The Speed of Life

Sparrows under the tomatoes
spearing the chubby nematodes
They stuff the hot pulp
into the gawp of throats,
those fledglings quivering
like plucked strings
A greedy little garden song
then a bath of dust that rises,
motes of spinning worlds
fugitive in the slant of August

They will never know how
the snails travelled all day
to see such things with their
umber polyps, sensual horns
eager and retractable,
making muted love
in the errant grass

Mariposa

you don't live in crowds,
not a meadow ablaze with you,
nothing but a singular ambition
to be known

how I steal your song
as it lifts from the parched earth
and shout it out to everyone
who can hear it

not many, perhaps,
but a few at least willing
to know you one more season,
revealed at last by observation

if you are pleased to surrender
your secret through
my consciousness,
I will never know

perhaps it is your divine undertaking
that you willingly grant to the world
so we will never forget
what is beauty

Five Snakes Passing By

He showed me the grim mouth
and chrome eyes, the unblinking patience
of a viper and how it seemed
broken from a tree, a serpentine branch
sage strewn over the black rocks

It touches the earth with all its length,
its armour of plates and the remarkable
loose segments of its tail passing by
I imagine its purple tongue,
split and stabbing, tasting me

And the other fellows
with their evolutionary glory,
boas and constrictors
and one fast and yellow and electric,
a trajectory of light at your feet

That one I picked up as a boy,
so curious to see him watching me
as he left his smell on my hands,
a reptilian introduction
with its striped dorsal rainbow

He sees with a fine sensitivity
to what is loathed in the world,
what has been lost,
a reverence that we need to come back to,
his gift to us all

Hobos

my knee torn denim,
a cap pulled down
to warm a vagabond

and your soft eyes know
the snug nest of my heart
and the pull of simplicity

that gently melts my sorrows
like a spring sun licking
the hard edges of winter

we go hand in hand,
hobo lovers dancing toward
the music spilling over the hill

Grass

you are so eager to dance,
never to settle for sod,
too close to the earth you
might say, stomped by some
careless foot before the wind can
give voice to rising form

you writhe in the blond oceans,
pulsing a language of rustling heads,
leaning and shoving,
foolhardy forays - this way and that
hiding snakes from crows

such aliveness in motion and sound,
you sing for the burning sun,
wave to the unknowable stars
but heedless of the beating rain
that can flatten you

even fire can only still you for a season
before the ground delivers
you from your sleep
how I love your heave and sway,
your swagger as you die in amber

The Bear

I see him most days now,
he is not a friend
There is no agreement,
some place in our brains
that makes the other safe
I see his savage pig eyes
and there is no sanctuary for me
I can only go out along the river
with my back against the rush to the sea

To think that I have escaped the world,
found the mountains and forests,
my stillness, only to come to him

He will take me one day
I write this so you will not
look for me

The winter is my respite
When the snow buries him in his den,
I long to find it and kill him
in his long sleep

I loathe the spring
when he will come out
He will hunt me then,
find my frantic breath
on the mirror like spoor
He will make me look
until I bleed

It is not my flesh
that he wants

A Child in Africa

i think of Africa
and babies that will
never see past their mother's
outstretched hands
all is parched and human,
it is the looking that is tragic,
eyes that say -
see me, see that i live and want to live
and do not forget that i am you
being me, you were here
with every famine reaching
back to the sea
i will forgive the callous and cruel
spouting the sad language
of too many people on Earth
for they have not yet come
to their famine
send me the same measure
that you grant for freedom and oil,
know that i also want to be free,
these are the words that i speak
through eyes that are closing,
know that my brief life
was for you