Marriage

I see you out walking Holding a mirror beneath your eyes So you can look downward into the skies One step at a time all the way home Careful not to go near the sun’s heat For fear of burning your tender feet Using cooler clouds for stepping stones   I see you out walking I see you flying your kite in the park I see you scribbling your notes in the dark I see...

I don’t know about you But it takes an act of my will To actually hear To truly listen to anyone I often can’t even hear my own voice in the mirror Nor the voice of those that I say that I love I get lost in my own thoughts And next thing I know Their lips are moving But I don’t know what they’re saying And often I’m only thinking Of what I want...

She is the one Who first loved me enough To show me I could be A better man than I was   And you can imagine How that worked out... Can a man with an inner-tube And a cooler full of beers Turn a stagnant pond Into a mighty river Just by jumping in?   And yet… She is the one Who continued to love me enough To try to chip away To grind and...

The dust of our bodies Remain fixed to the canyon walls Our skin stretches over boulder And gully alike On opposite sides Of the mighty river Too swollen now to swim   One river canyon Yet happily divided Tending the gardens we’ve planted Each on our own riverbank The rushing river sinks deep And saturates the earth And waters the beds That we weed today And harvest for the feast That we’re preparing For tomorrow...

When two bodies collide There will always be A fault line to find In you or in me But not now For today we are lovers Folded one around the other Cliffs and chasms Metamorphic And sedimentary flesh Thrust like beating hearts Love is a precipice We stand on the edge And as we spill over We fall into the wind And rise like mountains On the updraft And from these higher heavens We wonder...

It’s true, she loves the river And its steady constant force The ocean is just leftovers And she prefers the source   She leads me through the briars Stinging nettle, oak, and sorrow Some pain for the present moment But the rest we’ll save for tomorrow   The path is narrow and overgrown If it’s even a path at all Two roads diverged and we took neither She heard the river’s call   Down the...

Humboldt County The house we call our own Her laughter now fills this home It defies logic and reason And all good doctrine It sets sharply against The crushing weight of debt And doubt It ripples down the hall Like waves that dance On an ocean that will drown you Without thinking twice   From the depths I think about thirty different things All at once I should have painted more often And maybe wrote...

Daybreak Winter Solstice After a long dark night We stare into ceramic darkness That floods our morning with life Egad, what’s this? The sun that shines In our eyes while we’re trying to write?   Piercing light whom I address One little request if I may? Just please step aside And shine from behind My eyes weren’t yet ready to play   My coffee’s not drank My mind like a bank Robbed at the break...

Oxidizing minerals form A pattern of Rorschach tests Across my chiseled face As I lay here quietly Holding the roof over our heads And the seven miles of air above it While you raise the family In the home beneath Where I am overlooked Not as warm as the bones of trees Nor as pure as the crushed bones of cattle I long to be seen To be read like a book A favorite novel...

They were married here Beneath the cypress And my only job My one simple job Was to gather up the scene Many months later And weave it together In humble cotton Beneath the surface Of the paint So I set about collecting threads…   I found unceremonious tatters of silk ribbon hanging from the boughs I found tourists eating sandwiches in eleven different languages I found needles scattered along discarded railroad tracks I found the...