Thunder With Wine

Watching from my front porch,

enjoying a glass of Syrah,

an afternoon storm from the west 

crawls over the Huachuca Mountains,

appearing friendly and seemingly laid back.

Then surging over, gaining strength,

down the mountain like an avalanche,

ominous, dark blue-gray,

covering the eastern slopes

with clouds and sheets of rain.

It’s filled with amazing

and dangerous fragrances,

earthy and ancient, 

the decayed and the living.

The jagged wow of lightning

cuts loose the blast of thunder

that lurches ahead of the storm,

rumbling over everything toward me,

awaiting its thudding arrival,

to see the ripples in my wine,

to feel with Earth its visceral,

percussive boom, 

all the way to my bones.

From: After All the Years of Gravity

Unpub. MS p. 23

The How of the Storms

Childhood Summers

It couldn’t just rain in Willcox— 

a mass of grit and silt blown from the Playa

had to fill the air, teasing everyone

with the odor of wet dirt.

How odd that we could say it smelled good

while tons of the stuff blew

through town at forty miles an hour.

The onerous grit infiltrated

windows and doors,

adhered to our teeth,

filled our noses and ears,

and coated our game boards with an annoying 

layer of silt.

The wind howled like

the O’Connor’s blood hounds released for the hunt;

barb’ wire fences glowed and crackled with static electricity.

Lightning, as if hammered off Thor’s anvil, 

careened straight down through a furious sky, 

crashing into Earth in a blinding flash,

letting loose window rattling thunder,

sometimes so close we ducked. 

Then it would rain.

From: After All the Years of Gravity

Unpub. MS p. 26

Fire, Passion, and Stairways to Heaven

Ask a question any way you want.

The truth of the answer it won’t change.

Could the answers change the questions

into some other grammatical form or language?

Some day I will reach a place of Knowing nothing.

I’m wondering if invisible I will be. Or just older?

Better you’re transformed into the fullness of a symphony

with lots of brass, with a conductor with strong arms,

swamped by sound, swamped by the sound of love, 

by loving the harmonies, the chord progressions,

digressions, compressions, suggestions, avoiding the

false prophets and easy answers to abstract questions,

but what pain they will bring us, who knows, 

when our kisses fail to rise above simple disguises,

kisses of no fire, no passions, no stairways to heaven.

Answer from fullness, not from emptiness.

Answer in full voice, sing in full harmony.

From: Buckle Up! A Boomer’s Meandering Musings on

Innocence, Time, and Love, From Then to More Recently

Unpub. MS p. 7

At My Age

August 2022

73 years 6 months

In my pretentious sophistication,

at twenty-two, I watched A Clockwork Orange.

I unraveled in ways I didn’t know existed, 

but pretended otherwise.

Deeply shaken, I thought the world had shifted,

that something had died, 

that something malevolent was coming.

I vomited that night.

Innocence is gone.

Age does that, a little here, a little there.

So do books and broken toys,

and those special toys spirited away

by our mothers when we weren’t looking;

the news, frustrations, and betrayals by 

parents who should have loved their children

without question, without abuse.

Lest I become a resentful old man, 

I must forgive them every day.

There was innocence and wonder 

and imagination, then a need for comfort in an 

uncomfortable world, a longing for something 

of past good feelings seen through the lens 

of life’s experiences, craving meaning 

and connection, a Calling from the Wilderness.

At sixty-three, I entered one path

that opened into wonder, gazing 

at the Milky Way or standing in awe 

of nature’s primitive and beautiful places

and terrifying forces; and another 

into the journey seeking the Divine, 

the ultimate of the Sacred Mystery.

Walked simultaneously, 

in and out of shadow and light, 

with both love and suffering,

twisting, overlapping, merging together

until now, at this place, I arrived

better than I was yesterday.

From: A Preface to the Universe: Love, Nature,

& The Mysteries Within

Unpub. MS p. 19

Old Roads

to the love that should have been

Many old roads,

beaten and pot-holed, I have

traveled in silence unaware.

Year by year I have slowly learned 

to listen to my heartbeats.

Your wondrous touch 

and heartbeat caught me off guard.

You became a mysterious map

to some curious byways.

I was asked if I feared

disclosing my vulnerabilities.

Not any more, but a friend has told me,

If you get lost, don’t ask for directions.

The Master Poet said that love

emptied of things is the greatest love.

I admit to you my greatest fear:

the loss of the work of our hearts.

You have a marvelous way of seeing.

The curious byways persist just so.

If again our lips should come together,

if our tongues soften and our eyes shimmer,

the old roads would be made smooth again,

and they would be our new way home.

From: After All the Years of Gravity

Unpub. MS p. 13

Things Close By

A Reverie

Sunset glares through a slit in the clouds;

cool air descends with childhood memories

of horses and rain in Willcox. 

Horses knew things.

They knew more about wind, rain, and trouble

than any of the rest of us.

They helped me to many places 

that were kindred to my nature,

to escape the oppressing forces,

to wander in the dreams of silent places

where kindness flourished.

There were no maps for any of that,

but we may have known each other 

before time had its measure.

It’s windy this evening on the borderland,

and rain approaches from the southeast.

I opened a lovely Malbec to sip slowly

and relax while the storm treked across 

a darkly veiled sky. Its mesmerizing fragrance

mingled with the aroma of virga that fell 

from clouds of dreams and memories.

The horses knew about all that.

Sometimes we knew.

Look now. 

Rain is close by.

From: A Preface to the Universe: Love, Nature,

& The Mysteries Within

Unpub. MS p. 32

There Was This

2026

Fifty-nine years ago I was eighteen.

I remember that like it was just

fifty-nine years ago.

I was a high school graduate

washing dishes in a nursing home,

wondering, What about my life?

And today, for everything I can remember,

there are gaps before and after.

Memories stumble over empty spaces,

and dreams mingle with memories.

Which is which?

To my knowledge that’s nothing new.

I conjured plausibles to fill the gaps,

but that was never satisfying.

They are not lies, but not quite the truth.

It was merely a convenience

to avoid tripping through a story.

Since I’m past seventy, it’s easier to say 

that I don’t remember this or that

and I’m okay to let it go.

No one seems to mind.

From: Ponder: Dreams, Memories,

and the Imagination

Unpub. MS p. 26