After Words
In April, I had a stroke. Among other things, I lost the ability to make poems the way I had always made them, drawing from intuition and complexity of language and technique to try to create poems as art. I could no longer handle the multiplicity of focus and reference.
I thought my life as a poet was over.
But eventually it came to me that although I couldn’t any longer make poems, I might be able to receive poems.
So for the past months, that has been my practice. i don’t know where it is taking me, but I am grateful.
What Speaks
What speaks is unconditional. Therefore
it is not a poem.
Yet it knows a single blossom on a twig.
It knows the sound of thunder rolling in
and heat rain
and the small birds talking amongst themselves
from within the leaves.
It knows the coral stripes on the milk snake.
It knows you also in your stripes of complication
and the unwinding of your dying.
It is the earth speaking to you, the earth you share.
Go out, then, and give your attention
to the bent grasses along the trail
and the one blossom still sleeping on the hawthorn.
