....From The Tree Of............Sudden Joys
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_______________________________________________________ To Feel Something Balancing on the flagpole's tip, feet curled like an eagle's, toes grip the edge of roof- I'm peering down. Today I am somewhere in sky and a small lip of something keeps me from falling, but there is a crazy longing to di v e. I want to feel air rush down velocity, vertical blur- I want to be gravity's ride to ground zero smack- I want to go and not come back. I want to feel the thwack, I want to feel something all the way through: red then black, to the white blue burst ing eyes of God as big as Jupiter rings around me- I want impact. SALT LAKE CITY- (AP) Elizabeth Smart, the 15 year-old girl who vanished from her bedroom nine months ago, was found alive Wednesday walking down a suburban Salt Lake City street with a drifter... Thoughts During Tumble Dry On A Night In March When I Heard It's been a long time since my skin's felt water and sun, but I remember it. The beading up the sparkle on blond hair of arms- jewels for limbs, encrusted by the sun in yellow honey. The way the water lapped and soothed, the tickle trickle getting out like phantom fingers, and the air made every pore awake. Aware of oxygen. Blood beat underneath. A lake, a pool- everything but the sea where there are sharp things. Things with teeth and stringy tangles around ankles, shins and knees. The water green and dark and swallowing up whole. The sea is to disappear into; I have to keep a sharp eye on myself- on shore, and sometimes I lose sight of all but outline--and go looking---and Elizabeth Smart- .......I cannot tell you how it lifts my heart to hear they found you; end like a book or like the Bible when the whale coughed Jonah up. We cling to life and don't look back. Remember sun and air, and water, and the bloodbeat in the skin; we rest our harps against our shoulders thinking: "Fingers, strings and pluck" and wait the time it takes to turn it back to music. The Voice In the still heart still night soft as flakes through mellow lamplight, ice parts path to dark down deep inside. I hear you murmur, 'merry' and I am that is the miracle. Joy, sometimes side wise comes, a little magi. Old Black Mack Me and my pet crow- -I know I don't have one, but I can dream, can't I --this crow and me talk everything over, like when will I retire. How much sleep is too much. When do you throw the leftover lasagna away, and are crows really evil. Did Pol Pot, for example, have one as his familiar as he slaughtered those Cambodians- and why does the Khymer Rouge have such a pretty name for such a deadly thing, and just today, while watching a shrewdness of monkeys on the Discovery Channel, I asked him why, as they threw dung at one another, why do poets write in pods of such aggression, and my crow, he walked a little away, thought about it, cocked his head and said: Flung dung. Onomatopoeia. Squirrels Watch the ground in any November, hop alive with little scalloped ribbons of fur like rope snaps air. Sunshine and the grass ajump with bushytails, can carry a person happy all the way, so let it out there leap with it. Look at that one walking a wire, an aerialist squirrel, backlit by late morning sun, low to rubber tail straight up -a rudder racing ten feet off the ground, it's quite the show of heart that little guy's got- and look at a squirrel face packed to bursting, cheeks like oranges- who wouldn't laugh at a thing as that? I read a thing a southern writer said, 'there's something wrong when a person cannot smile at that; it's a measure of character's what it is' - and I agree. If there be rainbarrels catching our spills of delight, I think that mine is nearly halfway full of squirrels. Elevation Night kliegs, hillslopes writhe with arms till a sound like an incoming missile pierces everything, then an amped up scream of an existential brightness raised to resurrection white. A bass guitar and then another with a voice so high above a human sound I think that God must play an ax like that. Drumbeats break the air in half, everything has edges, everything converges as the rawboned thrust of Bono's voice stabs inside my soul and he cries, body dervish dancing- veiny voiced, shouting to the blackness up above, a love and grief to his father lost and buried the day before. It is a thing to watch. It is a wake ening and the top of my head is sailing off to wherever he is gesturing, wherever those better angels turn our pain into confetti, and guitars are the mystic arms of the almighty. Nothing a pope does could be holier than this sweaty man, wailing in a Dublin night. His host all round and rising, an Elijah come to deliver us to home, in colored lights of sorrow that've been elevated to something, somewhere else. Another Flock Song Standing in the needled sleet, day like cold wet sheets against the face, there was another flock of geese above. They save me. Watching them I watch the high notes- Madam Butterfly sound of sadness thrilled by triumph, pain made beautiful by love. Their V for victory over ice and death, the very breath of how it feels to be the song. Afterglow Certain days are triumphs so that afterward, alone and spinning down there is a warmth, sweet and golden like the sun has set within the chest and butter, sugar- burn, churn together. The day is carmelized and shiny. Slick with life gone slack, relaxed. It sticks to all the fingers while you, smiling, messy-mouthed roll into sleep Whitman In Hotpants Yesterday, Walt Whitman staggered along Fifth Avenue trailing his beard and visions. He may have been Manny the Sot kicked from 'Aces/Deuces' because his gibberish had bothered other drinkers.
But when he spun, looked at sky, every cell alive-
right up
-I sing of
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