The wind is
a memory
that is always moving
away from us.

Tomorrow there will be stones
we will carry with us
forever, if we can somehow
find a place
to settle down in.
--------

Should only Africa
sing in the black wind
for its pearls ?

Fallibility is the blood
with no seed to cross
and no pity
for pain to move you.

Hunger slices through
the wheat fields
of invisible tongues.

Silence simmers in the scales
and in the red sky.

There is a womanly air
about the way
the flowering trees
keep facing
the eyes of desire.

There is a circumference
around a
world
that brings a tired man
some symmetry.

-------

There is a wide-eyed sky
above the maples
to keep track of
the sugary hills,
where a child is not himself,
unless he is reborn
in the fallow light
and allowed to complete
the cycle of himself
before he is told
what he can or can't do
on the street.

--------

The darkness darkens inside me
as I ride past the old battlefields 
from the American Revolutionary War,
on my way to Moses' farm.
It's Father's Day 
and I'm not a father, and my father 
has died a long time ago.

I have this urge
to be where there is water
and red toads
and endless shorelines
to walk around in
that keep me to myself 
like an island.

--------

Sometimes white is the father
surrendering his home.

Sometimes white is the land
blinded by the wind.

Sometimes white is a disease
no one can catch
from someone else.

-------

The voices in the snow
have no other way of
snowing, nor heart
for its
tundra
to sweep across,
where no one knows
how far they are going,
where there are stones
to throw and worms
to eat.

--------
She never wore make-up 
to hold the sea
in her eyes and not blink.
In the afternoons the Greek sky
hid what is sometimes
too clear to see. It is now
thirty years later and what
I still remember, is the sand
that touched the bare rocks
on the edge of the water,
where the fish 
were too full to bite.

---------
Buddha is waving
the hungry banner
I went into
my own kind for.

My vision
contains the smoke
I cannot see.

Who is there to tell me
that there is no time to lose ?
--------

Bingo - eyed
parishioners,
you called out
for life
from behind
your altars,
following the snow
inside your sleep.
--------