New Discoveries in Familiar Places

New discoveries in familiar places

once rocky beach
now mostly sand
where Kate searched each year for her solstice stone
“This will be a challenge to find one now”
& just that fast she hands me
a solstice stone with a hole in it
“You can spot a ship on the horizon with this”
& I put the hole to my eye
& just that fast spotted a ship on the horizon
I reached into my backpack pocket
to find my pen to write about this
& came out with a green mechanical Italian pencil
Venus - 043
that I had never seen before.

New School

At our first PTA meeting at our daughter's new

school, my wife has to give me a little bit of a prod.

The dad in charge of the dad's maintenance muster roll,

Paul, gives me a firm handclasp and a welcoming smile.

While we talk, I notice details in the multi-purpose space:

faces of celebrities drinking milk, the piano, the stage.

Age has made me able to enter a school by the front door

grace on my shoulders, but I flash back to third grade.

April we moved to a new school in Hawaii, a new place

all over. The school buildings were military barrack style.

God, I stared up at the windows that opened with a long pole

through group time and reading time and math squad,

poor new kid, trying to keep the tears in his head until two.

in the first revolution of gaia

in moons
this is the first revolution of gaia
when something isn't pushing me awake
some cantankering must or would
(or some five or fifty-five of them).

i round the bend on the morning walk
that i take because the sun shows up
shockingly in december to remind us
what we're missing the other 222 days a year
when she's away.

i am confused. how do we respond
to a world on fire? how do we remember where we are
when rectangles try to repattern our thinking
in rectangle houses on rectangle streets
(there's nothing upright about life,
nothing rect that hasn't wrecked it).

i dream of walking through curved gardens
where dragon and apple branch guide us, where
plinth and driveway have revived to path and wanderwalk.

inside me, this ancient garden swerves my neural
networks into using the other 90%+ of my emergent
capacity. the cup of the hand, the moon, this earth
soften and flare. when they talked about the Garden
they were talking about my thinking. No one ever lost

the Garden. we carry it surely in our pen and thought.
in dancing limb and vox.
everytime we write a poem or sing, we become sturdy
trees of wisdom and life, girding ourselves trunklike
and in nonlinear blossomwhirl
for another (ancient) day (way):
our brains and hearts are landscapes of peace.
within are galaxies of curve and connection.
inside are looping and lumpy cosmos of creativity/creation.
our brains and hearts are landscapes of peace.

IMUNURI prompt: somewhere new

This week, put paper and pen in your pocket and take a little time to go somewhere you never go, or somewhere you have never been. It doesn't have to be far or exotic or hard to get to; but wherever you go, notice the newness, and if you can, draft your post in that place, about the place or the feeling, or anything else that's on your mind.

Should a physical excursion to unknown places prove unfeasible, you might go somewhere new within somewhere familiar or within yourself, or you might look for and discover a new aspect of somewhere you have been before.

lables: poem, zabriskie, your name