Picturesque

 

The moon is a perfect thumbnail

On a black still vaguely blue,

As if some divine cartoonist

Had drawn the sky tonight.

 

The world is not always realistic,

The mundane not always mundane;

Sometimes truth is the wildest dream,

Perfection only a moon away.

Consolation

If beauty is any consolation

(And it is)

Then everything is bearable,

At least as long as the sun shines

Or the moon halos a sailing cloud,

Or a single lamp burns in a distant shack

In the shelter of a mountain

Which tomorrow will be beautiful too.

Palimpsest

The shadow has a white shadow

Because the sun is moving,

Leaving behind a tracing of frost

In the shape of where the shadow was.

Is that what you call a palimpsest?

That’s a word I should look up.

The point is, everything leaves traces on everything,

So nothing can ever be really gone,

And no one can ever be really gone.

The Visit

 

I am only a visitor here

For a very short time

For unknown reasons.

 

I don’t speak the language well,

I don’t know the customs,

And I can’t really make attachments

Because I must be pressing on.

 

But I have another day here –

At least, I think I do.

At most another fifty years

To wile away before I have to go.

 

And this is a place for visitors.

No one is here for very long.

Let’s take the air, see a bit of the land,

Have a meal in the shadow of a mountain,

 

And see if we can even love each other

On this brief vacation from nothingness.

Human Things

 

A poem is only a human thing,

However cosmic it may sometimes seem.

It’s placing words in a certain order

And hoping other people think it right.

 

Some of us paint on the walls of caves

Or scratch our names on a bathroom wall;

We marshal black notes along stately staves

For a drinking song or a mating call;

 

And some of us make things out of words

In a hopeful frenzy, like bower-birds.

Inheritance

 

The dog does not know why it barks,

Or what it would mean to know why.

Ancestral instinct, buried in the blood,

Breaks out at the first hint of danger,

However innocent, however mild,

However warm I try to make my voice,

And the dog strains at the leash,

A thwarted wolf,

Protecting the pack on a winter night 

A thousand thousand years ago.

 

But am I any different? Do I know

What old and serious blood moves me

To wake or sleep, or seek a certain food,

A certain woman, or a certain word

To finish off my barking little poem -

As atavistic, it may be, as his?

 

A Gentle Reminder

 

While you obsess over things not done,

A bird is waiting in the woods for you,

Rehearsing a song exactly to your taste

In the hope that someday you’ll wander by.

 

And while you worry about the future

And grind the gristful grudges of the past,

A patch of sunlight is opening wider

In a meadow you haven’t seen in years.

 

The world is profuse if your eyes are open;

The world is profuse if your eyes are not.

In the time it takes to tabulate your failures

You could have heard a joke, met a dog, fallen in love.

 

Don’t seize the day. That’s not what days are for.

Just let the day wash over you like rain,

And tumble into bed with skin still singing

The tune it learned from the falling cold.

Codebreaking

 

Silence is a language

Not easily deciphered:

A Rorschach provocation

That shows you to yourself.

 

You fill it with the things you fear,

The words that you least want to hear,

Then blame it for all the baggage

You painfully dragged here.

 

Silence is a scapegoat,

Loaded with noisy sin,

Taking the shape of your favorite nightmare –

Unless you let the silence in.

 

Then the quiet again grows quiet.

The shadow no longer screams.

The silence is only the old, good silence,

And fears are only dreams.

Jamieism

 

If I have a religion, it’s Jamie McEwan –

The man who happened to be my father.

It’s a religion of rivers and books,

Long, ambling talks over mugs of hot tea;

Drawling, chewing on your words, telling stories;

Laughter like rain, deep eddies of quiet, too.

 

Our holy book is written on the heart

In letters made of sturdy, sinewed love;

And all our rituals are solemn, playful,

Woven through the weft of daily life.

 

And for a temple? You can have your pick.

A river or a bookstore makes good sense,

But anywhere that stirs the stagnant blood

Or fires up the ponderous brain will do.

 

There’s no dogma, and no dietary rules,

Although a thoughtful moderation is advised;

There are no priests, or really any god

Unless, perhaps, the world itself is God –

 

A blind, unthinking, terrible-beautiful one

As full of change and pain as life itself.