settled breath of dew,

and the sound of your voice,
  naming the leaves,
          the blossoms, stones and creatures
      on the way.

And each had a story,
  of birth and being—
          the stones that weep dreams;
      the earthquake birth of ravens;

the old madrone
  who clothed the fox with her bark
          so he would not be cold;
      the star that seeded lilies.

And each was a marvel,
  a touch of understanding,
          a fresh new flash of light
      in my soul.

We came to a cabin,
  moons along the way,
          filled with lost ideas
      and empty pages.

I lit the candles,
  read beneath the darkness,
          and penciled meditations,
      brief as lake-borne mist.

Collecting berries,
  I played with long dead lyrics,
          reciting little moments
      to the wind.

One day you told me,
  “This time is yours.
          You can never really own it
      while I remain.”

And so you left,
  assuring you’ll return
          when one day I am ready
      to skim the stars.

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subjectivity

Just did a little reading about an old Russian art movement called suprematism, manifesto and all. Kind of a curious thing. It was originated by an artist, Kazimir Malevich, around 1913, and he declared the movement ended in 1920. The only art movement I can think of whose originator eventually decided to end it. Never mind, though, Malevich was apparently charismatic enough to draw in a few adherents to suprematism, who continued creating supposedly suprematist artwork and writing (one Russian poet played with it) well after Malevich ended his movement. I guess if you don’t want something to take on a life of its own, don’t publicize it.

Anyway, Malevich was inspired by cubism and futurism to start this movement. In effect, suprematism is a sort of combination of the two. Cubism is basically artwork comprised of representational industrial shapes and angles like cubes and circles. Futurism is the extreme abstraction of the same.

Malevich, apparently, saw some metaphysical connections and called his attempt to bring them out ‘suprematism’.

So, here’s my stab at it, just for metaphysical cubist kicks.

subjectivity

clear your mind white
empty the canvas of thought

paint a black circle
a ring of smoke

outside is all the void
inside the void of self

scrape the inner edge
with a triangle’s black points

spirit thought and body
trapped within the void

now fill the black triangle
with questions feelings doubts

a snail crushed underfoot
a daughter crushed by steel

a spider’s shriveled figure
a mother’s crinkled corpse

a fly smashed by the swatter
a son smashed by debris

a red fox snared in iron
a father trapped in credit

it all lasts but a moment
the circle snaps and fades

and the triangle’s edges scatter
to join the canvas white

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Presence

Sometimes it seems as if the unit I keep watch over at night is in some way haunted. There are so many times I would see something move toward me down the long dark hall—something there and yet not there, tangible and yet intangible—only to watch it dissipate back into nothing once it reached the cone of light cast from the bathroom.

The kids, asleep in their rooms, would stir as it moved past. And once in awhile it would dip into a doorway, followed a moment later by an anguished cry from the child that sleeps there. I would go down to look, only to find the child sound asleep and nothing else, save a strange cold sensation in the air.

Presence

A shadow slips
      from the corner of my mind
   beneath a random lintel
joined with darkness

A muffled sob
      stirs beneath gray sheets
   as walls absorb
the thuds of restless sleep

The shadow blurs
      across the long dark hall
   and slides between
the jambs of dreamless rest

A long strained moan
      struggles from the gloom
   and crawls half noticed
toward faded shades of light

The shadow flickers
      dust from mothen wings
   into the hollows
of one more dusky room

A sudden holler
      echoes down the hall
   a broken sorrow
cursed into the night

The shadow rustles
      like shaken autumn leaves
   into the twilight
waking in the east

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Contrast

There are strange contrasts where I work. Inside it’s like a sort of grave—dingy, dark, dismal. Outside there is the Ukiah valley and the vibrant green hills nearby. There are cherry trees that grow just outside, and in the spring the contrast becomes even more pronounced.

Contrast

Sealed from the world
beside the drone of a dirty
ten gallon tank of goldfish
I look down the hall to hear
hidden in the splotchy half-dark
a cherry blossom breeze
and the twittering light refrains
of a yellow crested finch

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acceptance

Sometimes something breaks within ourselves, and the psyche is terrifically disfigured. Yet sometimes this becomes part of our growth and strength and not the cause of destruction.

acceptance

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.