Bouldering as Forgiveness

Sky puts down roots
washing dishes in a white
bathrobe before bed.

Finished, she uncovers
a clean kitchen:
a car driving in
-to a thunderstorm.

The table needs to be cleared;
next to a pink rose bush,
abandon uses ivy
as molding on a house in Arkansas.

Redress clouds
folding them in with the hills,
highway medians
into meadows.

Move in Place

but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
—William Bronk

Look!              The light moves
along the banister. I stop
To catch the gesture, and
I am in a skylit chapel.
The walls are a pigeon’s neck.
The variance in color is:
leaves sun-red
the mica on the beach
pine trees darker than the sky
oil on water
upon the surface to make
a line of streetlights. Oh no.
I don’t know what it means. Oh no. My eyes
flutter to the sound of someone on the phone.

Stopping to pee in the desert

Too late to live for utopia
We weren’t ourselves climbing

Along a child-drawn ridge
Ben and i’s torn-up hands         grasping at the wall

The rocks         rolling away
Reminding         there is no one place we belong

Too late to live for utopia

And the sky is a mauve cloth backdrop
Rippling in the wind

Each point of contact is its own beginning
Out here there is nothing at the end of headlights

Please, when all this is picturesque
Ruins, ignore our bones

Late to utopia
The clothes are left on the line

Kept in Kaleidoscope

The chorus of creeks
The shore of a beach
Where the water reaches
An inconstant horizon measured
In sky sublimating         above
The road         light giving
Statues of angels turning
Out pockets         filled with rocks
Transience
settles into the turn

wet in morning
Lilac         summer crickets
A change in color
And        I am         the first
One up
Branches spinning blue
Birds in the parking lot
Jeans on the beach
Socks on the sand
sand on the car floor turned

Out on mossy
Pavement
The tree’s leaves in autumn
On summer feet
Framed by a window
My mom sees me
Go into the woods
Not knowing she’s watching
Into beauty I turn

My mom
Leaves the window
And now her father is dying
I tell the river
We are here making ends and
The wintering tree scatters sun
Says goodbye without a kiss
I wake up for the sunset
Feet swinging from a fallen tree
Seeing a person through their dirty glasses
River out of focus
Among reeds
Each distinct and perhaps
To a bird from above
The river is a body turning

//

And in conversation with Ben
We agree that you can’t become I
If no one is listening and
No one is hearing
The surfaces on souls
In all the potentiality of metaphor
A vulture         in an angel’s ladder
Waves braking around
Ben’s body solid
In sunlight
We attempt restoration
Of forms         and becoming
Among ruins
The last word said
The unshaven hair
On both of our faces
Comparisons collapse
And reach for the shade
There may be something
To which the dead goldfinch on the patio
Reflects         and

//

A simple acceptance
That things are same and not same
And
Open the door         moon
Rising and I feel the earth         turning

To Ezra         a leaf rising
To rest on my shoulder
Moon shouldered on the mountain

Words give weight to the pale
Hazy spring sky
That those are the waves breaking
Around Ben’s body
and in my stomach I
Am the old white mustang
Crashed into ditch median
I don’t love you anymore
Can’t be true

Again cold spring
Last frost
Cherry trees pink
Ben and I are in a field of windmills
Each a center
No inherent value makes the color
Blue held in a slant of light
An after image of a lover
Seen in a half-smile
And having confused change for something