O that moment in
7th grade
wasting time at the school library
when I was supposed to be
reading the Odyssey )who
knows? This might also be a journey.
O that moment when
the smallcase e's and periods
poured off the shelf into my palms,
pushed from the other side by a mouse?
A dusty angel?
Pod of pages bursting
into thistle silk syllables
carried on a cruel lovely
April breath punctuated mad-
ly with dashes and a half
parenthesis )the
smiling horizon of a world
that awaited finishing
like a chrysalis on my shoulders
with a hole full of stars on top.
How can my stammering
imaginal brain cells
thank you enough, e. e.
for this baptism in
the spill of your broken rules,
the grammar of your grace,
where anyone lives in a
pretty how town with
up so floating many bells down?
Soon after, in a used book shop,
the mud-luscious messenger nudged
another rainbow off the shelf
entitled, "Cherry Blossoms."
I was only 12.
How old was Issa when
he dissolved me into his tear
of wonderwith
a little haiku?
This dewdrop world,
it may be a dewdrop...
and yet, and yet.
Soon it would be Ferlinghetti's
naked nude
flying on a violin horse
with the ghost of Chagall.
Then Keats, pillowed on his fair love's
ripening breast.
And the Trappist monk who told me
that his favorite mystic was
Emily Dickenson
because she taught him to dwell
in possibility.
But it all began with
those insouciant smallcase e's
spilling into my prayer cup hands
when I was 12
wasting time at the library.
It was Just
spring.
Still whistling far and wee
might uncapital(eyes
everything, even god
because a sparrow single song that falls
is none to ear or i the less for thee
than ten million suns.
