Venus & Mars

Based on Botticelli’s painting by the same name

What Venus sees when she surveys her love, The half-drunk Mars who cannot stay awake, We only know, or dare to guess because The God of War can slumber in her gaze.  That she, Goddess of Love, remains composed After she consummates her pact with war May be a testament that what she holds Is stronger, in the end, than brutal force.  Or maybe pleasure stills her quiet mind, And only we, who see that she still wakes, Assume she searches her lover to find The words to seal the pact that they have made-  If love and war shall be forever joined, Let he who speaks of victors have no voice.

Flutter

Hollow bones in their feathers clothed
Lift up frail wings to mount the air
To climb the invisible stairs
And flutter to their sometimes home,

Arriving in my dark moments
With morning's backwards lullabies
To coax my closed and dreaming eyes
To flutter to their sometimes home.

What strange migrations of the soul
Repeat their circuits every night!
What hollow apparatus might
Conduct this flight we take alone?

For like the birds, we build our homes
Inside a world that's not our own.

The Girl Raised By Wolves

On top of a hill with a view
Of the woods and the valley below
Where the grains touch their toes in the wind
Is a fine place to mark your beginning--

Where every day calls your small feet to explore
The uncharted paths stretching out your back door,
Which are carving their shapes in the map of your brain
Just as you make your mark on the terrain.

There's something about the vastness of Space
And the way that it rhymes with that other word, Grace,
That makes them the same sanctuary to those
Who have dwelt in their absence behind closed doors--

Where the walls listened in for the secrets but heard
Only childhood poems carving space between words
For the ache to which language can only aspire,
And the darkness which only tells truth when it lies.

It is thus that life calls to us, thus that we follow
The path through the thicket, the map of tomorrow.
Wherever the space opens up to contain us,
We open our doors to the path that awaits us.

Merciful

The only virtue of some things,
Like February and this poem,
Is that they're mercifully short.

Only a Mother

Even a mother's love is not insatiable to the point
Where she doesn't crave a lonely hour to sit at the edge of a pond,
Where her role in the ecosystem of interdependent needs
Is limited to the few drops of blood she might spare to a mosquito.

Her steps down the forest path draw a ripple of disturbance
In the birdsong that closes behind her,
Her long hours of creeping out of nurseries
Having taught her the role of quiet in sustaining life.

She must bear witness, now and then,
To the enduring, patient indifference with which
The earth mothers her constant offspring.

Only then will her mind close properly on a day
Full of needs she hasn't quite been fit to fill,
Despite her constant search for the right tune

To close the rift in birdsong caused
By her children's overzealous attempts
To seize that which they frighten away.

Whether her soul's piper ever stumbles upon the magic notes
To ease her children's way through life or not,
There will abide, at least, she hopes, this quiet.

Waking Up

My eyes flutter open to the darkness
As I wake up in the habit of my species,
Carving a morning out of nature's long sleep
With rote activity.

But this is the first day of the year when,
Stepping out into the gray hours,
A hundred wings invisible to me
Are fluttering as the birds,
Who in the habit of their species have returned,
Begin to carve their songs into the morning.

Light Inescapable

Light, inescapable, bathes the tall faces
Of buildings whose ground floors still mingle
With shadows and footfalls and breaths
That have just become visible this time of day.

This may be the one morning all year
That we feel the earth tilt on its axis
And see- perhaps down an alleyway
Drowned in the shadows-

The tunnel of years we collapse
In our memories down to their bones,
To the way the light fell
In its journey of angles to darkness.

Slender Stalk

The roads that take me home barely exist--
Well-worn paths of some practical imagination
Linking this and that quiet clearing
To the general stream of commerce
That we are always waking to from our dreams
Of a quiet life in the country,
Which also barely exists.

Alone on a slender stalk one afternoon
A heavy head of red petals drooped
In one of these lonely living rooms
Which existed solely to showcase this flower
Caught in the glare of the late burning sun
Where it caught my eye as I was almost done
Driving home alone.

Pythagorean Aesthetics

Your body is the shape of your habits
Like the shape in the sand
Is the picture of an ideal
In the mind of a man
Who believes in a universal order
That we shadow with our efforts
When we strive toward a perfection in form.

What this points toward
Is that beauty is what isn't--
It's the flower in the sidewalk,
It's the joy that's born of sorrow--
It's the soul's resolution
That fills up every space in our thoughts.

Glass House

The woman in the glass knows
She can never cast a stone
Because the one who holds her captive
Knows the name that breaks her bones.

The mirror brings together
The accuser and accused-
It is the prison glass that shields us
When we come to break the news.