QUAN YIN

to see into the eyes of woman's love
shakes the deepest roots of ancient trees
that hold this earth together


MOMENT

While we're in this moment
as of everything that ever was
a sleight of time,
and pulled you from a high silk hat,

let's disregard its meaning in a maze
that's nothing in the overview
as one who searches inside out
for answers that can best be called escape.

There's no escaping from a single moment
where we dreamed of ancient forests
in our eons of ascension from historic bogs,
and theater successful with illusions.

But if one falling snowflake had imprinted
in its crystal maze a message that all things
have happened in this moment
that you caught it on your tongue,
could you also have the presence
of a simpleton before a trout
that leaps the sun bright ripples washing
through your moment
fading now?


BONES

white
without permission
cleaned and bleached

dejected bones
expound in silence
like an optimistic faith
is undermined
where future goes

nothing lives there now
amongst the stripped
and barren jumble trapping
sand behind its barricade

blanching in the sun
calcium is more
than bad comparison
to Roman ruins

bones are left
to show remains
of all the unacceptable
pared down to simple means

and nothing grows there
after that but glory
of the fiction we were fed

son of man
can these bones walk?


PAINTED LIGHT

Light is only deeper than reflecting water,
and shapes our movement in its passing.
I beheld your form for just a minute of today,
and all the light and dark of you diminished
as I turned another page.
It wasn't that you passed into another turning
of this world, and then vanished into evening
and its clustered starpoints,
nebulizing where we cannot go.
It's here the sun is painting whom we are,
and all we are is light and shadows moving
in our moments filled with tedium and toil.
Stillness in that passing second genuflects
in reverence to the light upon your face,
and tells me that your heart is lighter
than the feather it is weighed against.
I watched you walking through the turning day,
and I knew you only by the brushing sound
of thunder that I feel
through deafening silence of light.


BAMBOO

clean fallen
smooth dropping
segments holding altogether
swiftly scything wind

and archers bending
bowstrings
to a distant morning
whistling hollow shafts
to birds unhindered

sudden unseen blades
already through their slashing
mark how certainly
the future has arrived

we danced among the parallels
of leaning light
and waved to evenings gathering
gusts of passing leaves

so quickly
in the brittle snap
of cleanly severed lines
a shining wind has thrust its steel
into the exquisite


APPLE ORCHARD

Light is never lost among a shadow.
Arching limbs prepare their gathering hold
on sun rays over spending blossoms.
A heavy hum of bees
defy those darkening stripes of shadow
as if they were a ghost of prisons
fading in the memory of the free.
Overpowering scent of blooms pervade
and overcome the soberest constitutions,
making drunkards rue the falsity that passed
for what they would have loved.

Two lovers run
through petal-falling streams of light,
impounding better sense that hides behind
my dark arthritic pain and cynic heart.
Still they have the power
to convey their dreams
and leave behind the shades of better sense.
Shadows would have been their home
had not a silliness of scented love
staved off appointed guardians
whose injuries become our own.

Foolishness shall reign
while orchards bloom before the apples
in their rooted sense.
Propriety and ethos will suspend themselves.
Fruit of ripened succulence
makes passionate breath avail,
and birth brings forth a sagely elder,
slightly with a grin.

Light was never lost among the shadows.
At worst it flickers at the moment of our birth,
exploding into novas as we breathe our last,
and settles into memories of apple sunsets
touching on an orchard-filled
discrepancy of blooms.


THINGS WE KNOW

There are some things we know
that mount upon a cornerstone
of summer melting candle wax.
Once we knew what lit our way
and told our children twice today
of labor that we dignified with pain.
Nothing worth a kippered herring
bares itself as easy as a random theft,
or honesty is something spoken
once upon a temple
made of broken stone.
These things we knew
before the risen tide had covered paths
we passed for certain in the trusted dark,
but face the daylight not the same
as shadows that have moved again.

There are some things we know
that never change in cycles
as a spiral risen skyward
like an axle free of wheels that turn
toward places that are left to burn.
Some things we know
that never have a name
still hover over fingers on the keys
unlocking music from imprisoned pain.
Somewhere under bones that fail
we know these things are palpable
as polished stones that hide beneath
a surface of illusionary light.


TAO CANNOT BE TOLD

particles of dust
lifting in a pane of light

a withering daffodil
that knows eternity

the sudden gust of air
from...