Gratitude

I'm sorry it wasn't till the end of the year
that I asked you to write about yourselves. You filled pages…

Thanks to the clouds on fire, the burning sunset,
and every diminishing as beautiful as time.
Thanks…

When you looked up and said, “Thank you,” I saw
your gratitude rise over us like rain.
It seemed external…

a man is killed in Mobile, Alabama. It is 1981, nearest what some will call the last lynching in America…

I’m here
             to tell you 
                             an old story. 
                             This
Appears to be
                 my work.
                                I live
                                in the world,
Walk
         the streets…

The feel of a much needed hug in a moment of sorrow
An unexpected helping hand from the stranger
The curl of the tiniest of fingers wrapped trustingly around your own
A gentle breeze on the cusp of Autumn
And the way a leaf...

Remember

you are not poor.
Your wealth is Infinite.
It is ever present.
It cycles and circles and ebbs and flows
and shows itself in traditions
in food
in music
in health
in relationships
in creativity
in passion
in curiosity
in laughter
in your finances
in the children
in animals
in learnings
in Spirit
in Nature

in the prayers paving...

I wish I had hiked the frozen hill tonight 
for reception, called to tell you I had a good time 

hearing the two Somali cab drivers laughing 
near an avalanche of on-sale oranges.  

I played a prince in absolute awe 
as the orchestra soared....

Que será, el café of this holy, incorporated place,
the wild steam of scorched espresso cakes rising
like mirages from the aromatic waste, waving
over the coffee-glossed lips of these faces
 
assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia,
of tastes that swirl with the delicacy...

Dear ferocious dreamer. Dear maven of song and surveyor of every flung star. Dear meandering romantic, audacious witness, dear listener with the whole of your covetous heart. Dear listener to the air’s brutal and gorgeous music, soft dancer to ballads...

O transient voyager of heaven!
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ To dungeons where a prisoner lies?

Methinks the hands that shut the sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠So sternly from this morning's brow
Might still their rebel task have done
⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠ And checked a thing...

There is a bat
In Chile named
Micronyteris giovanniae
Dr. Robert Baker named it
After me. He discovered it
While studying bats
And thought the big ears
Were just like me
Maybe if the bat wrote
She would be
A poet

There is a plaque
In Lincoln Heights
Where I went
To school
And a...

reveals itself in retrospect. Unlike the first,
whose March arrival bade you gasp, hands clasped,
like a child actor instructed to show joy, when the last
departs for points south, there’s no telling,
and no tell. Well, so what? You know their cycle.
In August,...

I swim my laps today, slowly, slowly,
reaching my arms out & over, my fleshly oars,
the water silken on my skin, my body still able
to be a body & resting at the pool’s lip,
I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how...

you mean well, but
when I say I hurt         when I say some part of
my body hurts      and you say oh, did you do something?
I hear       what did you do? As is, it's your fault,
there's...

The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions
about what might do to make your life
work better, she stares you down and doesn’t say
a word about your past. She brings you a thousand days,
a thousand suns effortlessly each morning rising.
She lets...

Think of the fox skins belted to the backs of the dancers

at Santo Domingo Pueblo, a thousand fox skins leaping.

The first year I heard the bells around their waists.

The second year I heard the drum inside my belly.

The third year...

After the words of the magnificence and doom,
After the vision of the splendor and the fear,
They go out slowly into the flowery meadow,
Carrying the casket, and lay it in the earth
By the grave’s edge. The daisies bend and straighten
Under the...

Blue plums in the pewter bowl—
may they wake wet in the earth the wren singing
and cull the sweetest violet.
But the children sleep secure in blankets.

I climbed by spinning arms and legs against walls,
awakened waist-deep in the water-well;
wrestled the black bull...