On Healing Wings
Be thinking all the time all the time
thinking just now just how this big yellow Wednesday morning would appear from the depths of translunar space
studying all the time
I've made a career adding up the numbers subtracting dividing figuring how long life could be
trying to take hold of everything from the Big Bang
to theological paradigms for the third millennium
with lamentations for the planet for the children of this century for the rain forest the inner city for all the unlivable dreams the unmet
needs unmanifest gifts and for my own advantaged self reproach unending
and still the verse flows only where it can twisting where it must
whittled on a walking stick as all these poems are
traveling poems
Within this fully human place where our faces conceive their shapes and our eyes yearn to be more awake than awake
where all inner silences are flooded
and drawn with the tides of the years where our first and our last words merge here and now on this pinnacle how it seems you are close
enough to feel
but I just can't touch you
I am staying tuned for further messages
working plans soul signals
mouth music
A mist conceals the peninsula
in the end which is the beginning of things
by this twisted path abides aromatic the golden yarrow
the bush-tits' notes
ride the ocean roar
a great up-reaching limb of the live oak is broken off and prodding
its wake through the soil of pine forest floor frothy
with ferns and tendrils
bare anemones and hermit crabs and ripe seastars thrive in transparent tidepools
mother seals outsizing their black promontories in waves of pups commune
dank as that sunrise we first sank our feet in wet sand I study
creases of flesh gathered on the back of my hand and Pacific seascape
the north wind
lupine in blue and white flurries
saltwater sprays all around
the sage I rub in my palm is pungent medicine
as hope descends on healing wings
I must solemnly do as little as I can
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