PAINTREE

It’s so easy to break things –
trust, a heart, a nation.
So much more work
to build.

It’s easy to get sad
and feel helpless.
It’s easy to get angry and
want to break something back.

It’s difficult when your ears
are filled with the sound of shattering
to hear the blackbird sing
or to look up and see the trees’ fingers.

The hurt is designed
to make you feel blind. 
Wipe the blood
from your eyes

and take a moment
to notice everything 
even as it breaks
a seed becomes
a burning sun
take the time
dissention
to love
some-
thing
and
make
it

grow

Enclosed, uprooted,
and left hungry, 
I will find my own way.

I reach to the sun and
create
my own sustenance. 

Once I’ve had enough,
I put down roots
and share with my neighbors.

I never meant to land in the water. 
I’m no sailor, no navigator.

Tectonic forces have cast me adrift,
the land ran away from me, 

islands on the horizon receding
faster than I could learn to turn a rudder.

I lay for ages in the cold doldrums, water
turned to lead, air to sulfur, I could not breathe –

until, gradual as the dawn, the arrival
of these misty storm birds,

who pull me forward until I am upright
and regain momentum,

moving toward the harbor I cannot see
but have faith is there beyond the swells.

Albatrosses, frigate birds, gulls?
I don’t know, or much care.

They are my wings, my strength, my sails,
this boat, the wind, the waves,

as am I, in turn, for them, 
hoisting each other toward the sunrise.

In the low fingers
of the Alps, lavender grows,
fragrance among vines.

It’s not the only thing
that flourishes in the spare
roughs of the maquis.

But by human hands
the blooms are reared, and come to
symbolize the land.

——————————

I too have summer
and winter thoughts forever
budding in my head.

I try to train them
like bonsai. On the best days
my summer garden

grows tall and pulls me
straight up to the soft blue sky,
frost beneath my toes.

——————————

In Texas there is
no want for French lavender. 
It grows in gravel

in our own gorgeous
wastelands. Autochthonous ward
against scorpions

and other household
demons, dried and stored for this
latest queer winter.

I will not buy dark flowers until the wake is announced.
I will sing bright songs and stoke the fire.

I will write stories in green and give them away
and my friends will read them to their friends.

I will paint the ceiling in pastel and neon and
we will spin beneath it late until we fall down laughing.

While watching for bitter torches in the long night
I will bake apples and scatter incense and magnesium

so that if the house should be burned down
it will shine and smell like cinnamon.

I will not obey in advance;
and I will not surrender my joy.

I’m driving out of town and the radio 
starts going fuzzy. At first the words
and measures are softened, but then
they begin to drown in droning chaos.

I change the channel and clear the air. 
But the buzz creeps back, faster now, 
filling my head, even at rest stops there is
no respite from the constant orange noise.

It feels like a bomb has gone off and filled
the airwaves. An invasion of a thousand people
inside my head shouting GOOD! and EVIL!
even when the car is quiet.

I thought I would know better by now, after all these years. 
I should know when to tune out, to jump out of the car 
and run through the dark green woods until I become 
human again before turning that machine back on.

But I don’t. It demands
my attention and I give it.
I’m not adapted to living
through the making of history.

And I suppose I am grateful to know
that the noise has not yet made me deaf.
That I have not lost my capacity for horror.
And that I can still make myself turn the dial, 

and search for signal.

The leaves are changing color. 
A sudden wind makes them fall.

Yellow. Red. Brown. They fill the air,
they cover the ground, they bury each other.

It’s upsetting that the growing season
should end, that the fullness should shrivel.

The trees may be skeletal and scratch
the length of the winter, but they are alive

and will return to their task of creation in
the spring, though it is far too early

to hunt for groundhogs or other augers.
Spring will return, though it may take many years.

I collect the leaves. As many as I can. And store them
in books, to love in the long dark by the light of stolen candles.

On this year’s horizon, instead of blanketing snowclouds, 
dark thunderheads. Harbingers of the flood.

The river will fill. And the lakes, and the ocean.
We’re so used to building dams against the rising tides

that when they break and we are caught in
history’s currents we rifle for footing

and try to hold back the waters with our hands
instead of remembering that we can swim.

Everything will not survive.
But some things will.

Everyone will not see the future.
But most of us will

and we will have to dream it.

And under the snow
and rain
and water
and mud
and silt
and shit
and hate
and winds
and dead earth
and fires of change

there is, under all that, a new year,
where small things will happen

small troubles, and small joys,
small enough for a human to hold,

and above all of that, at night, while
our worried brains are calmed,

the fixed stars will spin
as they always have.