Between Stars and Steel Fingers

The old world
creeps in
through the mouse hole,
and you can still smell yesterday--
the first day love hurt,
the second day you learned to speak
while standing at a distance from yourself.

Still-- outside the wind stirs,
and something larger than your
sense of duty calls you,
the sound of the river
like a shy African drum,
the fireflies...orderly as stars
spinning in orbits
over the grass and beneath the moon.

Something wild calls you
because your belly
is stuck on yesterday
and you need something different to eat...
something like a backwards crawl
to California, a gourmet moon,
or a greenlight dare.

THE WAY GOD SPEAKS

I hear church bells on Austrian hills
and quiet chimes dangling
from a clay ceiling in Peru.
I hear the brush of palms
on cool caves and
tears drifting as high as the stars.
I hear footsteps soft in the grass...
hiding and searching... and
Spanish music dripping on alleys.
I hear the life in slow motion...
soft the way God whispers
when you scream.

WIGGLER’S FARMER’S MARKET

I was a quarter of an inch deep in mud,
pulling myself deeper into the market.
My eyes strolled lash by lash
and I breathed the new world in.

I guess I had grown too used to cement walls
cooled with man-made breath
because this was something like lightning,
and it shook me the way a naked moonlight does
out of "nine to five."

There was a myriad of flowers...
hyacinth, Gerber daisies, violets, and mums.
Each one sipped in the warm gray day
and drank the rain like an afternoon tea.

You could smell the cedar stands.
You could hear them moan and see them bend
like old men’s bones about to give in
but going on anyway to tell the tales
of the way life used to be
when everything was simple.

I wasn’t sure if anything human lived there,
but I pressed the service button anyway,
not sure if something was going to grow from the mist.
Instead, I heard a foghorn like a red carpet
rolling out the next scene.

There she was...an antique piece of country,
a thousand miles from my world,
but she stepped into me
because my eyes were wide enough
to let her in.

She was wearing mud the way an apple wears caramel,
and was uncombed and perfumed in earth and fish.
The shack behind her was on crutches,
and the door was halfway open
as if there were secrets left to keep the story stirring.

I had to come back to myself.
I did what I came to do.
I bought the worms and gave her a $1.50.
I tried to build a bridge
and tell her what they were for,
but she smiled and seemed un-phased.

Our bodies were three feet apart,
but there were a thousand miles between us,
and that’s what made it beautiful,
like drinking in a new country
or smelling for the first time.

I was a quarter of an inch deep in mud.
I was lost in her rhythm and the rhyme.