Childhood songs

Childhood songs

I came into the world
  before there were words
  before there were shoelaces
  before dry ice

Childhood sang songs
  reciting, memorizing, gaining mastery
  kittens, toy boats, chicka-dee-dee calls 
  don't touch dry ice

Songs I once knew, I would hear them again
  arithmetic was easy
  I think further now
  but forget

What once seemed simple
  the difference between plus and minus:
  really doesn't matter
  getting dressed was good exercise for later

School had disadvantages
  one can learn something for life anyplace
  streams become rivers that run to the sea
  mermaids riding dolphins sing under the stars

Grains of sand in the hour glass
  accumulate below what once formed above
  time is a lesson:
  missed, premature, correct
 
My father said don't touch dry ice

A likeness

His great pleasure was a broom,
batting it
he stood on kitten-sturdy-stubby hind legs

He was Dickon after
the familiar who fired Mother Rigby's pipe:
("Dickon...a coal for my pipe!")
his orange coat the impetus.

He came into this world
a playful soul  
fifteen years ago
April last

He came into this world
a random soul
his mother half-feral, a tortoiseshell stray

He came into this world
to sleep in baskets (clothes),
to loll in the sun:
one time he caught a bat


It's fall now,
will Dickon another April have

Once we were of like age
now he's more,
older

Each morning he's
like all elderly and frail
who wake to the dawn

For Dickon
morning's brightening's
an eclipse:
Dickon who used to
find wonderful fun in all things

Can motion be home

Can motion be home?

The answer is no!

I am not one whit wishful

of roaming, of flying.

Travel is exile.

It is here that I roam,

that I saunter:

mountain, Valley, and shore,

la Sainte Terre.

Not Bon Voyage but here:

where sunrise is

a welcome:

things growing large,

things that are concrete.

Sunrise speaks to dreams:

of things to come,

of sun-filled pine hills,

of light-drenched ponds,

of belonging some place,

without which it's dark.

Fog on the mountain

Are they unimportant?
The foggy days in life?
I do not know...
but wish I did.

Dante spoke of fog ambrosial
Why?
I do not know.

I know river fog
morning fog
winter fog
frost-fog cutting the face:
I know fog dimming my eyes,
fog both above and below the mountain:
All as strangely uncanny as uncanny can be.

I've not seen fog on little cat feet:
the fog that I know
it swirls and it twirls,
cosmic sensibility.

Fog can take the mountain's place,
can recompose the Valley and more.

Fog's oxygen breathable,
yet shifts rocks and trees, suggesting
find a new direction,
another completeness:
a unique, solitary perspective,
another mindful view.

Kettles of Raptors

What's that you say:
kettles of raptors?
oh, an image poetic:
that means it's to be believed

A faint roll of thunder
in a cloudless sky, the Valley's weather
caught between mountains, North and South,
always changing

A thousand feet up, raptors:
ospreys, eagles, red tails, harriers
leisurely circling,
tracing patterns in air

They rise on the thermals
in stiff-winged spirals, gaining height
then down and out to gain distance,
another current then down and forward again

A migration pattern:
raptors indifferently together,
for all the world looking like
leaves in a kettle

The thermals a natural magic:
carrying birds
up and down:
wings seldom moving, rarely a flap

The kettle's hypnotic,
powerfully liberating to view:
how would it be to fly on wings tireless,
some unimagined new land discovered and claimed

Some things don't exist without words,
can't exist without utterance:
a kettle of raptors
is one

To hear of a kettle of raptors
is not the same
as to see it,
yet it's the words that give meaning

Words express thinking:
ours and that of others:
but not without ambiguity,
uncertainty,
hesitation

Words express recognition:
a certain conviction,
an emotional assurance:
when we speak,
we express what we think

The question of course:
are we thinking enough

Target Practice

for Tony

Think rifle
think bull's-eye
that's the subject here

The rifle:
the most physically compatible,
precise, advance since bow and arrow

The bull's-eye's nature:
line-of-sight, dead center black,
20 metres to 50

Add ear guards:
a silent world,
all to itself

Breathing stops,
thoughts vanish,
a gentle pull on the trigger

All that there is
involuntary,
a microscopic tremble of arm and hand

Is it Zen,
is it mental,
or more, perhaps other?

The mind's eye touch of target,
chaos free:
an ordinary day

At the waterline

Fundy's cobblestone shore:
granite, quartz, basalt
ground handsize
is smooth and pure

Years by the thousands, millenniums sure,
the bay's eroded jasper, garnet, porphyry
sandstone, feldspar and crystal
the rarer, the more true

Fundy's shore:
a rockhound's tumbler
the salvagers' delight
be it pot warp, driftwood or shell

The prize though
is beach glass
nothing aluminum, plastic or similarly obscene but
beach glass sublime

Beach glass can be red, yellow or blue:
amethyst, amber, and turquoise are rarer:
the gems though are apple to deep green
and the lapis of that sometime  medicine cabinet staple
Phillips' Milk of Magnesia