To the Legal Limits first poem commissioned May 2008

To the Legal Limits

Part One

A Matter of Public Record

I first saw you

Out there

I couldn’t meet  your eyes

Looking  at me in light years

Not sure when to sing

Waiting for me to speak

I watched your hands

Trapped by  your fingers 

We walked the creek bed

And missed our exit

You drank my beer

because it was colder

I don’t remember signing

Above the state seal

You made a promise out loud

A pact with history

I carried in my pocket

After the public sacrifice

Our private consummation

Your leg crossing

In the darkness

Now the day becomes

A hut of dry  bones

Without you

Did I  thank you

For cleaning up the cat pee

Did I thank you

last night

We woke together

An hour ago

Our breath

Hanging in the half light

I forgot the milk

Again

Your patience broke

Sharp places on the floor

It drives me crazy

when you do that

Again and again

Does it matter 

Those button holes

Left or right

If I love you  like thunder

If I wait for hours

On the porch

Not believing fireflies

While you are at class

If I promise

To stop at the store

To be kind to your mother

And pick up my towel

If holding you

I become human

You’ll be asleep

When I get  home

I want to come home now

Let me call you

home

Part Two

A Fell Following

Humans are always human

Our bones call out

To the Other

Fastened sinew by sinew

To the notched haft

A fell following

A trail half seen

In the dusk.

The snow

Catching on our boots,

The grasses discuss

Our passing 

Whisper vespers

There are two pledges

Even in  the old huts,

caves,  basket houses,

walled cities or blinking towers

one to love

made  when the sheet  is damp

and the  radio weeps

too early for  morning

 (the stars were shut and

the breeze stopped on our hair)

Another pledge

Comes with a dowry of goats

Horse blankets or joint checking

Made with ribbons and ink

For the long haul

For      the sighing of  oxygen tanks

For      brothers and sisters

For      those who come after

For      a place on the ramparts

For      dinner in the kitchen

We are all

In a cold and dangerous place

Climbing

Hand to hand  in the dusk

The sleet  running  down our necks

To the soft places hot

Beneath the cloak

One of us stumbles

Kicking rocks out

To tumble over

We hear them falling

Blue into tomorrow

The white space caught

Between our fingers

Is the last tether

Hand to hand 

Leaning out  over the chasm

We choose then

Hand to hand

Or going on alone

Who can deny another

The least comfort

A trail half seen

A fell following

The grasses discuss

Our passing 

Whisper vespers

Reds

Friend 2 jb

Skin Boat -- to a good man lost at sea

A skin boat

Rises on the breast

Of an unswum sea

Borne on frozen waves

Yet liquid, into

The quick mercy of the tide.

In a skin boat

He rides the breathing waters,

Swallowed by

The dusk, on a

Cold and golden sea

Where only heat is human.

In a skin boat,

He finds the homeward lights

Extinguished

Upon a sentient

Shadow rising,

To spill her phosphorescent sigh.

Which of us does not thus ride,

Suffering the cold,

Upon a dark tide

In a skin boat.

The Milky Way

My soul lets down
As the first pearl

Rolls across a thread-wing curve

His tiny cheek and smile

Created

For this now

To find the sweet and quickly

His pupils, still smoky with eternity,

Were made to see

Only as far as my face

We lie beneath a churning surf of stars

Clearly he knows

And is ready

But I, still engorged with joy,

Am astonished by my own
Nectar

Until the tender hurt
Along his starfish tongue
Triggers a huntress tide

Submerged galaxies of hope and fear

The milk nebula
Is a sudden  introduction

To threats that held

No power before

He came

If I pray for my First Born

(Now driving down to the Capital

For love, his tears rise in the desert

His lens puts time in place)

I must also Pray for Yours

In high rise, or hut, or hangar

Behind a fence, in the field,

Walking shanty roads, crying on the beach

If I pray for my Second Born

(Bounding through striped shadows

Beside his red dog, he comes home

With a green glass gaze too sharp for comfort)

I must also Pray for Yours

In prison hall or dancing for rain,

On the banks of the Jordan, tending the steppes

Weeping, warring, reeling

If I pray for my Third Born

(Who has suffered too much,

Named by his shattering grin

Insisting on Shukran

Stubborn for justice and food)

I must also Pray for Yours

Sleepy with sustenance

Cradled in a pearly tide

We dowse for joy

And In the warring milky night

I have become all

Hopeful Virgin Mothers

Praying for Peace

Last Call at the Owl

Last Call at the Owl

after,

you could hear

He is coming like the glory

of the morning on the wave

a coin

spin

in the Owl

silence carved

a chasm after her

bourbon broken voice

woman shards

of desolace

and Nick’s one hearing

aid is not enough

does anybody know the battle

of the coming of the lord

hymn

blue jay talks fast

like a cat crying

in the alley behind

the bar his wife knows

mine eyes have seen the glory

beauty is a crime

none forgive

from auschwitz to alpena

the grapes of wrath are stored

last call

one hand on the end chords

closing out the set

with a glory in his bosom

neither you nor i can see

they  cry

in the wilderness

we know from home

all the words

she carries

rising discarded

by the dim and flaring lamps

faster through each flourish

nick can’t stop

for her voice

his terrible swift sword

is forging on broken

a paper bag

His vessel

sifting out the hearts of men

quavers and shreds

be swift my soul to answer Him

the soliloquy of the lost

stops

after the glory glory

Blue jay

locks up the owl

Nick and Beauty wait while

Hallelujah

falls away

The Heart of The Monster

The heart of the matter

Lies below the canyon wall

Flat silk running

Today the great cat slumbers

The canyon

Yawns and shivers

Slipping past the river

Slow shadows flex toward evening

Waterlight strikes silver

 Just as the Crow calls

Oh My God

It is hard to wait

for the pain to stop

Double strands web the secret stars

a transept

intersects the heart

where it fell

The People singing their Ascension[1]

Into day after silver day

---

[1]We would have come another way, east of Eden, hallowed by a book, taking a corner of Sumer (some err). I am heir to a home long forgotten whose old heart lies in a stubble field. A small god gone in the fray. 

Fires and ice and grasses passing

Here the blades make obeisance

Coyote passes

The heart

Oh, he flung it here

All planes and darknesses and topaz[1]

The canyon stretches and sighs slumbering

dark rock down one side, on the other

The pattern parting white

Pine and ponderosa

and cradled thereby

the river tickling pearl

sweet belly of the brown trout flashing

on old stone kisses

On the Clearwater

Down from Orofino[2]

 Many hawks wait

Hunting on the wind

Ferruginous, Swainson, Harrier,

Cooper’s, Roughleg, Sharpshinned

---

[1] Certainly the pain could be worse -- could be a burn or a slide on hot pavement. Hurting enough at night, to discourage dreaming. I’ll try to hold it for someone else --maybe in a holding cell, bruised, cold, waiting. Might as well carry it as something like grace.

[2] ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­If you knew Coyote. He let himself be taken with the others. Turning the monster inside out, he flung the heart right here. Pain comes as briars, or wires, barbed and sticky on the long muscles.  Ages pass the night, trapped beneath the quilts.  After the last battle General Howard massacred those spotted horses, but they still run.

We see each other

From a dizzy height

The solid heart lies

Here at the end

Those grasses are the inscription

Cuneiform in motion

Too quick to read

The meadowlark printing

with her kindling feet

(Broken and mended)[1]

Her bell telling just what

Clarion on the Clearwater

Not the song of the Palouse,

Not plainsong

Stop here

Kingfisher diving

For something darker, brighter,

The canyon wall unwinds

Most holy

Bring the ponies down to drink

Spotted flank and tails flashing

---

[1] Coyote broke them. Like a bone needle. It was an accident and yes, he mended them later, but you can still see the broken place.

It’s not my place to say

Though the heart consumes me[*]

That lump of earth,

Skips a beat

Sudden rock the center waits

Centuries pass like horses

Dying on the wind

Mayflies still lick the water there

Sliding silk

Holy holy holy

Simmers over flesh

Gravesong, nightsong, windsong, brightsong

Make some other language say it

Fires and ice and grasses passing

The heart of monster

Blessing waters slinging gilt

---

[*] Communion?

Blurs from the Desert

Am missing the desert very much right now. To me the blurs catch the "just out of sight" mood of those vast spaces.

you can still see texture in this photograph, but the light changes with the camera movement and the texture looks different to me.

Dreaming Poland

I actually did dream I was Poland !

Stacy Ericson​1/2/2008



I dreamed I was Poland
Born to be bigger than my current size
My borders shifting
A matter for war and greater crimes
Aching for mountains
Circling the Others
It is snowing in Warsaw
Where my winter has a hunger
More cruel than April
Who stands where so many have fallen?
The wheat fields call for my lost gold
The river canyons have always been at war
My current slides down and down
Tonguing the rim of freedom
Where he lies opposite
Sleepy and sated with bliss and Coca Cola
I in my smaller splendor ripen
Waiting for the grassland to turn
Again again again
Luring some savior home



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practicing still life thanksgiving

Attempting Still Life

I was losing the light, but it was still fun. The first ones were awful but they improved as I moved in.