Rock Paper Pictures
It’s called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
this place where handprints
with broken finger
wave at squint-eyed scientists
where prehistoric rhino, too,
looks up and down
in animated
horn thrusting
It is a place
where I can no longer walk
freely
into
its mouth,
for me to trace
the jowls of a saber tooth
or
to feel at home
in the chilled darkness
that once belonged to
a long dead tribe
of southern France
that hunted
and hooped
and hollered
their way from hunter gatherer
to farmer
Though I have yet to cross
its threshold
the history of the place
humps its way to caress
my innermost cheekbones
with an icy forefinger
and mesmerize me with
fireside chats about
arrow and bone and hide
of meat and fire
on picture and pride
These are ancient ones
who delved into
stone-walled comic books
the hero of which
was hunted and killed
ingested and digested
and immortalized on rock paper
Of Voices, Waters, and Fires
There it is— the horn of awakening. I submit to its call the way
ancient tribes adored the mountains of the moon and the way
fireflies soar over soft summer grasses escaping from the hot
earth— caught in mid atmosphere between the ether and the soil...
in perfect pitch and light. My affirmation becomes the resistant
verdure of ancient trees of the North and of the scarlet wild flower
that blooms from the crack of a rock so old it forgot it was rock
and thought it was fertile earth so young. Then, giving birth to
crimson explosion, it morphs into a rainbow of mesas jutting into
the horizon of western skies, allotting valleys and nooks their
respective triumphs as they meander their way through haunted
passages. This becomes the flood water plain of my adoration,
eroding all walls, permeating all barriers, eviscerating all fear. In
this flow, perpetual present is infinitely directed and time is linear
no more. A voice—part of an old language, with a kind of
sweetness that feeds the Redwoods and Sequoias of ancient births
and seeps into spirit waters from ethereal sources in misty glens—
this voice—becomes a channel that demystifies the world,
irreversible in its foundational tenets of authenticity. I am shaken
the way the wind cracks the shell of an acorn before it hits the
earth, as to get the green snail out of hiding from the orb of plant
and seed, to spring from each encounter into the oak of promise. In
the darkness, there is the smoke of old fires. I can no longer smell
what started them. The torrents of spring will soon extinguish the
vestiges of the smoky remains and—tomorrow,
the world will be winked at by the sun, nudging the arch in the foot
of time that circles back onto itself, reminding me of the long grass
that bends back to kiss the earth. Now, the rest of my life can
tumble like happy children down a grassy hill
at summer’s end
Samsara Serenade
a fanning of banana leaves
a scrape of bamboo
the subtle sounds of an eastern
sunset
an intake of breath
a slow exhale
the yellow of a horizon behind my eyelids
i want an end to it
the suffering of ages
a thought that plagues
my breath count
i must disassemble
to reassemble
to unlearn the ignorance
that has waylaid me
i am indebted to the springs in my pallet
the soft sands of my floor
these things that do not belong
here, in my meditation upon them
1, 2, 3, 4, a sharp
pain in the middle of my foot
a cramp that retracts four of my toes
a nuanced nuisance
that interrupts, bequeathing
another foray into life after birth
i taste the salt of 500-year-old sweat
that imperiously drops down the nose
of my death mask
a legacy of awareness and merit
then and now and later
all, now
faces melt into a full
horizon of unmasking
a breath that has been held
for waves of ages
and the thin edge of paper
bent backward
as a memory
speaks to the assembly of selves
that have gathered
and the naked door opens