Night Bird Summer Rain

How didn’t I see you there, old friend?
How long have you been looking over my shoulder
from your perch, your telephone wire,
unable to make out the words, the handwriting
not even my wife can read?

Seven o’clock dusk among thunderheads,
seat cushion seeping into my pajama bottoms,
the rain picks up where it left off. The story goes on.
Long-winded, its narrative thread shifts
in the air beyond the orchard, its pinprick liminal,
a spray bottle pointed at the back of my head.

Why do you linger on in greatening degrees
of darkness? What are you hanging on
for? Not ready to go in, not ready to turn on
the television, unwilling to lay down your head
and listen to the rhythm of the sump pump
flushing more and more dark water
away from the foundations while you rest?

Clear Grit in the Grass

Clear grit in the grass
leftover from Monday’s blizzard, skyscraper
of burst glass; each of the red
bricks of the retaining wall with its own
little load, its own thin

strip of snow. From Theo’s digital grip,
the fountain pen rains down
on the lineated plain of my notebook
a black blizzard of scratch marks.

On the front stoop, a plank of black
ice frays white along its crumbing
rim, warming up never above
freezing. Windblown branches flicker leaf

shadows over the living room rug,
its floral tapestry of blue
butterflies, before clouds envelop
the sun and the leaves spiral down

and down. Before his hands redden,
Theo shrieks, giving chase to a skittering leaf.
Perched on the two bags of cracked
cement anchoring the basketball goal

to the ground, I watch my son bumble
in his padded blue among the shivering leaves.
I watch ideas hatch in his mind:
He calls for Mommy. Raises a hand

to touch the wind. Points me
to the basketball ensconced, snow-splotched,
in the side yard. Grunts at the back gate,
then laughs to find me at it.

I watch him, walking backwards down the lane,
just to see what he will do
without me watching. He squats for several minutes,
eating clear grit in the grass.

Gary Snyder

After Gary Snyder lulls my son to sleep, I retreat
to the kitchen where he weans himself off the bottle
with messes. I rinse the grime of avocado from green rubber bib,
empty out crumb catcher for the compost heap.
It’s still bright outside. Stuffy heat of late evening
pillows my brow. Puddles of water on the quartz countertop
soak through the blue hand towel. In the basement,
cool and crisp as a meat locker, he screams,
diffusing the day’s excitations before succumbing to sleep.

I scrub the rubber spatula over the sink, its bits of scrambled
egg grafted to red silicone. Lower the rice cooker
into the dark, cool cabinet below the countertop.
Pick errant sticks of cucumber from the high chair lining.
Drag the long white wing of the tray insert
through falling water and sponge the smear of avocado,
squeezing suds of dish soap over the ridged quadrants of cup and plate,
the rain-dirtied pane of the storm window clipped open
to admit the relief of breezes, lower sash held up by a 2X4.

Night Winds

A breeze rises in the night.
Moonflower leaves rattle in the arbor
behind my whitewashed
wicker chair, alerting me to a kind
of presence. My mother,

I imagine, back from work, hikes the dark
slope of the yard. A breeze
rises. Then there are only engines
moaning in their casements, their sheet
metal carapaces, and no breeze,

just the silence of the shriveled leaves
and whatever the stars have bequeathed me
of their light among the porchlit limbs
of the silver oak rearing above. Some knowledge
would be the death of me. Some mornings

I can’t squeeze my eyes
into the crow’s feet of a smile, a greeting
for the hours to come. Why have I always had to know
everything? Now another breeze,
a colder kiss on the cheek, and the night

cars whisk, taillights streaking
bloodshot insomniacs peering between the dark pickets
of the fence that protects my privacy.

Every day I set out to find the still center of my being. It's always there waiting, the source of my creativity, the voice that will say what it wants to say. I can hear it speaking most clearly in nature so I return to nature. Here are four poems I wrote out of the still center.

I keep a notebook in my back pocket, go outside and sit down in my white wicker chair. Sometimes I’ll bring a book to spark a conversation between my natural surroundings and the writer I’m working with. Right now, it’s Saint Augustine, but I’ve spent a lot of time with the Tang dynasty poets and Suzuki Roshi, too. Some time later, I’ll transcribe my scribbles into text and attempt a poem. It’s a pretty simple process but without it I wouldn’t know how to continue living. I wouldn’t know what I am thinking or feeling. As a glioblastoma cancer patient with a 14.6 month median life expectancy, I want to live life as deeply as I can with the time that I have and the meditative writing process I’ve discovered in poetry is my way of doing that.

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