All night	
   in and out the slippery shadows
      the owl hunted,
	the beads of blood

scarcely dry on the hooked beak before
   hunger again seized him
      and he fell, snipping
	the life from some plush breather,

and floated away
   into the crooked branches
      of the trees, that all night
	went on lapping

the sunken rain, and growing,
   bristling life
      spreading through all their branches
	as one by one

they tossed the white moon upward
   on it’s slow way
      to another morning
	in which nothing new

would ever happen,
   which is the true gift of nature,
      which is the reason
	we love it.

Forgive me.
   For hours I had tried to sleep	
      and failed;
	restless and wild,

I could settle on nothing
   and fell, in envy
      of the things of darkness
	following their sleepy course—

the root and branch, the bloodied beak—
   even the screams from the cold leaves
      were as red songs that rose and fell
	in their accustomed place.

~ from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1993)

for my clients

Sometimes, when healing words escape I think of the gray squirrel who muscled from the office chimney. Whose sooty head poked through the pie plate hole where my wood stove had stood. The animal transfixed, my client jumping from a chair, her story interrupted— mother inaccessible, unfulfilled, a daughter’s bottled angst, black-out nights. Later, I read Addictions Professional, of White Ladies, Red Devils, Angels’ Dust. How each patient climbs from a different darkness. I think of the squirrel who clawed his way from the amazement of my building as if he could grasp hunger, bottom, ascent— bury the nuggets for winter’s stash. How I chased him from room to room. Easy Does It. Let Go. Surrender. Swing wide the blessed door.
~ from Rattle #34, Winter 2010, Tribute to Mental Health Workers

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
 
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
 
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
 
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
 
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
 
and I think of each life as a flower, as common 
as a field daisy, and as singular,
 
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
 
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
 
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
 
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
 
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
 
~ from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1993)

Centennial Beach, unclean and busy,		
the merry-go-round at the park in pieces
to spare the young from chipped teeth.
Every June our family gathers at a pit to roast	
hot dogs until sunset, until nausea.
My cousin Jacob and I are picked to wait, 	
secure a perfect spot.  Our nana places
pink donuts on our laps, rubs lotion
on my face, the scented kind from hotels, 
then sits on the hood of her car, the sleeves
of her custard sweater rolled around her elbows.
We wait for our aunts and uncles, stuck	
in rush hour, who must let their babies nap,
change from housecoats or suits into denim.
Jacob and I don’t feel the tension, simply	
ingest the sugar of family, the salt of family,
the processed meat of family.  Jacob, a teenager
with a beautiful girlfriend, climbs the alder tree
above us.  I time him then call for him.  I love
and fear him the higher he gets.  At the top he says,
watch me break my collarbone.  His mother,
broken, caught in traffic, will say nothing, will love
to take her son to emergency, add this to a list
of reasons why the world cannot be on her side.
I tell Jacob if he jumps his girlfriend will cry
And I’m surprised that this is enough.  I feel
the high school love in him from below,
catch in the breeze, trace his throat.
Later, I fall asleep on the picnic table,	
my head sugared with fear, imagining
he did jump and what that would mean.

~ from This Will Be Good (Book Thug, 2018)

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight. 
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a 
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

~ from Of Gravity & Angels (Wesleyan University Press, 1988)

After a single season jigging cod
I gave up on the ocean,
boarded a steamship bound
for Little Bay Mines where
I secured a position
picking for copper;
kept at it through the winter,
a long shadow working
effortlessly beside me
while my back was shaken crooked
by the jabber of pickhead on rock,
my hands too numb
at the end of a shift
to properly hold a spoon

In June I jacked up and went
back to fishing, shipping out
with a crew headed to the French Shore,
happy just to be on the water
after seven months discovering darkness
in the mine

Salt air like a handful of brine
held to the face of an unconscious man
coming slowly to his senses

~ Hard Light (Brick Books Classics, 2015)

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   
transparent scarlet paper, 
sizzle like moth wings, 
marry the air. 

So much of any year is flammable,   
lists of vegetables, partial poems.   
Orange swirling flame of days,   
so little is a stone. 

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   
I begin again with the smallest numbers. 

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   
only the things I didn’t do   
crackle after the blazing dies. 

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems 
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

The deep strangeness of flowers in winter—
the orange of clivia,

or this creamy white rose
in its stoneware vase, while outside

another white
like petals drifting down.

Is it real?
a visitor asks,

meaning the odd magenta orchid on our sill
unnatural

as makeup on a child.
It's freezing all around us— salt cold on the lips,

the flinty blacks and grays
of January in any northern city,

and flowers everywhere:
in the supermarket by cans of juice,

filling the heated stalls near the river—

secular lilies engorged with scent,
notched tulips, crimson and pink, ablaze

in the icy
corridors of winter.

~ from Traveling Light (Norton, 2010)

Winter winds cold and blea
Chilly blows o’er the lea:
Wander not out to me,
Jenny so fair,
Wait in thy cottage free.
I will be there.

Wait in thy cushioned chair
Wi’ thy white bosom bare.
Kisses are sweetest there:
Leave it for me.
Free from the chilly air
I will meet thee.
How sweet can courting prove,
How can I kiss my love
Muffled in hat and glove
From the chill air?
Quaking beneath the grove,
What love is there!

Lay by thy woollen vest,
Drape no cloak o’er thy breast:
Where my hand oft hath pressed,
Pin nothing there:
Where my head droops to rest,
Leave its bed bare.

~ This poem is in the public domain.

Hope is the thing with feathers   
That perches in the soul,   
And sings the tune without the words,   
And never stops at all, 
      
And sweetest in the gale is heard;           
And sore must be the storm   
That could abash the little bird   
That kept so many warm. 
      
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,   
And on the strangest sea;          
Yet, never, in extremity,   
It asked a crumb of me.

~ This poem is in the public domain.

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch's crown;
A dowel into which I've screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree's elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn't suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUV's.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It's comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing's lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born. 

~ from Toward the Winter Solstice 
(Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006)

Even this late it happens: 
the coming of love, the coming of light.  
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,  
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,  
sending up warm bouquets of air. 
Even this late the bones of the body shine  
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

~ from The Late Hour (Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 2002)

Your resolve to leave
had grasshopper’s legs
and catapulted you
several body lengths
in one jump. In a matter
of days, you were snapping 
past disgrace and heartache
as if they were truck stops
on the Trans Canada. 
Too busy leaping 
to feel anything but high.

I’m more the spider type,
elaborate mandala,
so hungry I could
eat my weight in wings. 
Watch me turn a monk’s cell
into bitter arithmetic. 
Loving me was cramped,
everything cornered. 
How I miss the endless
twisting of you.

~ From Disturbing the Buddha (Brick Books, 2016)

I have refused to live		
locked in the orderly house of
	reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in	
is wider than that.  And anyway
	what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or	
twice I have seen.  I’ll just
	tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
	ever, possibly, see one.

~ from Felicity (Penguin Press, 2016)

Praise the rain; the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk—
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The stand of trees, the dignity—
Praise the dark, the moon cradle
The sky fall, the bear sleep—
Praise the mist, the warrior name
The earth eclipse, the fired leap—
Praise the backwards, upward sky
The baby cry, the spirit food—
Praise canoe, the fish rush
The hole for frog, the upside-down—
Praise the day, the cloud cup
The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.
Praise the path on which we're led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

~ from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems 
(W. W. Norton & Company 2017)

have your eyes ever fallen upon a beast like me
i have the spine of a mulberry tree
the neck of a sunflower
sometimes i am the desert
at times the rain forest
baut always the wild
my belly brims over the waistband of my pants
each strand of hair frizzing out like a lifeline
it took a long time to become
such a sweet rebellion
back then i refused to water my roots
till i realized
if i am the only one
who can be the wilderness
then let me be the wilderness
the tree trunk cannot become the branch
the jungle cannot become the garden
so why should i

~from the sun and her flowers (Simon & Schuster Canada, 2017)

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

~ from 99 Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016)

The night has come,
Pink’s job is done.
She was the dawn, and the pink sun.
But now blue’s time has come.
He’ll be the moon,
He’ll be the sky.
Pink sits and waits for sunrise,
Then she’ll be the sun again,
She’ll be the sky.
But sunrise won’t last long.
When yellow comes
And spreads her color to the sun.
Pink sits and wait.
Pink sits and waits.
  
~ From The Flag of Childhood (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1998)

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

~ from Poems 1960-1967 (New Directions Publishing Corp, 1966)

Morning yawns, the sun stretches, and the train
Pitches the air with smoke, paws the iron earth,
Tracks its big city game along the coast,
Narrows the span between our birth and death.
From dreams, we, dépaysés, fall to coffee,
Orange Free State oranges, new news, fresher dreams,
Prophesying what tomes we now must read,
What names we will need, what gods we will prize.
    All we can prove is the sun and the bay
And the baying hunter that is the train,
All joined in a beautiful loneliness—
Separated from our pure world of wounds,
Our globe of love (sharp nails hammered through palms),
Happening alone, as if it matters.

~ from Whylah Falls (Polestar Book Publishers, 2000)