Poems

Grace

A ballet dancer, a sculpture titled Bird in Flight,

a gazelle gliding across an African plain.

Anything smooth and elegant,

often in motion or suggesting it,

we say is graceful – full of grace.

Grace is also something of the spirit,

not something that can be held and kept in a cage,

itself a spirit and a spark

that lights on me like a butterfly on my shoetop.

Like gentle rain on parched desert ground

it comes over me and I’m flowing with the current.

It washes the dust from my soul

and leaves me clean and shining

when the winds blow the clouds away.

Something warm and pure like sunlight

has entered my heart and soul and for a time I’m freed

from all that weighs me down and holds me back.

It stays only as long as it wants,

then having a mind of its own, leaves without a farewell,

and I return to life’s “business as usual.”

I chop wood and carry water, buy groceries,

wash the dishes, do the laundry.

Everything is like it was before,

full of routine and empty of grace.

I no longer regret that it flew away,

knowing it will visit again,

but elusive and not at my bidding,

not something I can capture and cage.

I can only savor and appreciate it

when it shows at my door and grants its favors.

But I can leave the door open

and welcome grace when it walks in.

On the Santa Barbara Divide

Standing on top of the Santa Barbara Divide,

the whole Pecos watershed

spreads a measureless green quilt below

reaching to the horizon.

Every tree is a thread

woven with uncountable others

into this dark, silent blanket.

Every acre, every square inch crawls with secret life,

each living thing hunting its food

and hiding from its hunters.

Up here on this Olympian ridge,

surveying the vastness from above 12,000 feet

and twelve miles from a road in any direction,

I feel like a god.

At the same time,

rock older than 100,000 lifetimes

contemplates my fifty-odd years with a yawn.

And I’m invisible in this wilderness

to any other eye that looks across it

to the ridge I so proudly straddle.

But I’m also a link in this chain

as I hand the past at my left

on to the future on my right,

no less than the coral polyp

that once became the tiniest grain

of the limestone I stumble on.

I’m part of that eternal march. I can feel it.

In a few days I’ll retrace my steps back to the trailhead

and to my place at the center of my life.

But for now I hang suspended in this proud immensity

happily being the center of nothing.

Just Like That Old Chevy

I’m just like that old Chevy

you hung onto for years

because it just kept goin

in spite of the noises it made

and the sluggish acceleration,

the window that had lost its crank

so you couldn’t roll it down.

It seemed like you had it in the shop

every few months for some problem

or part that went bad

and had to be replaced.

Yeah, that’s what it gets like

when you’re kinda long in the tooth.

But you keep on rollin

just like that old car did.

You knew it couldn’t last forever,

but you hated the idea of letting it go

because you’d gotten so used to it

you’d developed an affection for it

and hated to part with it,

even though part of you longed for a new model.

Bosque Spring

It’s late in April and warm,

but in the Bosque

curling up against the Rio Grande

the trees are still bare,

only a small branch here and there

sprouting any leaves at all.

Disappointed, I came down here

hoping for evidence of Spring’s jubilant arrival.

Two days later I come back

and every cottonwood wears a bright green crown!

The whole forest is a carnival,

alive and exuberant in the rays of the sun

set off by an electric blue sky,

and I’m no longer holding my breath for Spring.

Crown of Creation

They say we’re the crown of creation,

the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree.

Masters of the world,

everything exists for our benefit.

But I don’t buy it – that’s not the way it is.

We engage in abstract thought,

record our history, imagine the future,

tell stories and write books, make art and music,

measure the stars and discover quarks and bosons,

send spacecraft to the outer solar system and beyond.

Other animals can’t do those things,

though they have their own languages –

some more sophisticated

than ours in subtle ways we can’t imagine.

We may be the highest branch on the tree,

but without the tree we wouldn’t exist.

We need the trunk

and all the branches that led to our species,

plus the current branches

that make up an ecosystem we can’t exist without.

Invention is a phenomenon of all life and I’m here

only due to the creations of bacteria

who sowed the seeds of the tree

two and three billion years ago and more

and those who’ve carried the torch since then.

I came from them and it’s the genius

of animals and plants down to the simplest original bacteria

whose shoulders I stand on.

I owe them everything!

Inventors who created in succession the cell nucleus,

fermentation, photosynthesis, flagella, spirochete,

and the mitochondria that learned to metabolize oxygen,

which now live in every cell in my body and give me energy,

all of which I knew nothing about for over seventy years.

How they managed to grow the tree

that results in us I can’t comprehend,

but I’m the child of their brilliance.

If I really think about it, I’m astonished and awed

at how they’ve made me.

No, I don’t feel superior.

Sending humans to the moon, splicing genes,

composing Sibelius’ second symphony

writing Dylan’s and Cohen’s songs

are just some of the latest steps

in the evolutionary adventure.

I’m what I am only because of

those who came before.

I stand on the shoulders of giants.