Tint Duel

In order
Is disorder understood.
Those funny yellow weeds
Among heather are
Also heather.
There is no heath
The size of itself
Or single way
It goes.
It is
What it is, and how
The cosmos grows.

Gravel

Gravel garden walk--
Crunchy thing--
Pensive sound stirring
History, intrigue, power.
Gold, any gold under flowers?
Nitric acid would tell if
I had any.
Well, arsenic?
Reinsch test misreads
Its own copper gauze
Which contains what it tests for.
Marsh test is accurate
Nine times out of ten.
I haven't the knack
But then, how to tell if
These rocks are backfill
Over poisoned royalty?
This was greed, grief.
This was bone,
Committed to crystal lattice
In a stone.
Or could this be a bug
Breaking into a water drop?
Who am I, then, where stone stops?
Who cares.
I have worked hard on this who,
Don't want it petrified
In poisons under tombs, menhirs,
Pyramids, abbeys, stuff formed
Of so much rock
I'm surprised any is
Left over for my
Gravel garden walk.

Janus Before Seven

Time to sit on a log
And be spellbound
In pearl early light
Turning in low fog.
White tendrils curl
Up from earth,
Ghosts churning
White over winter
Fields.
Not a sound.
How to consume
This crop, this yield?
Sit on a log, be
Spellbound.

Dark Express

You remember me better
Than I do.
Who I was, under a hat:
Another magician arriving
In station echoes--
A late train, smells
Of cigarettes and steel.
An overcoat
On a cold night,
For an instant seemed solid,
Right and just, more
Than invention in
Shadows, dust, down years.
Here, you touch glass
That stops a place where
Steam is,
Clear a squeaking
Circle and
Remember me.

Quantum Gardening

All things are events
Bubbling up, losing balance,
Getting on top of themselves.
Storms sent by chance
Send us this way and that.
The world curves
Into everything
Large, small --time, mind,
Space and all events that
Serve life, make it
Full --the world
Is not flat.
Tree trimming or
Tending irrigation in
A boggy hole -- up, down,
The compass points are
Always with you.
You can't go in one
Direction without
The others too.

Antiparticle Of A Photon Is A Photon

First there is wilderness
With a voice in it
Sent all ways at once,
Echoing at random upon
A becoming collocation--
Arrives in minds surprised
As by a healing tune or
Curtain opened on an
Indoor moon.
This black flower sends
Its petals into night,
But silent?
I don't know, things said
Sometimes leave me
But silences, never.
After all, where
Would they go?

Perhaps Because I Have Done This Before

Each moment contains
Some quality of the next
In continuum, in text
An enjambment, as rain
Tonight stores starlight
For opalescent fog.
In the morning, birds
Mutter in hedges,
Silence is
Broken by a barking dog
And this garden loses edges
To rising mist.
New worlds are
Made of this: calm uncertainty
That will grow
Wings, feathers, fur;
From this weather
Occur, live, be,
And roam the future
Of memory.