Coming Into 29
Coming into 29, you wake up in
this high mountain valley sunshot,
and constantly changing to the eye,
which attempts to dissolve everything
in the translucence of memory's color.
Rest now in this music. Offer praise to the river, the hill, the sighing pine, the chinook's warm breath flowing down the canyon, the love hidden in the seed of everything.
Soon it will be time to descend into the work of years left but bearing now in your palms this grace of snow, and rock, and the in and out of breath's white smoke.
March 2, 2007 Banff, Canadian Rockies
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Night
Armies of the night have
laid siege to this city tonight.
Their flares overpower even
the reflections of the winter stars
gleaming over the black silk of
our river of meetings, and of drownings.
Or this is what I think in this loveless state, in which the days drop sapless and swift like autumn leaves, and the nights are full of echoes of the revelers' fireworks.
Note: Originally scribbled on 2007:02:18, on a brochure of the Royal Ontario Museum, in front of this wonderful Japanese print; words of longing that have grown much darker when transcribed this Friday evening, in which I pace like Rilke's panther, in this city I can't leave
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A Found Doodle
in a volume of Anna Akhmatova's poems
A jaguar's eye takes shape on the green glass of water misting over by the bedside table. It is in its gaze, I write with my tongue on your illium, words you can't read, as you lay naked in the intruding winter sun.
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