More Anatta For Will

How it happens without you

if you aren't careful-

every moment is yes very deep

like beyond the wave-breaking point,

every moment is yes very

saturated with gravity,

every moment every moment

every moment

I was twelve years old and the world tasted of chamomile.

Devoured and shaped by the soft gray fog, so long ago and

long before

the tilting scale questions:

Windmill or fracking drill?

Is that a windmill

or a fracking drill?

Balanced on the beam of a branch, and once I was a child,

hello there, and once you were a child, the past is death

it is the truth of death, it is as if it never was,

every moment, every moment.

And do we all know, you and me and

the swelling human sea, do we know the

healing purity of the struggle?

The churning disparity between windmill and

fracking drill?

I almost can be as brave

and as stupid

as myself

yesterday.

But I am learning to make love

out of anatta.

And I will write a letter 

and let myself be golden for a moment more,

a moment, every moment  

Yet haste, haste on

Yet haste, haste on

Where do you all go to, small miseries? Fleeing 

like tumbling lemmings spurred by anthrax. 

Holding space for more 

small miseries

more brief reprieve long 

recovery,

more conversations with the landscape:

                                      Oh night sky, can't you hear my tree fall? 

Where am I going when I follow

the tunnel of time? 

Curled beneath

                         the curling gale, 

the brackish wind,

the thickest socks, 

                        the dreams of fog,

                         all underwater

Heart of Scrimshaw

I gave love back to the universe, and 

all the marrow I scooped from the sun

I returned to the sun and kept the cold 

rock of the moon. 

I wound every smile back

into the skein.

A beautiful dinner that night:

all hen-of-the-woods and morels, 

chanterelles and I lost myself in the saucepan, 

still heart for a moment during the strange,

gray May spring. 

Missing a thing defies the entire landscape

and is blasphemous in no worthy way. 

Yet my bones sing the tired ache, 

I'm real down and out, 

I wipe dust from my eyes 

and consider my keeper.

I have poison thoughts that taste 

bitter and half-cooked, like 

Love is a big dam exploding 

and nothing good happening.

And as time confesses, 

I see that it's true:

Much is fluky, 

maybe unavailing, all in flocks

and scattered showers,

The sky-the bird, 

the cloud-the need,

like a past poet said. 

I remember that bird, looking up at my 

lingering face as it died in my hands

soft and tiny. 

I am not your woman, 

not your fox hole, belong to nothing 

but the roaring vacuum, 

nothing but the scream of 

wind the only embrace for the poorest. 

Poor poor soul, 

wishing for unintelligible extravagances. 

Knives stuck in hides.

I will be in San Simeon soon,

to gaze down on the rookery of seals.

Fully bereft of all but the present-

full galed, full upright. 

I have feared all the changes- 

I've dreaded the mornings,

I've needed more rations

than the rations

I've gotten,

past is a volume on a high shelf

but I am tall and sometimes too tall. 

Brave and sometimes too brave,

asking the earth to offer equal, 

time and long drive crease my palms, 

love I am your ally always. 

Coast recognize

my heart of scrimshaw

Sea Witch

Sea Witch

I had a brisk, blue dream of Morro Rock

and strangers

that loved me with open immediacy. 

During my wakened days,

all the memories blow past my body

like scorched kelp and sand. 

Emptiness is too generous

an opportunity for silence,

an opportunity for sadness. 

And I'm giving my body to science now,

to the truth of things.

Take this invasive animal. 

See how she does. 

Hide me beneath the quilts

at the market,

crush that coral into snow.

Dream of the sea or not at all. 

I'll say goodbye,

drive away,

and come back.