Pick Up the Thread

Children, pick up the end

of the golden thread.

It begins anywhere --

a church, these plums,

a drop of blood, the rain

-- and leads on through

the universe out to the

other end of yourself.

If you lose the thread

for a time in the dark,

keep looking: You'll find

it again. You can always

start here.

Stories Out West

I heard that out west you can spot poems ambling about off the highways like antelope.


-- John Balaban


Northwest of Yellowstone
where men can tell stories for a living,
where a speeding ticket costs you ten dollars
and littering half that,
the buffalo and antelope 
dot the sweeping hillsides like poems.


A friend and I Jeep-Cherokeed
the ninety miles from Bozeman
to a Helena rec-center auditorium
where the granolas were selling
"Wilderness: Yes!" bumper stickers
and nodding in groups over coffee,
and scuffing the floor with the toes
of their Vibram-soled boots.
We paid our two bucks
and waited for the show.


Walkin' Jim Stolz has hiked from 
the Grand Canyon back home
to Lone Mountain, Montana,
and he straps his guitar upside down
onto the outside of his backpack.
It saved his life once,
digging like an ice axe 
into the steep snowfield
he was sliding down.
He repaired it with duct tape
and uses it still to growl
out his wilderness songs.


Raphael Christy tells the stories
of Charles M. Russell
in a one-man show. In one,
an old rancher, in the process
of lighting a fresh-rolled cigarette,
spooked his horse right off a cliff.
When his buddies rode to the edge,
they found him in a treetop,
still on the horse, asking,
"Any you boys got a match?
The one I struck blowed out." 


We had beers with them later,
in the Wind Bag Saloon, 
swapping stories as the wind blew
in the West Montana night.

How to Fly

My ex

expected

I'd suffer

the split

she inflicted

longer.

With nothing

to hold 
you can fall

or imagine

the story

you could

but aren't

and fly.

My Work Need Not be Epic Now

"My work need
not be epic now.
There is a time to
stop beginning and
let your being be
enough," says
the urologist
as he cauterizes
my vas deferens.
"There is no
other life."

Old Penny

Tell me, traveler,

about the sticky pockets of toddlers,

the tip jars of the dreaming baristas,

and the cupped hands of the hopeless.

Tell me how to bear

being someone's good luck.

Tell me how to tumble head over tail

then choose who wins.

Tell me how to shoulder the weight

of a wish.

Tell me how to be

spun, jangled, sorted, stacked.

Tell me how to be

hammered, smashed, chipped, counted.

Tell me how to be so spent,

yet still carry your message

of emancipation.

The Candlemaker

You pour the tallow, dip the wick

and watch the candle cool.

And it's same way every day

all down the years.

You grow benighted by the dark

pursuit of process,

until that inattentive instant

when an insect somehow falls

into a candle mold and late at night

a flame you always thought you knew

flares briefly cochineal.

Illumination comes from

accidents you welcome.

Curious, you open up,

and reds and happenstance rush in.

Hungry for color you crawl the woods

and soon your workshop walls dance

indigo and aubergine and marigold.

Sometimes there's just soot and stink.

No matter: The old gods are dead.

You're asked about perfection

and you laugh. As if arrival ever is,

as if there ever is a golden age of anything,

as if there's ever anything

but making and remaking

light by light we've made.

Ordinary Sweetness

It's almost

as delicious,

that Tuesday

when you

exhaled my name

as I fell toward

your center,

as your message

Wednesday:

"Eating plums;  

they are so sweet."

Maybe all

that Meaning

really is is

a succession

from here

to the horizon

of ordinary

succulences,

shared.

Chopsticks

Things split so easily.

Take chopsticks.

Years of rigid intimacy

makes it easy

to pull them apart.

My ex and I

pluck at the sushi

and talk about the kids,

splinters

where the connection was.

The Little Children

The little children return 
from their great expedition

to the park across the street

turning themselves inside out

to offer us fistfuls of pea gravel,

dandelion blossoms, and a frog

they've placed in a jar.

While grownups say,

"I'd give you the world,

if I could." Children do —

one pebble at a time.