Mocking Bird Song

We sat on moonlit craggy
rock-dome; its granite face
turned outward toward
enshrouded valleys.
I felt your grief,
unspoken,
yet so real
as if a marker
stood between us.
The quiet stone sank
deep into your heart
as in a well
without an echo.

Night surrounded us
and wrapped each ponderosa pine
in silver stillness.
The shadowed wilderness
gave not a hint
of sad remembrance.
Yet I knew what images
lay close
beneath your wistful smile.
So we watched the sky
change from blue to indigo,
then black.
Twilight,
like a curtain drawn
across the mountainscaped horizons,
hid the day.
Its last, long sigh
was lost
in gray-hued past,
unreachable,
as the hard escarpment
underfoot.

What could I speak
to pierce this wall
of tears?
The lunar orb
had not an answer,
but shed
its lonesome whiteness
on your face.
The softened light
seemed here to paint
your features
with a shaded
distance,
far beyond my touch.

God, where have my words
flown off to?
Grant me speech
to meet
such sorrow.
My answer was a memory
that here I share with you.

I’ll tell a winsome story
of my far-off homeland, Tennessee.
In this fabled place,
there is a bird.
we call the mocker. He speaks not
from himself,
but in mere shadow-voices
copped from others.
Yet, as a child, I heard him clear
in early morning,
carol loud his own breathed spirit.
He did call out
with all his grace toward misty space.
There, soon, a lantern sun
would break in two,
the eastern sky.

In brighter times,
the mocker hides this other self.
Instead, he shows it
just before the dawn
with long, enchanting songful cantilenas.
Joyful, loud, in ecstasy
he greets the coming day.

Arise and sing,
my mocking bird,
sweet loved one
of this other time.
Put off your mask;
fly free
to mountain peaks.
Come laugh with me.

I’ll tie your griefs
around the wings
of my tiny mocking friend.
Yes, then I’ll tell him:

“Take my loved one’s burden
to the highest branch
of yonder Ponderosa pine.
Sing it out
above the treetops.
Bear such mourning
and transform it
into songs of life a-borning.
May this new-found voice
soar far
above the clouds,
and let its sound ring out
for all of time.”

Finding a Way

I lay in bed that night,
watching auto headlights
flicker on a wall.
I thought,
Could you be mine?

Sounds of freeway-hardened, speeding
truckmen echoed in from midnight.
Wildcat calls that crossed the city
prowled through my darkened room.
Will you care?
I thought.
My heart beat fast
from wondering where that path
would lead.

I began in sunny morning
on a prairie highway.
Mountains rose,
bare monuments reminding me
of Titans’ battles
fought to the death
in the ancient days.
Sentinels of a gone forever
cast down here,
as quiet guards
on watch above me.
They lined a dim, heat-gray horizon,
with each scraped-down rockface
rising.
Reaching cliffs seemed to try and catch
whatever moisture
that might fall
still
from a blue-white dusty sky.

Will you see
and freely take
or turn
away?

Soon I found you
at the desert’s edge
by a place of sand and sagebrush haven.
You bore me off to show
a vast arroyo
panorama
to my eager eyes.
There a river chorus
sounded and fell
through a wind-rock whited well
in a canyon gorge.
This place where mountain split in twain
to baptize plain and city
enfolded us
within its shadow.
We stopped to rest
by water’s edge.

What will be
your answer?
Could you ever
stoop to take my
hand
in yours?

So there, amid the waters’ glittering wonders
I bestowed my words,
while foam and breeze
rushed wild
over nearby boulders.
The airy sunglare hung there lazy
over white-rapids’ restless
hazy motion.
Mayflies flew about our heads
like children at their noontime play
of leapfrog games,
in free abandon.

Strange, my words
I don’t remember,
but even now
I know.
I told you of my
wish.

As I watched the river’s
bright reflected lights
dance
in your eyes,
I knew.
That day we would begin
a joyful journey
ever hoping, seeking, talking,
becoming one.

Requiem for an Old Friend

We leaped across rocky ledge-parts,
seeking a secret veil of water
shadowed in sacred Yellowstone.
Camping together, we huddled against
cruel cold that caught
ice-barren wasteland winds.
Watching whirling air,
we saw dusted devils blow through
deep-carved canyons.
They howled their coyote
wistful-throated wails
past red-rock sandstone.
We climbed weighty slabs of slated
rocks in layered creek-carved labyrinths,
betraying eons of earth.
Bones of living things lay there,
long interred before
the birth of human minds.
I had never witnessed the West before,
and he showed me its
wild-edged ways.

In college, we laughed
with our women and other friends.
The ladies smiled,
and some men fought
or marched in dour defiance.
Learned ones stood
before us and taught strange,
tortured histories
of tarnished, vanished times.
We wasted days and drank,
listening to music loud,
lusty and luminous.
Running mental courses
through restless thoroughfares,
our sprinting spirits drifted.
Yet, they lifted upward and proud
together.

In later life, we parted,
picking pathways
distant and drained
of precious things we prized before.
He called it “God’s country”
where he stayed, our home,
but I strayed far
from Tennessee.
Visits and talks
grew fewer and fell to none.
Finally strangers to one another,
we quieted ever more
until no voice could cross
the void between us.

Late in nights’ long sleeplessness,
I thought of him at times,
seeking but finding no solace
in his absence.
A spirit lay beside me,
whispering wondrous tales
of sweet sequestered places
where we ran as one before.
Younger, fonder days paraded
dusty, down through darkened hours.
Restless remembrances
skewed out like skeletons
from fallen coffins.
My thoughts conjured friends and fun
as if from far-off planets lost,
where younger suns shone bright
on seas’ forgotten shores.
At last, the moon set black
within that seared-looking
barren space before dawn.
Its face revealed failed remnants
of a faded firmament
pushed far
beyond my grasp.

News came to me he was gone.
I paused to hear a shutting door
sound solemn far within me.
His smile would be no more,
nor would I know his voice again.
A flame went dark,
and blindness
sealed the snake-like passage ways
that pierced those far-flung
reckless, roaming years.
That same fire left me too,
and only an aching stayed,
reminding me of an empty place,
something in my gut
now ripped away.
Numbness and pain
thrashed within,
as if a spinal sprain’s convulsion
spread throughout my limbs.
Just the knowing
was like a torrential mudslide,
dragging needed highways
downhill deep into crushed
and crumbled dirt.

Today I recall a still-hidden
waterfall, rushing clear and coursing
down a cliffside.
Two men beheld it then,
testifying to its tender,
white-graced tracery.
Waters welled into a misted gorge
and filled a glassy bright,
light-crested pool
forever pure and free.
In dreams I drink there,
bathing naked, aware of
things those hollows keep
from everyone else.
Staying long in sentinel shadows,
I rest alone.

Communion

My loved one, your face greets me in the morning
from silent pillowed mooring
of soft, unharried sleep.
You’re unaware
of slatted light that seeps still inward,
to invade the quiet room
as mist steals in from rising tides
toward Big Sur’s mythic coastline.
Careless dust motes dance
like a thousand daylight fireflies
above your unfurled form.

I pray,
“Dear God, be ever with you.
Guard your soul and reveal
to you
the proud iron-girdered strength
of my love,
unbounded as the stars.”

You stretch, dozing cat-like,
with generous yawn and akimbo arms, thrust legs
that force bunched breasts and muscles to awake.
Your back unfolds like slow unrolling furrows
of wave-corrugated waters.
They flex like ocean ripples seen
through a soft sun-haloed fog
as water washes up on craggy boulders.
Your skin’s like that,
and yet so soft, inviting.
The tightened flesh pulled down across full
buttocks now swells out
and pushes upward
to receive.

A single hand spans intimate space
between us
to explore the meadow freshness
of my unmown, rounded chest
with nipples tight and hardened
as acorns.
You scratch and rub each hair
until I almost feel the fire sparks
flying as if tossed
from a welder’s workbench.
Or is it strength of my flowing
heartbeat’s constant pressure,
pushed into my legs’ conjoining,
that fulfills the pillar
of my desire?

Like a careful sculptor, you move hands
slow-working,
down the center-tuft of hair,
on my belly
carpeted
as if by tree moss.
Like a restless tide, you overthrow me
and grasp my upthrust limb
to straddle me entire.
I probe the surrounding wet-warmth
of your wide-spread now lower caverns,
so soft as dewy grass at sunrise.
Then I push
with thunderbolted fury