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“Keep your head clear, and know how to suffer like a man.” Santiago (Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea)

Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man
Keep your head clear and know         to suffer like a man
Keep your head          and know  how to suffer      a man
Keep your head clear                          to suffer like a man
Keep  your head         and            how to         like    man
Keep   your                      know  how to suffer          man
                            clear      know how to                 a man 
Keep                   clear                        to suffer          man
                                           know       to suffer          man       
Keep                  clear                                               man
                                                               suffer          man
                                                                                 man

On Freedom

Blind from staring
at the sun of my existence,
I try to trust my gasping footsteps
as they find their concrete place--
and succeed, somehow, at the feat of action,
despite the doubting that remains
and the darkness that they face.

Forever

My soul soaked in alcohol,
I tried to find the flame of you,
to burn me free forever.

Now, on the walk home from the bar,

I try to find my footing through
a slush of feeling, trapped inside

the winter of my heart.
Shouting if I never find you, this
is not my world, but some alien place 

Some dream—a snow storm in the emptiness
containing everything forever—
and me, nothing but a set of footprints,

a snap of ice, an exhalation;
a shadow plodding forward through
a silent, never-ending street.

We begin vulnerable

We begin vulnerable

Alone in the shadows of strengths,
the men in the café try to remember
the way through their innerness, their coffees gone cold
like a love's effervescence.
For me, she was the fields of fall wheat
that circled the place of my youth like a halo,
where my soul expanded with the spaces
for longing. But we learn to bear our burdens well:
watching the snow out the window,
we know the inevitable, and nod to the whisper
that ripples the surface of some inner field
gone fallow with loss—
we end vulnerable.

Reflection

Reflection

I thought I understood necessity

but now I wonder what has brought me here

reading Kunitz in the park

and the bug that pads across the page. 

And this bug, I want to know the thing that drives it,

across the long expanses of the page

while people stump the poems of their lives
waiting for the lines to tell the way.

For what could it know when, arriving at the strophe
"It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn"

it pauses for a moment,
and twitches its antennae, once,
then strikes out across the "deeper dark"
and then so surely off the page?

Alone again, I wonder what is in that bug
that might also be in me,
as I chance across the long expanse
of grass, pausing at the far edge of the park.