All humankind is of one Author:
The man who pedals the rickshaw,
the small girl selling roses
as she weaves between cars,
the broad-shouldered woman
with a flower behind her ear.

Along the highway, even the cows
lying on narrow islands of the median
are a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.

So, too, the veiled women
chatting on the red sandstone plaza
of the mosque, the man selling pineapple slices,
the four tired travelers
climbing back into the rickshaw.

White Flower

Magnificat

Every moment trumpets
an annunciation if you only look:
the light reflecting off waves,
the branches keeping guard
over buds until fullness of spring.
Each blade of grass, every living thing
waits to dazzle
at the appointed moment
when it unfurls
like an embryonic seedling.

For light has no vanishing point;
Mount Taylor’s white magnifies light
while the pale blue cloak of sky
warms the gray of bark and branch.
Meanwhile, in the flattened foreground,
Earth, as she both
absorbs heat and scatters light,
warms the green
inside the seed coat—
all of life hurtling forward.

 

Mud is a pearl
In the beak
Of the dove.
Each minute pearl
An offering
To the masonry
Of the nest
Wherein the egg
Conceals a song.

If Euclid wrote
on the topic of forgiveness,
or love, for that matter,
I think he’d admit
that sometimes we approach
our heartache obliquely,
and yet oblique lines, too,
have a way of intersecting.
Even without right angles,
we come together again.

So here I set down my lines,
neither parallel nor perpendicular
to yours, and yet satisfied
as the geometer
that my lines will pierce yours.
So too the birds above earth’s
harsh elements fly, ignorant
of any proof
except that light
follows dark, their wild
intuition heedless
of any axiom except
their knowledge that
the earth’s axis returns,
each year, to spring.

When the jay sang,
did you thank it,
or the stream,
when it caressed your ankles?

Here is beauty
you cannot hold,
but only channel:
like a reed
vibrating in wind,

or like a cliff rose
whose fragrant scent
permeates
the canyon
while her startled seedpods
jostle
wildly
as wind socks.

Wind claws
the forgotten feeder
while a flash
of light startles
at a feeder panel.

When the wind stills,
the feeder stops rocking.
Shadow now
overhangs the feeder
and takes wing,
displacing
the golden plumage
of the sun.

The man hanging laundry heaves
the wet sheet like an offering
onto the line where it hangs,
wet cocoon tugging at the line.
It is just one in a sea of sheets
and pajamas. Here we are,
stitching the world together,
our work held up with clothespins,
spring-loaded. Next week’s laundry
will be piled as high as today’s. We
are not here to change the world,
but here to love. The man next to me
lugs another sheet and wrestles
it into place, and shrugs. Among
the pillowcases, a whiff of alcohol.
And yet, was there ever
a transformation
worth writing home about
without first love?

In the census count
of the skies
each star
is accounted for.
Every star
that ever shone
or burned
now exerts a pull
on its neighbor
that forever shapes
the trajectory
of the stars.
Each life
a link
to the next:
We too are stardust,
carbon shaped
by the breath
of the universe.

In the repurposed
high school gym,
the basketball hoop
hangs,
vertically suspended,
white netting filling out
a flat spider web;
even in summer
the orange outline
of its metal hoop
catching dreams.

hope
visible as breath
on a cold morning