Dispatch #77

Three short poems

Spear Thistle

The heat seals
the day beneath
a sheet of faded sepia. 

Summer is bardo—
gnat-flecked and feral.

Still, I covet wakefulness
in this season of sleep and the odd wildflower. 




Sunday 
    for Nicki

Woke up from dreamless sleep 
sun drumming through blackout blinds
enough light 
to read the small type in a prayer book

An ordinary morning 
but for the joy in my body

after shedding shame that claimed the shape of my life
Now the joy, the joy in my body

Nothing left to defend, and a flood of poetry




Written While Sitting in Front of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950

Jackson, you knew
nature doesn’t make
mistakes. The eye
and the arm, 
and the way
a man stands 

when the world
recedes 
into a wrack zone
of rhythm and pattern.
That’s what counts.

A man mirroring nature
is nature.

The thing made
is the thing found, 

inevitable 
and vibrating

with the momentum
of light itself, O
mandala
of the one sun.

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