small batch

Common Plight

Everyday soldier at home with weapons, trained

to kill with them, caught in an endless ceasefire.

            *

Accounting

Darkness keeps a careful book,

absolutely strict and utterly indifferent to the just.

Whatever walks in light casts shadow,

whether worn by itself or grafted to another’s back.

*

Shards

the pleasure of right action

   soft rain after drought  

_________________________

joyful    sorrowful            deep

_________________________

 quest

      for

  less

            *

The Danger

(an addendum to Browning)

Always reaching and reaching too far

     too far too far too far

can make of grasp a fantasy act

without power to add or subtract

     or fully attract

     or really bar—

            *

Door Too Fast  

Old man pulling from that side

while I push from this, lost in thought,

not seeing him through the little window.

The door flies open, sending us both                

scrambling to stay upright on the slippery tiles.

            *

August 15 2012

The world is small

and stretched tight like a drum

Everywhere I go                                     

I hear your quiet footsteps beside me

______________________________

Who has not seen

the glow of loved ones

vanish, never to return?

Who has not seen

each night the pitted moon

rise here, rise there?

            *


It Can Be Hard to Tell                                   

Half-stoned on a new drug, or just

another sleepy being in slow springtime.

Brain-molecules swaddling synapses

in cotton junk, or a seed shrugging

tumid shoulders in damp dark, tuned          

to the rumour of warm, light-filled

presences that will require nothing.

               *

Keeping On 

     vita longa ars brevis

So hard

& rare

not

to get worse

            *

Allowance                             

(i)

So many great poems lost                                                     

because an inner voice said That is not

what a poem should be, not what it should contain.

And if for poems one reads: moments, hours, lives?

(ii)

My gate so narrow,

only rarest diamonds pass.                    

My gate so wide,

diamonds tumble among the trash!