singing

the music

of tiny waterfalls

in midwinter

I follow a newborn brook

singing wherever it leads me

~GUSTS 23, spring/summer 2016

I sing

my thinking mind

to sleep—

a deeper way of knowing

wells up like music

~red lights 12:2, June 2016

Pegasus

My mother used to sing to horses.  She claimed that “Get Me to the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady soothed the skittish buckskin mare. But when she sang in the presence of human beings, they generally begged her to stop.  From my mother I absorbed the notion that both she and I were simply born without music, just as we’d been born without wings. It took me over sixty years to discover she was wrong; by then she was ten years dead without a song.

muffled

inside this chrysalis

of doubt—

trembling wings

unloosed by melody

~Haibun Today 10:1, March 2016

vibrations

cold fog 

enveloping my world

Bach

pours from the radio 

the light of trumpets

~GUSTS 21, spring/summer 2015

cello concerto—

no need for string theory

to convince me

the universe vibrates

to a deeper harmony

~A Hundred Gourds 4:4, Sept. 2015

the musician

speaks of going deeper

into the music—

playing for himself alone

he wraps us in his magic cloak

~GUSTS 22, fall/winter 2015

Migration

three nights
I dream of home
with locked doors—
a woman hands me a chart
marking the depths of the sea

my path
littered with the bones
of poems
I couldn’t write . . .
a blackbird whistling

a wren calling
in the piney wood
teacher teacher teacher. . .
I read aloud
from a scarlet leaf

my quarry—
a poem without words 
dancing 
through the green glade
barefoot as music

a wisp
of thistledown drifting 
before me 
I linger by the brook
to pan for fool’s gold

clear notes
rising from my flute—
the gift
of water flowing
in a life without rain

~Skylark 3:1, summer 2015

Sonatina

light fading
at the tunnel’s end
I slip away
down the fluted passage
inside a singing reed

longing
to open the clear wings
of music
I breathe into my flute
a flight of butterflies

the murmur 
of wind-turned leaves
before a storm—
the soft cry of a mourning dove
echoes in my flute


~Skylark 2:2, Winter 2014

wings

music lesson—
the caged bird 
beating inside me
learns how to sing
her own sky into being

~Ribbons 10:3, Fall 2014

I wait
without wings
in the empty chapel . . .
organ music lifts me
by the marrow of my bones

~A Hundred Gourds 4:1, Dec. 2014

echoes

a ribbon of birds
across the winter sky
the echo 
of earthbound magic
in those hollow bones


~GUSTS 19: spring/summer 2014

slow down 
slow down the song 
of the wood thrush
until at last it echoes 
the music of humpbacked whales

~Atlas Poetica 18, July 2014