the white orchids in the window
and the delicate orchid-colored orchids
need to be re-potted, a snowy-day's project.
there must be something called original memory

where orchids bloomed in a pleasure cavern
carved in amber-colored amber
and a rock sat cross-legged
in a bullying swirl of hardened precipitation.

at the beginning of this century, i intended
to travel light, but things have a way
of accruing.  i have acquired, among other things,
a sole blue shadow, freshly aged and slightly stooped,

with the hunchback posture of the winged.
for a while,  i was married to a photograph.
i kept my vows, walked the long miles of waiting
until time took down my future
in one cold swallow.

nevertheless, i will finish this poem
with a happy ending
a sun
on which to hang
a hundred shades of endless sky

there's a strange serenity
to these bare trees,
i love these ghosts of november-
not like last week's leaves
that set the landscape afire
as summer's departure
left its mark...

threads of smoke
float through an open window.
tonight through black branches
stars will swim in random circles
and dreams will yield to the wind
in shadows pared clean of light

with the moon climbing
i'll look to your window,
your light a bonfire for my soul
in a night half-swollen
with the loneliness of the day
i'll hold the image of your face in my heart
afraid of yesterday
and uncertain about tomorrow

as the moon pales
against the window
and clouds lap across the sky
i'll remember that someone once told me,
never use these words in a poem:
love. ghost. heart. moon. dream. stars. soul.

in the soft sleep
of a beautiful dream
a murmur of compassionate rain
melts the unforgiving snow

it is only the wind
that can't control itself,
unintentionally sweeping snow
from the window

the clearing turquoise sky
is as transparent as the day we parted
your soul was light as a feather
as sunset unfolded a banner of gold brocade

my dream is dreaming of another dream
where you are somewhere playing behind the wind
i know that gods and humans take different paths
but they lead to the same destination

where dreams cry sacred tears

one by one, these autumn days
are stripped away
by an unseen wind. dreams
locked so mutely in the heart
perhaps are lost forever,
and unlike the fading flowers,
they are not renewable.

the night comes like a lone stranger,
uncertain of its way, and the dawn
shrinks the soul with its pollyanna
optimism, all make-believe, egocentric,
in the face of twisted trees, victims
of reality's winds.

the ash tree bows over the balcony,
like a thoughtful man brooding
over dark events and the treacherous
aftermath of a bright mirror shrouded
in a storm's black cloth.  but no one's life
is perfect. it is senseless to maneuver
around furniture in an unlighted house.

best to leave them as they are:
blurred, unclear shapes
from the past, be they gems
or garbage, in the subsurface
of your heart's shifting, changing sea.
let's just do as we have always done--
and get on with
this bewildering business of living

how sick you must be of my poetry!  those halting footsteps
entering the shadows of  the bamboo grove,
where mist hangs like gauze.  the best verses can be read
on the needles of the stunted pine tree and
the cracked knees of the quan yin statue.
i always loved the romantic notion of drinking wine
on the stone bench under the dripping moonlight,
arms wrapped around each other, a shiver
from a sudden chill---

but i never really did like wine.

nonetheless, winter in massachusetts though seemingly
endless, has never yet ,in any year, failed to end.
we'll find a shelter for May, a little sparrow arriving in spring storms,
huddled in the weeping cherry.  evening winds will
fill their sails with the scent of clover, clouds will sail
their sampans of gold.    there are maps inside us still.
maps back to a time-obliterating village in a dream

a dream i still believe in

poetry provides the diagnosis :
love is longer than life. half the time

we are doused in sleep with hair
like a bird's shadow

descending a gnarled spine

where pockets of
marbles, faded photographs, broken keyboards,
the sound of a cello,
and the unread letters of a decade
swim through uncharted waters

packing heat.

crows land like creosote
from a burning chimney
on a rush of rocks

the white horse of dreams plows a disaster

but it is the Magnetic Resonance
that reads the words of a poet's delirium
capturing sun and moon and mist
recording a love letter gone askew,

words like seagulls tumbling from cracks
in the clouds
with nothing less than the world
at stake

the late sun closes his hot eyes.  but he can't escape
these mountains...beyond this hermitage
the landscape opens, rain falls on the cornfields,
light spills across the plains.

last night, i dreamed of a man with white hair
kissing my neck.  in the silence at midnight, i had crossed
three decades of shadows to a garden of sunlit flowers
illumined by a sacred fire;

twilight spread shadows on the balcony
and flying bats were clothed with gold.
they fluttered beyond the gate with its peeling paint
silent as their own fates

i was picking flowers.  i paused for a long while
watching their leisurely flight

the weather is perfectly perfect
empty mountain, no one in sight
not a single sound
of a chain saw

a gas engine can turn
three hundred years of history
into a pile of sawdust
in the dancing air

but not today
today there are birds singing
and a sentient bittersweet vine reaching
toward the hanging fuchsia on the balcony

someone once said that dandelions
carrying tiny umbrellas of white down
sow seeds of sorrow
like flying tears

the ringing phone shatters
the perfectly perfect day
like a torn garbage bag
with rotten food spilling out

close-up of a poet:

sitting on a river barge in the mist
toying with a romantic idea
and inviting others to join her on the river
where she pries from them

their most painful or joyful experiences
then lures them to the railing
and drowns them in the river
where the water runs deep

there are so many steps to heaven.  i know this
because so many times i have climbed
up and down the steps of my heart, searching
for your name and a home
i can call my own.

there are mountains there, and every mountain
has a shrine, and every shrine has a cloud above it,
a crane beside it,  and below it there are valleys
ragged with fallen stars.

these days, a lost soul hangs over my sleep
mumbling behind a screen of dreams.
it is his signature that scratches across
my waking days,

his promises that once stamped my midnights
with the seal of the moon.  why are you ignoring me?
i can give you songs of loss and sorrow, faith
and devotion; while the liars tell you
that the past is over and unimportant,
a story best told in a fairy tale,

i will give you a story that is true.

but the truth is often partly bitter:
the truth is a man and woman who
lost their hearts to each other
in a time that was inauspicious.

i will tell you the truth:  no one knows
how this fairytale will end because
there are two halves to this history

and no matter how many times
i paint a pretty ending
on long, loose-folded scrolls,  the happy
ending requires co-operation.

on these lost days in the massachusetts autumn
when the leaves shuffle across my heart
i listen to the mountains sigh and shrug their shoulders

as the wind sweeps the yellow dust from
the red cloisters of my heart and my passions.

meanwhile the moonlight bleeds through
the windows in the kitchen, where it falls
at my feet, spilled and scattered like rice

•  

   

   

   

• 
• i am the butterfly eater
  dining on illusions,
  quandary mechanics and chaos theory;
  it's the difference between determinism
  and indeterminism...is it true that if
  you know everything in the present, you
  can predict the future? for example playing billiards--
  if you feed everything into a computer, such as
  how hard you hit the ball, the angle of the cue,
  it would still be impossible to tell how each ball
  would respond to a collision--a speck of dust
  could throw everything
  out of whack...then there's the butterfly
  effect. ( for every butterfly eaten in tennessee, a woman
  dies in massachusetts. ) Newton's universe was
  a clockwork universe, but the quandary world is not
  deterministic--you can't predict the outcome because
  you can't know both the position and the momentum
  of your lover/ex lover, dead/alive, loving/not loving
  at the same time. things change as you look at them
  when does the wave
  become the particle?

  wave and particle are two aspects
  of a single reality, an unknowable reality--
  wave function defines an area of
  probability-- like being in a certain place at
  a certain moment, loving and not loving at
  the same time, a la Schrödinger's cat.

  here's my quandary: in the absence
  of measurement, is there no reality?
  to measure, must one have to see?  if you have no
  separate reality until i can see you, can measure you--

  and if you are neither separate nor real,
  then you are an illusory part of me,

  so how can i prove the existence
  of that which never goes away
  but does not exist?  how could something
  be true but unprovable?

  it's the liar's paradox.*

   

  * i am a liar

  

  Schrödinger's Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive ordead, not a mixture of alive and dead.