About Therapy

Memory means something, always,

but it isn’t precise, ever.

So many times I have scattered some of my memories over

a mental landscape for scrutiny and eventual reassembly,

thinking I might find something long overlooked, 

something that would fill in the memory gaps,

reveal a long forgotten name, a missing event, 

reasons for my occasional unravelings, 

or I’d find a new poetic voice.

It is so difficult to know if I should reassemble 

everything in more colorful and musical ways,

thinking that would relieve some anxieties

or make life look better or the memories more interesting.

I ask the therapist to help, who then often asks me, 

How long have you been carrying this around?

You still haven’t fixed this?

I’m looking for understanding and closure…

Despite her earnest efforts, 

inexplicably, I’d still procrastinate,

still lose some things,

never to be found, most likely,

not really missing them, 

coping as I have for many years.

But sometimes, just once in a while, when standing 

in my back acre, my heart emptied of words,

sipping a little wine, 

I feel the consoling voice 

of that one lost love, unforgettable, 

and still I wonder what could have been.

From: Getting There

Unpublished MS p. 35

What Do I Know?

We don’t know.

The world doesn’t know.

The world is needy.

The world is idiotic.

The world is barbaric.

The Universe moves eternally, under our feet,

over our heads, through our hearts and souls,

and I, the stumbling, fallible,

open-hearted poet of lost words

and lost worlds, mending still,

resigned to meandering,

am hoping for that one lightning bolt

that will open new doors;

listening to voices in the wind,

encountering ghosts and spirits,

and knowing stuff of other realities,

of no language, of no visibility,

that are full of colors and gloss and

sacred gatherings that I can’t explain.

At the bar in Pizzeria Mimosa in Hereford, Arizona,

a glass of wine and ordering something Italian,

chatting with the bartender or the person next to me,

penning a line or two, an edit here and there,

pondering the whats and hows of grasslands,

the wheres and whens of the Pacific Ocean,

the ups and downs of the Huachuca Mountain slopes,

the kindnesses of so many people I have met...

The world is beautiful, 

I said to no one in particular.

Just beautiful.

From: Getting There

Unpublished MS p. 39

Passages

It isn’t like marching nor ticking like a metronome.

Humans, animals, and the world have their mixed rhythms.

The passage of time, our perception of its passing,

seemingly slow in our youth, faster the older we get.

Even the silences of the Huachuca Mountains, 

the immense expanse of the Willcox Playa, 

the ebb and flow of tides,

and the seductive grasslands

have their own mingled cadences.

We play music to feel a steady rhythm, 

to step out of the push of time

that keeps us off balance and out of sorts.

And in our meandering, we take time

to think of the passage of lives,

of children to grandchildren,

of loved ones, the aging of brothers,

sisters, friends, and lovers.

The past slips away like fading light; 

the future arrives unnoticed in the here and now.

We let go our regrets; we hold on to our joy.

We sing, we dance, and the music plays on.

From: Small Places, Big Places, Everywhere 

Unpublished MS p. 48

A Day Of Something

A poem is a mountain, a pond, an ocean, a desert, 

a forest, a grain of sand, a lost child needing a home.

What a day of nothing in writing,

looking out windows, 

pacing around the house and yard, 

turning on music, turning it off, 

snacking on Girl Scout cookies.

I hoped for a word to flutter in, 

a butterfly of a thought,

a sigh from the grasslands,

or fantastic creatures galloping

down the Huachuca Mountain slopes.

I had a glass of wine,

thinking I would see a change in the sky’s colors,

or I’d put a new spin on a curious idea

scribbled in the margin of my notebook.

I managed to insert a comma, instead.

I had one more glass and played 

my trumpet to a forties big band tune

and was sure I saw dragons leap 

from quickly moving clouds.

I can’t sit still and wait for something to happen.

Surely there’s a restless poem or two in all that.

Maybe tomorrow. But for this afternoon, 

with some Syrah and The Wailin’ Jennys,

I’ll soften into the lay of the landscape.

From: Small Places, Big Places, Everywhere 

Unpublished MS p. 44

Peggy Sue And The Blue Chevy Pickup

 From Willcox, 1960, as best as I can remember.

The music is a surprise without a ribbon.

A box full of sounds, orchestras,

rock bands, and a chorus of sacred lovers.

Such music will take us somewhere wonderful.

Leave trouble behind. 

Get that cold bolt from the blue,

get ball lightning, be the lightning rod— 

unshakable, undeterred, unflinching— 

stay off the highways that go nowhere fast.

Time to get magical, get heated, be fiery!

Get out of the rut...jump, leap, hop-scotch,

pogo stick, bicycle, tricycle, and fire up

that blue ’54 Chevy pickup. 

But it’s a stick shift.

It’s Peggy Sue’s. She can drive anything.

We’ll all ride with her.

Turn on the radio.

Listening to the music, laughing and singing.

Holding hands and shouting, 

It’s Elvis!

Turn it up.

Turn it up.

Go. Go. Go.

From: Memories and the Things Left Behind:

A Non-linear Recollection

Unpublished MS p. 10

One Night With Syrah

Road trip, Northern California, Winter 

Alone with two bottles of Syrah and ocean surf,

Gold Beach, Fern Canyon, redwoods, Beethoven,

a moonless night, a starry-starry sky, galaxies,

chilly air, and a red sleeping bag.

There are sparkling past futures; there are ponds, lakes, 

diamond shoes, and a road to nowhere which ends up being

somewhere near someplace, with hands and arms flailing, 

begging for a ride to Eureka, California.

Look. There are clouds; now there aren’t.

Look again, there are stars, like Deneb and Betelgeuse,

and we can sail away like ancient mariners on a silvery sea, 

breathing deep, but now our lives are shorter, so let’s eat pizza

and BBQ, drink more wine, tequila, and eat tacos and carne asada.

Let’s give coffee to this drunken madness, then we can dance.

Enya is singing in the blue lagoon, in the silence 

of the months ahead, and in the noise of the months behind. 

Now the hellos, goodbyes, deaths, burials, trains, planes, 

and art left over from the good old days, the blue days, 

the windy days, the rainy days, and all the days 

of city traffic that went nowhere fast.

From the silence of lost loves,

the wind of grasslands and oceans,

we finally sing “Hallelujah,” “White Rabbit,” 

“Mairzy Doats,” and an old Vernon Dalhart classic.

Settling in my sleeping bag, unafraid of the noise 

of forest darkness, the universe reveals a secret,

and I sleep.

From: Dreams, Memories, And Leaps Into The Wilderness

Unpublished MS p. 11

The Day Came

 A Meditation

What was my reason?

How did my voice become?

When did my heart awaken?

Why was my voice so quiet?

What has my underground flow

to do with anything?

A day came and I knew,

without words, but knowing came  

in a terrible melancholy of memory.

When is the truth?

How is the truth?

Who speaks the truth?

What was I thinking?

And so I hit the road.

I followed a road to How.

Where it was I didn’t know,

but I found it, though it ran through

places where so many had already been

and had never asked Why.

What I found wasn’t lost.

It was there all the time.

And my old failures?

Some became red wines.

Others, the stuff of dreams.

From: Dreams, Memories, and Leaps Into The Wilderness

Unpublished MS p. 2

The Memory Of Dreams

Dreams are weird.

People running through, stopping to tell me

I’m worshiping fire; or, was it that I was like fire?

Some said that I should follow scripture,

but the scripture pages were blank,

yet still screamed messages

in extinct languages. 

I’m listening but not understanding.

I feel the presence, like earthy vibrations.

Would it help if dreams had punctuation?

What does anyone know

about inside dreams? Or outside?

I wonder about memories like that.

Aren’t they sort of like dreams we carry?

Wide awake and still dreaming.

Dreams go back and forth

like palindromes, where past and future

interchange so I don’t know what realm I’m in.

It could be either/or at any moment.

Forget about tidiness; there are blank spaces.

Messiness and illogic are givens to be cherished.

They are time openers and teasers, moments with 

or without sounds, right and wrong at once,

and yet a memory is released and then the wonder

of its time in a place, or a place that slipped through time.

We dream to remember, 

but don’t forget to dream.

From: Dreams, Memories, And Leaps Into The Wilderness 

Unpublished MS p. 1

Visions Beyond The Ordinary

Southeastern Arizona Borderland

Red kisses from the secret garden

opened to me flavors of time. 

I ripened in tiny ways in my quiet years.

Now I profess to live in my later wisdom.

In my rainbow eyes, birds flew into

sunrises infinitely, as exciting yellow rays, 

growing into vines, into blossoms rosy crazy, 

becoming flashes of blinding beauties.

I loved horses and symphonies;

one and the same nobility,

galloping through fields and colors of sound,

and apples fat brought stars home to play.

The high desert, a strange home 

during an opaque time, made of nothing 

and everything; willful, colorful Grace 

drenched the seasoned land of memories.

Buckle Up

Pay attention! Wilderness is speaking. Listen.

It is I. It is her. It is you. It is us.

It is no one else but the memory of many

who ran naked in the borderlands that belonged

to the wind, rabbits, coyotes, and the gathered in;

to lightning and thunder and rain; 

to green and yellow grasses, and blue sky clouds;

where The Traveler has Journeyed since time began.

What will the next thing be?

Creation isn’t finished.

It’s always in a state of becoming.

Welp, now it’s time to do something different.

Coyote said that Love will be our upper hand,

our flying hands, our open hands, our tender hands.

He has loosed a Ring of Fire. Time to fall in.

There will be more than one kind of Awakening;

more than one kind of Revelation;

more than just the noise of the Sacred Assemblies,

but only a one of a kind Traveler.

Buckle up, everyone.

It’s going to be another bumpy ride.

From:  A Rambly Search for Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpublished MS

Please Take Note:

The Traveler is a time traveling, non-verbal spirit carried

in the wind that can only be felt, that infiltrates the heart

and soul and informs us of other realms of reality.

The Watcher is the heave of Grace that informs us

of something that must be given attention.

The Stranger is the mystery of the unknowable, the

part of ourselves that we don’t know that always 

asks why; that pokes and prods, awake or asleep, an

intruder asking unanswerable questions, sometimes 

an unnerving participant in dreams.

All three may be agents of God, 

but that is ultimately unknowable.

Poet and Coyote are alter-egos. 

From the introduction to: A Rambly Search For 

Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpublished Manuscript

What Light Is This

What a strange kind of moth it would be

that is attracted to darkened candles.

Lovers and seekers see the light 

as an earnest madness in one another.

There is nothing in day and night that will 

tie down their wild, scandalous hearts.

Who can see light where there is none?

Where there are lovers, there light is.

The Good Storm

It crossed Phoenix,

a freak storm

out of the west,

late April.

Lightning unleashed

shoulder crushing thunder.

Monstrous clouds tore at each other,

pinkish purple full of ice

on the face of them,

blackened grey all around,

charging like raging brigands,

the conquerors of everything,

throwing golf ball-sized hail

that pounded roofs and destroyed cars,

frightening reminders that the giants

among us can wreak havoc at any time.

What A Time It Was

It could be The Beatles or Beethoven,

the music I remember most,

from places and time,

memories becoming vaguely familiar strangers,

not so much the reality of the time

but some form of what that reality was, 

continually stretched, compressed, broken,

and reassembled in creative and  

sometimes startling ways,

floating somewhere around

how it really was (now long gone),

how I remember it,

and how I wish it had been.

Grassland Sonata

There is a cold air breeze, 

softly on the dusky grassland,

leading me down time’s easy path

until a five-year-old child looks up

in wonderment, and the lyrical, 

untuned piano played by his grandmother 

brightens the evening sky.

The chilly air takes me back 

into that five-year-old’s warm heart,

into a world seen through his eyes,

innocence that I think I remember so well.

The noises of that day, the dusty street, 

and my off-key singing mingle 

with my grandmother’s rendering 

of a long forgotten piece. 

That sliver of a sweet memory, 

carried gently on the evening’s 

cold air silence, meanders, merging 

into an airy stream of memories

of what was, of what could have been,

constantly flowing, fleeting, leaving me longing 

for the wonders of childhood’s innocence. 

Wire

 Sonoita, Arizona

An iconic western image, 

a barb’ wire fence

straightaway running,

becoming a pencil thin line

disappearing over the last rolling hill.

Do we wonder 

what is at either end? 

Or are we content to gaze 

into whatever is on the other side— 

the expanse of range grass caressed by breezes;

low, tempting mountains two miles away?

Do we take time to consider life’s vagaries, 

or is there a vague desire to run away,

thinking there freedom is,

unaware of its costs?

But then there are those of us 

who stand at that fence instinctively, 

our hearts aching for what is unspoken 

and unknown but is nothing more 

than how to live a life that is 

authentic, sensuous, and 

entirely beautiful.

Silence

To some of us the world is blue with silence,

because silence is bright yellow, bright green,

and silence is wide and narrow,

full of prayers, full of good and evil.

And following along are the thunderous silences,

like empty sports stadiums, closed race tracks,

and shattering cruelties that surround us in red.

There are curiosities of silence, of the strong, silent type,

the quiet ones, those children who have been too quiet

for too long; the silence of the sulking, depressed, lonely,

contemplative, guilty, puzzler, wanderer, and lover.

There is the silence of love’s hidden work,

the burning silence of sunrise and sunset,

and when the music begins, silence deepens it.

For the troubled: outward silence; inward screams.

Make room for silence; live in the mercy of silence.

When you are in the noise of nature and you hear 

your footsteps and breathing, bow in that holy place.

Let silence be an art we practice.

If We Love

The kisses, the caresses, the letting go;

hearts laid bare,

the ultimate invitation to love,

to risk heartbreak

and the deep commitment

to something greater than ourselves;

fully mortal, fully human,

and yet, at the instant of our rapture,

there the tremor of immortality.

Musical Notations

I was born in a world of music and abstractions,

sound translated into images that assemble

and disassemble, then reassemble in colorful ways

with new music, old music, the brawling, the serene,

roaming about gently settling here and there like Mozart,

or rampaging through the universe like Beethoven,

pushing me around a bit like Bartok or Nielsen,

astonished by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich,

tripping me like Charles Ives, to be lifted again

and set on a steady beat by Johann Sebastian Bach.