The Bridge

Beringia called and you responded, but I was to go first
I hoped to hear the landscape moan, join the ancient song

Nellie Chinik won your heart and had you digging her potatoes
then cast her spell and offered you an amaryllis in exchange

“Fully occupied with growing--that's
the amaryllis... If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!”

You wished to know your own edges again
and saw them past your feet overlooking the bay

Fey morning, window darkness
Golovin lay, this side of the changeling a
Fata Morgana, dancing between a rock and a hard dawn illusion
or the illusion, set to conspiring from a hard drawn conclusion

“If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus!”

The chilled horseman’s star-ship? Nay.

It was the mammoth in the living room
who moaned from the distance
of bridges passed




The cuttings are from "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. Enjoy the entire poem from Poets.org

Also, a reference for a mirage known as a Fata Morgana from Wikipedia

Where We Might Overlap

That tunic of cloud hung densely, veiling all planes and vertices.
A saturated blue gray tilted more toward flattening white. No angle of lens could lend such precision to form or catch the magnitude.

Child, don't forget how we tracked near the small, quiet, old, and sparsely swift
with wing, tail and quill.

You and I trail across whispered intent, follow likely syncline and marvel that the animal tracks always lead the best route; least effort spent is energy conserved.

For them, energy is hard earned while we have little more skill than desire.

Still, we take pleasure in practicing flight; river far below our four out stretched wings.

Mourning Song

I sit in the old quad of Bakersfield High, out front of Warren Hall. This time it's February 2009 already, and all of the days I spent here as a kid, in a state of elevated darkness, still haunt about in the ashen, dwindling palms.

I turn my graying eyes to the sky and think of you. I wonder how so many miles and tidal surge of lifetimes separate us now. You call to my heart and mind with such consistent kindness and, like all my girlhood boyfriends, I heard you first on the radio.

Back then, in the stifling heat of nights possessed by want and innocence, rocking my pillowed head to the metal collisions; the terrors of purgatory: the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe switching cars; 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:30, 3:45, on and on till light. The trains and radio were deep comfort to this girl interrupted.

I didn't know I'd be riding those freight trains two years later, following vision North. That they would deliver me from what was murderously mundane, undone, to the cherry orchards of Stockton. Two million Bings and Queen Anns later we'd pick enough for the old Chevy flatbed. Four months after, it was "get thee" to Alaska.

And there I'd find you.

Boys from your parts flocked to my tavern, we of chess and politics and poetry jams. These kids, high on seine crew wealth and good beer, knew of a new comer, their college home boy, red hot radio. I fell, pell mell and stayed.

Sunlight muscles it's pushy way onto the walk, driving me towards the guarded tracks. Beneath the two train crossing, screaming sounds peal from every neuron. Those shades and memory, his dangle dance, open my throat and the morning fills with song.

That older heart duet; there's something more to be sung.

Joanna Macy

I've featured the ongoing effort of Joanna Macy before. Macy is a scholar of systems theory and Buddhist thought. Her decades of work, helping people find inner resources for dealing with global crises, interfaces between social action and spiritual breakthrough. The preface from her and Anita Barrows translation of poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours/ Love Poems To God includes this:

"That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or try to escape into private "spiritual" pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and the courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to "love the things/ as no one has thought to love them" (I, 61).
My own stubborn, wild love for the world was summoned, and I learned to recognize it in others, too, in the movements for peace, global justice, and ecological sanity. Rilke confirmed my sense of a deep passion at the core of life itself, which I could come home to, the way sheep come home at nightfall, "the dark bridge thudding' (I,40). I could die into that passion, as into a lover's arms, trusting its ongoingness and its vast sufficient intelligence."

The 100th anniversary edition of Rilke's Book of Hours is vital and relevant. The present moment that we are a part of is designed for change in the world as is Macy's larger work. Additional web information is linked to in the title of this piece.

I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ Walt Whitman

I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday
morn I pass'd the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard your
long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard
the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through
one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells
last night under my ear.

Oh That Girl!

The deep fissure
up-welling opens
to the sky, mirroring back
the fathomless - touched
by an extended pinky.