Walking to Work

It is impossible to ignore the shimmer of spring
as the cumbersome layers of dark days fall away,
fracturing the illusion of all that I have left behind.

Each new day is vacant of the painful assaults
and bruises of expectation,
that plundered joy and the logic of abundant love.

Let the brusque wind and blithe April showers
divide my heart from the mind that saddled me
with heavy thoughts of the unkindness of the world.

It is the Beloved that has arrived
in the yellow cup of the daffodil
and the delicate edges of the short passion
of each purple crocus
along this gentle path
walking to the work I must do.

Knowing When It is Time to Go

The divestment from this miserly and unfaithful master
is threaded from a spool spun with potent, black misery.

Vanity loves another kind of company
and all I can do is run from the poison
and too many pockmarked promises.

I forget myself on a vagabond errand
toward joy that cannot be measured by money
or human desire. Time and love are all that matter.

Time and love are all that I have been given.

I am chalky with gratitude
and evening dusts me with salty simplicity
like I know at the end of a sunny soak
in the belly of the ocean.
In this moment only
I am breathing air saturated with brine
and God's constant laughter--

knowing so clearly when
it is time to go.

Welding With Jonah

When I spend the weekend welding with my son,
who has entered into his beautiful teenaged amperage,
we weld with evolutionary electrodes, fire and fuel
fusing our bonds,
pushing the molten lines of metallic love
into the spaces between the strongest of steel.

The slag and flux of life has no magnetic power
in this heat that still burns brightly in the forge
of the life that brings us together.

Sparks fly like comets all around us,
landing randomly in the noise of a shop of strangers.

My grandfather's Norwegian shadow
coils like smoke around our heads, laughing.
There's no joy like watching the shining seam
hold tight as the quenching solution steams.

The Tasks Left Undone

Perhaps we've all forgotten,
one time or another,

how hard it is
to do anything alone.

Each meddlesome task
a metallic taste
like a pending headache
that leaves each of us indecently vulnerable
to losing time.

This mottled mess
of what is left undone
is what brings me to my knees,
helpless watching all hope
wash out to sea.

Cold

Bone tired and breaking,
cold creeps in under the unattended doors
and around the places where warmth disappears.

Pull the colorful quilt high
and nuzzle into the tottering pile of pillows
where the wind cannot touch you tonight.

Wait for the sound of pots pulled from the cupboards
and the smell of coffee and toast
before you crawl from your dreaming at dawn.

Pray that the breaking of the day
will make haste for love
and for the forgiveness of sunshine.

Warm Spell

February has suddenly liquified,
a sponge wrung out into the dirty dish water of days,
pallid and lacking all signs of any season.

We stand in a stupor
wondering if winter has forgotten how to howl this year
or if we might trust our hibernation instincts
and shuffle heavily back into our dens
out of the unexpected warmth
and open streams.

Turn the wrench tighter on spring
like a ground hog's blinking eyes
discerning the earth
while clearly still a frozen mystery.

We can all give up pretending to know anything.

Instead, let us pray for the tiny chirping mouths of flowers
who sing their songs of praise and thanksgiving
out of turn and with no sense that the ashes from which we all come
have not a single ember to claim.

Tonight I Will Not Scurry

Tonight I will not scurry toward the noose
where I often hover in desperate thoughts
of the toothless future
or the wafer consumed in sin.

Tonight I will climb the shaking ladder of love,
fertile and blossoming,
and weave a garland of jasmine
so that I might place it gently
around the neck of the present moment.

Tonight I will dream of leaving all that is undone
and invite the honey and the bee to rest
while we drift on the current of all time.

In this sleeping peace
there is never anywhere to go
and always nothing to do
but extend the hand in kindness
to the whole world.