How Thee Tree

Thy grand and effusive tree

Your whisper does rustle high out of reach

Rolling from your thousand green tongues

Carried upon any number of breeze.

Oh wooden lash upon the cheek of this hill

Tell me what happened yesterday when

I was not standing where I stand now.

What came upon you with the brilliance of noon or

Nuzzled you in the shadow of a shepherd’s moon?

What brought you to this place?

And I am referring to this precise place?

Majestic tower of hope, soothsayer of the glen

Bestow your knowledge held high in those knitted bows

And reveal the catalogue of ringed memories

Collecting in your belly of trust.

Acquaint me of why you forever wave

Toward the pink slit of morning

And hold resilient among the torrent of

Heaven’s weep?  Who do you wait for?

Who is worth such unwavering faith?

Such fain patience, such deep rooted love?

How did you know that this was the very spot?

Who taught you to dig in your heal and lean into tomorrow?

Sacred Heart

It was the tiniest of holy places

A congregation of simple beads
Strung together by the rural thread
Of local farm faith

A tapestry of visions and ideas

That reveled in backyard boundaries
And ancestral certainties
Handed down through generations

The catechisms and cakes sales

The sermon’s command on when to
Stand and sit or stand and kneel;
Books held open like birds in hands

As a nine year old, I often ran to the pastures

Pretending not to hear the calling
When time to load into the Valiant
On those fastidious Sunday mornings

Sometimes they would catch me

At the bottom of the stairs which
Would mean more time confessing
The mundane troubles of obscurity

On Christmas Eve we stayed up late

Attending midnight mass where
All of the glittering blues and reds and golden halos
Compressed into this tiny church like miracles

A time filled with clean reflection

A time filled with clear sacrifice
And perhaps, the only time
I ever saw my father cry.

Long After Retirement

For Red Perkins

I will tell all of the ladies that you were meditating not sleeping

When I arrived during newspaper time while volunteer Samuel

In his muscle shirt was busy doing his vaudeville of the

Headline that read Is Today’s Internet Dating Yesterday's Town Social?

And the half-attentive audience murmured reference to their day

When girls and boys once flirted from across dance floors, fairgrounds.

Yes, that is what I will tell these fragile flowers, meditating; you will sound

So much more enlightened, even mysterious, worthy of a first dance;

Better than the truth that your cancer medication had you bobbing

Like some red beaked drinking bird during arm raises

Which lead to slumping at the activities announcement

And to near snoring among the daily news.

But you will not recall this as I have come to visit you

And you work repeatedly to remember how long it has been and I, 

still remembering a son’s love, do not have the heart

To remind you that it was you who left the conversation years ago.

For in this moment, at least one of us understands, that there is only this moment

And that all moments of before are now but shadows in a gentleman’s mist.

A meditative Casanova, the contemplative Flynn, why, you will be the talk

Among this winter hen house which, as I look around, is not far from accurate

As the y chromosomes seem to lose ground here

In these late chapters of life’s journey, when all men are reduced,

Becoming similar shapes, the same surprised eyes

The same bent expression of his-story

The Beautiful Almost

The cat is sprawled on its side

Laying loosely upon the foot of the bed
She is lying in the shape of dancing
Like some footloose fairytale character
Rabblerousing within a cartoon cabin
Perhaps near a fire caught in mid-papyrus jig
Much to the consternation of both mice and goose

I think, if only I had a mini accordion

How I would place it between her paws
To complete her minuet, to add
Music to her dream dancing
But I have no accordion nor fiddle
No trumpet or flute only my
Chest that sometimes whistles when I breathe

It is November and the cats sleep about

The house in so many various poses that
I forget that they are cats at all, these living
Still-life in the early winter of my solace, a quiet
That drives me to sleep, to enter my bed earlier
And earlier each night, to toil through indigo,
Detangling the many never was and beguiling the beautiful almost
 

December soon will arrive by the hard spin of

Winter when the real solitude begins, the
Rolling over into vapid mornings, the continual rowing up dream
The slow and repeated clamber between floors
My boat taking on water; and I would have half a mind to
Chuck it all, including myself, overboard, if it were not for a
Perennial habit of tossing my hope upon the peg of a coming spring.