Welcome Company

At night, in darkness or moonlight

reflected back, the loons call out,

raucous, or low, warbling, mournful,

their calls, though, welcome company

on a night like this,

quiet and alone,

breaking the silence,

breaking, too, my solitude,

a welcome company welcomed

in the quiet of my night.

Beach Towels

At camp, our summer home lost in the northern wilds,

the beach towels hang in the evening breeze at day’s end

shaking off the lake-water soaked up from tanned

and reddened bodies that live there,

diving and swimming, cannon-balling

from the dock’s end with a scream resounding

and rebounding, echoed only by loons and bullfrogs

unseen in the shadows lengthening along the lake,

darkening as night settles in, sunset’s colors reflected,

matching the beach towels hanging wet on the clothesline,

a rope strung taunt between two trees,

a line connecting us, pulling us back each summer.

I Heard on the News Today

I heard on the news today

we’re dropping bombs, again,

to kill off the terrorists terrorizing us

and fighting just as hard as we are

to kill off what’s terrorizing them,

but it does no good,

no more than it does

for the young boys and men, fully armed,

fighting off their own terrors

here in the streets of the cities we call home.

Boxes

Late in summer’s months, pawing through boxes

for something, I can’t remember what, now,

something buried deep and inaccessible,

and I spill out some old pictures, old photos come loose

from the pages of an album over the years

packed and repacked away, the glue

dried and flaking, letting go the hold

on little 3 x 5 images, grainy and faded,

years old, agéd years since I captured those faces

squinting into the sun over my shoulder,

children the ages, size, and shape of their own children,

“the spitting image” perhaps only a grandparent can see,

holding them up and squinting myself, bi-focaled,

peering over the tops of my glasses, or down my nose,

remembering the date and place, the occasion captured

years ago, a Kodak moment, left to fade, occasions slipping

into memory in the letting go, losing my hold on them,

letting them grow, memories buried deep and inaccessible,

late in summer’s months, pawing through boxes looking for them.

Eden's Garden

Life’s goal, if there is one,

is to return to whence we came,

not dust to dust, ashes to ashes,

or some form of life from which we evolved

perhaps years ago, eons ago from

a single cell that emerged from

ocean depths to spawn shamefully on terra firma,

but it is to return to Eden’s Garden,

mystical roots of a creation story,

Adam and Eve, naked, shameless then,

and blameless, bare limbs and breasts,

exploring life’s pleasures freely,

in wonder of each other and self,

time not a clock with piercing alarm

reminding where and when to be, or who,

but a rising and setting of the sun and moon

signaling nothing more than light and dark

and hours passed in between, hours passed hand

in hand, upright, unimpeded

through grassy bowers and glades

shaded by trees but a few

days old, or billions of years,

where age and origin mattered little;

And Adam and Eve, upright,

hand in hand, naked and shameless, blameless,

roamed Eden’s Garden, a borderless

garden lacking white picket fence

or stone walls that separate and confine,

that define our space, your space and mine,

bordered and hemmed in; just Adam and Eve

through a garden roaming, naming the un-named

nameless in a language not English, French,

Latin or Greek or Germanic, no one’s native tongue,

perhaps even a language not yet spoken,

but understood by two, each a part of the

other, from Adam’s rib, from the dust

of earth’s new formed crust, dust and ash

to mud to man and woman, taken from man,

creation unconcerned with cause or process,

creation content only with being.

To Eden’s garden returning, gateless now,

gates long torn down, Satan’s Serpent

cast to the ground and ground under foot,

an object of wonder and study, no longer

a voice tempting woman to eat, to share her sin,

for knowledge’s tree long ago outgrew

itself, rotted, decomposed, earth to earth

returned, crushed to humus, all god-given

restrictions lifted, for all knowledge,

all truth, was learned, not there, but

in the expulsion and in the journey back

to Eden, to the truth, blameless,

naked and unashamed, hand in hand --

creation’s mystical roots, Eden’s Garden,

is but the goal of life.