The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.
There will be no going back.

~ from Collected Poems, 1930-1993 (W.W. Norton 
& Company, 1993)

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

~ from Alive Together (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

~ from Good Poems for Hard Times, Selected by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2005)

(signs on first rows of chairs at poetry festival, La Conner, Washington)

Sunsets.
Trouble.
Full moons.
No really—they’re everybody’s.
Nothing is reserved.
We’re all poets rippling with    
layers of memories,
mostly what we might forget.
Let it belong.  Every pocket,     
satchel, hand.
We forgot to make a reservation.
But there’s room.

~ from Voices in the Air (Greenwillow Books, 2018)

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever

~ from The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2000)

Ten years ago
I was writing poems	
brief as bird tracks.

A wing encapsuled 
an entire spring.

Three morning grace notes	
scored all summer.

A single beak	
bit off autumn like a worm.

A few hieroglyphs	
on the snow
said everything there was
to know of winter.

I was younger then.
I was more certain.

All my short spare poems	
knotted themselves into a final word
like a crow shot from a tree.  

But I’ve lost that brevity,	
that arrogance
of what is what,
and my poems
flock like blackbirds
gleaning word after word,
line after line
from the waving field.

They are still famished,	
cawing terribly in my mind.
I don’t know what to give them.
I keep on writing, 	
and writing.

~ from What have you lost?  (HarperCollins, Greenwillow Books, 1999)

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)