How many notes to self can you take?
A road nobody drives for pleasure.
Scan the dial for something
sung in drawl. Get out & walk.
The older you get, the fewer options
still tempt you: the wet membranes through which
light enters our heads versus the eardrum,
coins in a fountain versus coins in a jar.
And if you want to feel every note
you find a desert, even one small as a banjo head
or unreachable as the moon.
You go to a tattoo shop
& ask them to take dictation
on the parchment of your arm.
Don’t try to explain.
This isn’t that kind of trip.
To be honest, we looked so pathetic.
A raggedly line of people
Not more than fifteen
Standing, disheveled
By the side of the busy city street
Holding placards
Asking not to cut down trees
As around us dust swirled,
Remains of the huge trees lay
The uprooted roots like
Splayed innards of a roadkill.
We said, ‘look, the trees are our heritage’.
We asked, ‘how dare you cut what you did not plant?’
We cried, ‘how can this cool shade cast a shadow
On your way to progress?’
Cars and bikes honked us to the brim of the ditches
Could you walk- with
Your hand in mine?
Could you see – life
The way I see?
Would you care- to
Share my pain?
Would your heart - beat
As would mine?
Would you love- the
Things I do? Would you
Trust, would you be true,
Would you have faith as I have in you?
You said yes? Then come!
There is no road no map no light to guide
Only my love to ward off the cold
It might be short or last forever,
you ask me how they keep walking
the Peace walkers
walking all the way from San Francisco eta
to Moscow
their message is too beautiful for me to encompass
in a poem
GOOD NEWS!
But as a metaphor let me point
to that long-legged woman over there
she's pregnant in shorts and sneakers
her bunched veins
like blue hyacinth petals or berry scratches
& she wears a nice cool peppermint striped blouse
well, now she's walking heavily from one side of
this small playground to the other
in the sun
To begin with,
the road
stretching out
in front of me
does not exist.
Because I say this
you must not
take me seriously.
But it is all the
same, a girl
twisting beneath me
in a red room,
her breasts red
upon red folding
like leaves like
they are only
followed creek upstream
till lost in stones
wait in a dark
cloak
for ride
east.
road goes up in brown hills
ten thousand men
walk in the gardens of the prophet
no cars
white & black goats in shallow wash
mountains move far away
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
For every parcel I stoop down to seize,
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with, hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.
The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are
Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an axe.
And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole
And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.
Where the old road meets the new road
I stand the guard at morn,
Where one comes winding down the hill,
The other, through it torn.
October’s friendly fingers dipped
In every mellow shade
Have touched the leaves on all the trees
That stand within the glade.
In distant treetops I behold,
As I have seen in clouds,
The faces of my heroes
Or dead men in their shrouds.
The marching columns pass me by,
All sailor lads in blue.
And some will wink, and some will smile,
The way young fellows do.
steady summer rain &
an old swayback farmhouse
by the road
Sometimes I wake up and feel Nebraska,
the whole state sleeping hip-side on my sternum.
I feel the endless roads parting the flood of corn
after a harvest. I rise in line
with the straight standing ghosts, feeling
fellowship alongside their dry family. We are
split ends of the dirt, empty of duty and purpose.
I have no greeting for this day. I have nothing to say
to the sad souls of my friends that are stretched
so far that the tension is almost shouting
fill me, fill me
How can this state be so long? So, nothing
But somehow that nothing is just sadness
you can't name, a Grassman rumored-beast
that passes barely through the edge of a photograph
yet can draw everything into its shadowy stride.