as long as I can remember
death has always come
in time

inexplicable
in a moment in
the middle of things

like those crows
gnawing on something
snow exposed when winter
changed its mind about February

like the sister
who never writes
poetry, always prose

postcards promising more
so much more to tell when she gets home

death backs into history like the rest of us,
out of step, knowing nothing
happens twice.

timing is everything.
just wait. there will be laughter

There are circles
that sew truths
any one of us
might have found
inconceivable. No use

waiting for a guided tour
in new terrain. You are
drawn by circles of conversation.

[This was originally posted in 2007, on the occasion of Richard Rorty's death.]

The Brownian motion of a mass of children
you might mistake for random dancing
cold beside a line of still

buses waiting on the first day of December.

2

A woman counting out loud to a known number
I do not know until she comes to it

and the children flow before the buses go
to some place I know as nothing more than
away from here.

3

A dog more Chihuahua than not
wears a bronze bell I carried home from Lhasa
that rings a prayer every morning walk. He is
the incarnation of a young Lama for whom

the one hundred and eighth clear tone signifies
desire to hear one more, and he
knows he is and will be

born again.

4

Red berries glance through a window
bright in morning sun, wait for snow.

Lobelia blue on green leaves gray now fades slow.

glad of the sea
glad of the earth
glad of the sun
glad of the moon
glad of the stars
glad one by one

god said of every one
that this is good this
gladness is
good

and had god thought
god would have said right
then and there that god is good as well

and god could not say
enough of four realms of four
elements seven realms of seven planets

god could not stop and take it in
take it in take it all in
taking it in

god said angels like words
beyond numbers to express them
and still god could not stop and take it in

the elephant the whale behemoth and leviathan
planets and suns and stars and angels
beyond counting and god

could not stop and take it in
so god made us of it all
and vanished in the
whole host of it

god could not stop
to take it in god could not
contain himself and all god said

is good
it is very good

In the long beginning of the moment
of the fall, a squirrel has made a nest
four Winters running in the hollow
lightning left, knowing it could not last.

Squirrel contemplates the absence
of a roof over his head, kicks all
the furniture out, hopes this false Spring
lasts until he’s settled in again before the first snow.

These sisters of Saint Benedict are
social insects, but the whole convent is
a hermit like me. They
need each other, but they
all need distance, and they
all keep their distance,
out of sight hoping to stay
out of mind. One
has wandered into my
kitchen this morning, lost. I
open the screen, avoiding her sting,
and wait until she is between
screen and window.

I close the window and tap,
which sends her spiralling to find
edges until she happens upon the opening
I’ve made, not knowing and not caring who made it.

She hurries back to the house she knows she and her sisters made
in something I’d forgotten, out of sight, out of mind,
working like a prayer to let the world be.

red moon rises clear
as day on the edge of the city
so sweet you can taste it
from here tonight
and I think this is where
the earth down here
gets red and I
hope it stays
a long long time

long enough for all that light
to fill us with all the madness
we need to remember
what a red state is
what a red state
Oklahoma is

it hangs slow slow shining, nothing
but light, and there’s space
enough in that
for every single one of us to dance

up don’t mean down and out
don’t mean in unless we stand together
the side of the sign that don’t say
nothing is the side of the sign
on the side that belongs
to you and me

if you see something, they say,
say something but I say
you can never say I
without meaning
we even when you forget
I say look at that moon like nothing
you’ve ever seen and say what you see. dance.

WoodyFest, Okemah, Oklahoma, 16 July 2011

to think there there at the time.
He said she said they said (meaning,
I suppose, the old man in charge, assuming
there was one) grammar, so she and Mortimer
were going on about narrative and she hit him on the head
said you are a young man who likes to argue. He was.
And she wanted readers so she wrote for herself
and myself, strangers.

It drove him to Thomism (the old philosopher)
which is not as far as you might think
from Oklahoma, almost Kansas,
which both know (Thomas
and the state you are in or have been
in at one time or another knowing
what Dorothy said to Toto) knowing
time and time again and time and
time again and time was it could have
been otherwise. Time is it could be otherwise,
always is. Now is otherwise another time.
The grammar of this is word after word
time after time I say she said (though
I was not) there. That is

what all men mean
when they say said the saint
when he was a heretic. Women
too, it goes without saying. Gertrude
said, he says, or so the words say as far as
I can tell reading for myself, a stranger, writing.