Camp


Here we are in yet another place,
one more half-way-home, this time called Camp.
It's in a good spot, a locale of beauty,
and the rent is paid, even if so late
the once nice owner's genuinely pissed,
so thinks she's well within her rights now
to tell us: No, you may not use the boat,
and no new oven in the stove for you.
 
So we say all right, it's she who has to stay
in town and sweat and pay the taxes
while we, for the sin of worldly poverty,
have all these lovely blossoms to ourselves,
in league with bees toward summer fuitfulness,
a big Moon Bay, the famous Turtle Rock,
and blue-eyed grasses at our door.  O, and  yes,
we can unplug the phone, for "business" sake,
trash the tube away in storage, and while
the tides make constant music with the rocks,
we'll strip and love out loud on every saggy bed,
then rise and write on paper with the dream
and call it art, and life, and love, and good.




 
Great Blue Heron


Of these so cold heronwaters
Elusive counterspirit
Selfsame forager
Archaic silhouette
Elegant ungainly lifestalker
Menacing greywings
To your own kind intruding
Shy featherwings
At my physical approach
Croaking longthroat
Unlikely greatwings over
Daylight waves
Nobodied image I know
Can only be you
When I hear you late at night
Back dawn remade and
Wading in the alive shallows
Whispery breastplumed
Carestepping
Heronshadowed
Before that deeper water
I can see




 
Late Afternoon at the Blue Parrot


We're lolling, after all, and Pedro Juan
is right on time to ring the happy hour.
Some puzzle-stupor from the night before
reins in the impulse for a plunge, a swim,
a stroll beyond where others always go.
 
The bluest sea comes crashing to our feet...
profound diversions amble by, (baked to
tan enchantment, tied by the fewest strings)
along the cooling corridor of beach.
What was it that we really came here for?
 
Last night the stars were standing on their heads.
Liquid motion of a life: a sea still warm
from the burning sun, black fathomed in
to fill up footprints with a hiss... the air,
mad messenger of music, made of silk.
 
Lost in the moontalk of a naked hour,
we watch another day go softly by.
Ice is melting slower by a hair and birds
with scissor tails, black feather wings, soar
above the longing waters closing in.




Camp, Great Blue Heron, and Late Afternoon at the Blue Parrot appear in Where They Know; Great Blue Heron was first published in Wolf Moon Journal.