Poems

It Was the Crack in My Soul

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen

It was the crack in my soul that saved me.

There had to be an opening for something to come in,

something I didn’t know I needed

until it got in and lit me like a candle.

Like the crack in the gutter

that let a green shoot through

to sprout a columbine

on a city street near my home.

Yes, I’ve seen it, all filled with joy

to lift its face to the sun -- its destiny.

Like that bell in Philadelphia

with a crack reflecting the imperfection

of our beginning, that keeps a hope alive

that we might have a destiny worth celebrating.

Something got in and showed me

what my best thinking didn’t.

I became teachable and was taught.

May I stay cracked, just a little,

so I don’t die in the prison of my own wisdom.

I need more light, always.

Feed me now, and again and again

with always just a little more light than I have.

Everything Is Practice

Everything in life is just practice.

Someone told me once

Just think of it as practice,

and suddenly the atmospheric pressure dropped.

I feared if I didn’t do something right

it stamped me with an F on my forehead

and everyone would know.

Practice makes performance better – I knew that.

But this part of my brain didn’t know

what that part of my brain knew.

I didn’t know it for me

until I saw in his eyes and heard in his voice

that he knew it was so much easier than I thought.

Like an old rock and roll song I knew –

I’m gonna do it wrong till I do it right.*

Failure is what we do until we succeed.

So everything in life is just practice.

Practice for what? For the rest of my life, I suppose.

And There is no there there,**

no place to get to where I’m finished.

I’m just a work in progress that’s never complete.

Life is just one damn thing and then the next,

but that doesn’t mean it’s not an adventure.

Like the sycamore out my window –

it just keeps making new branches.

*Bobby Charles, “Down South in New Orleans”

**Gertrude Stein

September

It’s September, and I feel autumn coming on,

the all-too-fleeting season

of brilliant colors and cooler weather.

Even in autumn’s October midpoint,

it slips through my grasp

while I celebrate its evanescent glory.

Summer is a stasis prolonged,

its green clothing unchanging day after day

in three long months of sometimes relentless heat.

But autumn changes its dress week to week.

It’s a season of constant change –

summer’s blazing death in joyous celebration

as we harvest the last ripening fruits of the land

that withheld their bounty until late.

Sooner than I’m ready it will fade

into the cold austerity of winter

when trees go to sleep

and we hunker down

to wait for another spring.

Autumn mirrors the impermanence of life

and also the bounty from life’s summer well-lived.

I feel its joy and its sadness together in my own autumn,

the miracle of life’s cycle of inevitability.

But the cycle is renewed every year,

reassuring me of life’s constancy.

We will all die someday, but life will live.

Places I Haven’t Been Before

The hunter surveys the land

from a cliff overlooking the valley,

seeing the course of a stream

revealed by a winding strip of cottonwood,

looking for signs of game to feed his family.

It’s thirteen thousand years ago in North America.

He’s an explorer, always moving on

to look for new territory

with abundant game and fruits of the land.

His people survived by

always being ready to move on, searching,

coming down the coast over centuries

to bypass the ice-covered north

until coastal green spread inland,

where they moved upriver

until there was no need to go by boat.

But they keep moving, because moving

is what has brought them what they sought,

now their habit and way of life.

In a PBS documentary a San Carlos Apache’s words

ring a bell somewhere inside me.

He’s telling how he surveys a valley

from a high vantage point on a rock outcrop,

how he always wants to see

what’s in the valley and over the next ridge,

and when he reaches it,

what’s over the ridge after that.

He’s reading my mail, describing

the yearning I always feel, something in my bones,

when exploring territory I haven’t seen before.

And I always want to go places

I haven’t been before.

There are few trails I can still hike

that I haven’t traveled, but I keep looking –

finding two new trails this month.

Hiking mostly in the foothills and the Bosque now,

I also walk trails of the mind I haven’t traveled yet.

I want to know, to become aware of new things,

to understand what I haven’t understood before.

To explore the mental and emotional

white places on the map

of my interior landscape

and territory of the mind and heart

that others have explored and written of,

vaster than I can imagine.

It’s like feasting at a banquet

where the food never runs out and I never get my fill.

The Mountain Will Swallow You

The mountain will swallow you, if you let it.

Start by lifting the pack to your bended knee,

put your right arm through the strap and swing it

up and around onto your back,

not sure you can actually carry the weight all the way.

With your left arm through the other strap

buckle the hip belt and the sternum strap,

and take a step, that first step of thousands of steps –

and start walking.

You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Once you get a rhythm and some momentum,

you think This isn’t as hard as I thought.

Then you start to notice things as you stride along

above the West Fork of the Santa Barbara:

ponderosa and fir and stands of aspen,

boulders the trail winds around,

the ridges looming above the canyon,

butterflies, ravens and a soaring hawk.

Still, you wonder if you’re up to it –

two days and twelve miles to the divide

with nearly a third of your weight on your back to start.

It’s just one step and then the next

in an almost pleasurable monotony

that becomes a succession

of seemingly endless next points reached,

getting yourself to the next spot,

then picking another one,

eating the trail one bite at a time.

Minute by minute, hour after hour,

until your soul seeps into the landscape like water

and your feet have grown roots.

Cut off from roads and traffic, from the sound of car engines,

unplugged from cellphones and schedules and calendars

you’re now touching the Earth

and you feel the rhythm of her pulse

as yours entrains with it, synchronized.

Finally you reach a meadow with a good campsite

seven miles up the canyon

just before the trail crosses the stream.

The massive ridges so high above the canyon

look down on you with indifference, not impressed

but without objection, tolerant and respecting.

The mountain has swallowed you –

you have become wilderness.