Our Voices Never Broke

The garden begins coming together in late February, plans intensifying through March, our lives rhythmically aligned with what we grow. How far from the dead must you get before they do not hear you cry?

The man without shoes is studying how to be a sannyasi, give him some space, let him figure out for himself that bowl is never going to be empty enough for his longing. The sound a tree makes just as it begins to fall, ripping and tearing dying, everybody standing back.

Windows that have not been washed since we moved to the place, seams in the wall where the cold blows in. There are bees in my heart and flowers in my mind, who wants some honey on their tongue?

Morning and night given to fucking up the yama, what did you expect. Into my cupped hands the moonlight pours, spilling over onto the earth, rising around my knees, soft currents calling me to a sleep I have so far refused to allow myself.

Voices rising, falling, spell-casting. This thing about fearing kids, what is it I don’t want to say but keep reminding myself every few poems, you should really try to say this?

Bells at the bottom of the sea. The world is a field of graves, we should all be walking more respectfully. 

Soon I too will be an old man with crumbs in his beard. Life is a crossword puzzle, did nobody tell you?

It doesn’t seem practical, refusing communion. As a child I used to count dandelions, even now I sometimes wander the yard tallying yellow, forgetting what number I'm at, beginning again.

Huzzah! Odd but true: a nontrivial challenge to awakening is the especially close way I read Homer Price stories as a child.

How do you not realize what a child wants? We hiked many mountains, canoed many rivers, carried guns a long way into the forest, our voices never broke, and was this in the end what you wanted?