Walk out of the sea at last.

Blow a tarnished silver horn in your mother’s
garden.

Sometimes it is wise to open the door.

Open the door and just stand there sleepily
alert.  Not waiting!

The trees have been whispering  their secrets
all winter long with their alphabet of
branches, now fall silent, blushing with leaves
in green embarrassment.

The ice is almost all melted now.  And all the
gouges and scratches and skate scars on its
surface have dissolved into the pond.  Year
after year!  No wonder water is so wise.

But sometimes it’s all right to wait–just make
sure you’re not waiting for someone, not even
me (whoever I am).

No wonder we get tired after two-thirds of a
day– at every moment we are on a road that
forks in front of us, every breath brings new
choices. Haven’t you ever wondered why we
need so much sleep?

Any sentence that begins with “I” can’t tell the
whole story.  But it tries.

Read the signs:  blue sky, shapely small cloud
over tall spruce.  I think that’s its name.

Sometimes you feel you’re walking through a
dreamy empty city like Berlin, not too many
towers, lots of skies, wide streets, everything
safely in another language.

They say that Connecticut is named for its
river, its Indian name, that meant it flows
both ways at once–estuarial, obviously, like
the Hudson (whose Indian name had the same

meaning). The river flowing south as the tide
flows north.  Nothing natural can ever finally
make up its mind.

There’s a hill I know up in New Lebanon where
you can stand with one foot in New York and
one in Connecticut. Face north and your left
foot will be in a sort of Sufi monastery
downhill. God knows what your right foot
believes.

Everything happens at once.  How could it be
otherwise.

I never met my grandfathers, both were dead
before I was born. My mother’s father in the
one photo I have of him looked a lot like
Wallace Stevens.  I never met him either, but
he taught me most of what I know, though
you’d never know it.  But it’s what I mean
when I say Connecticut, speaking of what
words mean.

I think there is a temple on the other side of
anything, a sacred spacious building where

true god is served.  To find god go, to the other
side.

I love it that we have borders and frontiers,
especially the kind between states, real
frontiers you can cross freely, nobody
noticing except something deep inside you
that knows, that always knows.

It has connect in it, of course, and cut. Does it
mean cut all connection, dwell in sublime
isolation?  Or should we be wise and ordinary
(the ordinary is always wise) and read it in
English:  connect the cut, span the gap, heal
the wound, make the skin of our lives whole
again.

Stevens at the end wrote about rocks, the
rocks of his place. We belong to the stones of
our town, our glacial boulders turned up in
our fields.  How could we live so long if we
weren’t part stone?

Slim hips of Connecticut wading in the Sound,
across from my own island.  Grandfather
owned a little chunk of it but I left home.

So when I say or I sing come out of the
shallows to me do I have to have someone in
mind?

Why can’t we all just sing?

Heal me with your song–
every woman a wizard, every man a sage.  Just
open your lips, let your breath do all the rest.

28 April 2020