after the lame goat in Rumi’s poem
not everything is beautiful
said the gods of guilt
and fear
and I understood
suddenly
after the mountain’s
height over the misty blue valley
and its rocks underfoot
that I like this hobbled life
with its three legs of joy
and one of wounds
for the pace
drummed slowly and syncopated
by that one
April 2012
What and where I was a few nights ago
I wasn't a star.
Not a rain cloud.
Or a rose.
I was not the barn, or a bird flying out its chink.
The reflected sky-silk on the pavement
was thicker than a hundred of me—
not even an opal fingernail.
A pile of mountains
on a weave of snowmelt
in an ocean of red planets
brushed across the eyelid of air
like a fox
and twitched its tail.
I was a minute that couldn’t.
I couldn't touch the bud at the tip
of next spring’s twig-tongue.
I was no thing. No word. No body.
The air said: We are invisible.
And then there was
no where we weren't.
A year in an apple
Crunch into the sweet flesh,
and winter snow crumbles under a black branch
where the juncko lands.
With the second bite, the entire orchard
blossoms pink again in your mouth.
Hold its red skin against your cheek
and it is a hot summer day
but you are cool in the shade
of the tree it fell from.
It is autumn, you are eating an apple.
For a few moments remember the year,
how it opened and fell into a thousand pieces
and how you widened your being.
