​
Just a Cap of Sunlight on the Mountains
​

I grow restless in wind. It shakes me to
the bone. Someone’s death around the bend,
between the pines and firs—visible
in peeling bark, downward branches,

the oak’s sharp stoop. It’s certain to fall.
I walk in step with Sakari my malamute.
How far we’ve traveled I haven’t
a clue. Others walk beside me. All

the dead I’ve known get carried along. Ok
it’s not as bad as that. My pockets fill
with Kleenex, a worry stone found yesterday
grasped tight. I cannot figure the way people pass

as though we are all cars on a highway leading
to the off ramp. But here I am walking with those
I’ve known. Being together is more than staying
alive. It’s how we loved, stayed in touch. This stone.





Housing the Indefinite
 

My dream is to lounge like a rock in a riverbed,
feel the cool lap of water, snug fit of

earth underneath; relax in the massaging
sands, while sunshine bakes my limbs.
 
How might I kayak my body
into the flow that empties into the ocean,

live in the lives of all things that cover earth;
to bloom as flower, to leaf on a bough?
 
To have no thought but the present feel
of things, how water expands someone until, she, too,

flows downstream, present
as all things are that are uniquely existent.
 
Give me back my life. Let me live in the all.
O, expansion, you are

not a circus, but you are the water
I was baptized with.

 


Contagious with Stars
 

Pick a pocket of nighttime and everywhere you reach is deep with darkness.
The gods caution that to hold a luminosity you must earn such privilege,
but these days those deities are out bungee jumping on Uranus or Mercury.
 
Who sleepwalked with the Milky Way, drunk on distance, its expanse?
I wanted to write with a torch but ended up with a stubby pencil.
Quality pens are of no use either. Because the sky is contagious with stars,
 
nighttime is best for viewing that dust which is us. I want my ashes
to create their own planet. One where people live in peace.
I cannot cry for what we are. But I am saddened by what we are not.
 
 


Directive

​
Your dead husband’s mouth
is a cornucopia filled with scent of mangoes,
succulent pears.
 
You climb the tree of his outstretched arm,
past shoulder and neck
towards his still lovely mouth,
that last orchard of human expression.
 
You think of final words, their seeds,
the mercurial push of grief,
how it hones bones.
 
Lastly, you throw seeds in a circular motion--
evoke soil and rain and sunlight
to plant him next to that
which is spoken with absolute clarity,
 
then you kiss the rain
hoping to prompt his life to once again sprout.