Under the snow, seeds listen.
Are you singing to them?
Your breath is Persephone.
Don't waste a single exhalation
complaining about the world.
Just choose beauty.
The gift will not appear
until you are grateful.
And the softer your voice of praise
the more they will reach up to you,
empty purple cups
full of yearning.
This is the art of thirst.
Creation happens in quietness.
You are the cause of Spring.
No more mountain tops.
I yearn for a valley that smells
of your rain. I like to touch
the sky in your dark springs,
the rivers and roots here
in your blue nest of veins.
Let me kiss the spider in your brow,
your eyelids white forest pools
reflecting the moon, fatted salmon
leaping up your blood
as last night's sleet snakes down
the switchback trails along your thigh,
a taste of sweetness in the mud,
the syrup of composted stars.
So I wander Winter woods,
a lover's breath warming my solitude.
This is our weather. Our path
is the ordinary, vanishing, appearing
again through wolf-gray mist, a way
chosen by deer for its stillness.
I like to touch your fern and
hemlock places, your bejeweled
silences glistening with a musk
that has the vireo so wildered by
your Being, she can’t contain a song.
What kernels of blackness are not
your seeds, what ferment not
your yeast? Are we not all the brown
and blush in each other's cheeks?
You were folded and kneaded
into the bread of my body
before I was conceived.
Feed me now.
Took this photo hiking in the rain on Mt. Rainier, not too high.
A tear is never just a tear,
a pollen bindhu never just a dust mote.
Every sub-atomic pulse of blackness
spans galactic wombs.
How will you discover other worlds
in the fissures of this one
if you cannot pluck the ancient forest
from a hollow white seed?
Would earth not be dead and done
if a dandelion were merely a weed
and not a scripture of entangled chants,
a helix of golden poems?
They say the Lord’s most sacred work
is Tirobhava, concealing truth
beneath appearances.
Is this planet not a rapture of veils,
a mirage swamp, every lucid
hiddenness revealing
some deeper transparency,
the odorous delightful chaos
of skunk cabbage and cattails
seen through the wing of a dragonfly?
Think of shells and their pearls,
the husk and milk of coconut,
the fingers that broke
a pomegranate open
stained with the wonder
of ten thousand wounds,
or her that first gazed into a
still
green pond and fell among the petals
of her own retina.
This is a sea of thanksgiving.
You dive in with
your whole body,
then come up gasping
with a soul.
