John's Poems

John's Poems John's Poems

Absence

Without you
my soil dries
and speaks less to my roots

Being less than full
I can feel the wind on my leaves
but cannot join it.
Fingers of brittleness
grow within my branches.
Thickened fear seeps down my trunk
toward where all sap starts

With you I can bear fruit
Without you I can feed only flame

Advent

Touching the dark birth
of devotion
is a
demanding abandon

pistols and psalms
are checked
at the door

Entering
is awakening.
First rapture,
then hunger:
ancient appetites
flap the body like a flag
in the wind

Abandon demands
discipline:
hewing to the path
not taken;
the path of
the taken.

Navigation is tactile
with skin's compass.
First ours,
then It's

Being
becomes
being
lost.

Turning first
the doe's ears
then her nose,
the Chinook wind rises from the valley,

She now knows
where to begin.
She no longer waits
for dawn.

loving poem

Imagine the warm rush of
anticipation
of a slow symphony
The first movement is of falling clothing;
each garment unveiling new instruments
that will warm and play
to breath and touch

The second movement is of falling flaws
each crows foot, wrinkle, bulge or sag
each too little and
each too much.
Slipping off, like a T-shirt
each garment of doubt
No longer are the sheets too loud with light
or the need to lay that certain way
No longer is it safer to begin beneath,
to perform and not,
to play

The final movement is of falling within
where each body begins as a new glove
filled with god.
And making love
is a heartful handshake
teaching each the measure of what is within
during the leather's slow joyful journey
of flexing,
thinning,
and finally
fully
fitting.

Spring Grief Group

I am here
for
the most rational of reasons
and
to deny them

I am here to learn, heal and recover
and to
complain, kvetch and to linger
tastefully
in the garden of my malaise

To retrace,
with ardent sobriety,
the wounds of loss
in a body that is
too brief,
even for sand,
to remember.

Death gifts an untidy longing:
a longing for more memory
and less life

A longing for the shadow
of new lovers
lost in the thrust
and receipt of
firmness

For a life so full of memory
that there is no emptiness
available for a stranger's touch.
A desire for wanton
recollection
or just that
knowing wink.

In this celestial singles bar
I dance only with memories
Yet all too soon
each touch
touches less.
So I savor instead
the fine wines of loneliness
preferring to cultivate taste
over progress

But spring intrudes
and my sap rises
from forgotten roots
and pushes past all propriety
into leaves
and flowers
which my lost love
mischievously pollinates

Forcing me
to face my fruit

And I,
of course,
resent the intrusion
while worrying
they won't
be picked

John's wife died from cancer.
John's e-mail address

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