Yin and Yang

A soul that lives alone,
with no friend,
with no mate,
has no east
to call them west,
no left
to call them right,
has no gender,
no race.

With no yin
there is no yang.

A soul that goes alone,
with no point,
with no search,
has no way
to follow,
no music
to lead.

The path to yin
informs yang.

Between yin and yang
a lost soul
roams the rock,
moves from dark to dark.

Speed Trap

Two cops know that reckless drivers
congregate here, and they make their budget
with fifty more tickets. The road is poorly designed,
it's banked wrong, it's a blind corner,

the tickets should go to the highway engineers.
Bill Gardner's fence has been rebuilt
eight times by the insurance company,
Bill doesn't care, he likes new fences,

they should replace the one along the river,
but it never gets run over.
Two crows follow the river
looking for spawned out salmon

washed up on a gravel bar,
they're like two cops
who know where to find the easy pickings,
and they're not going to change.

Redwing Blackbird

He fluffs scarlet epaulets, leaves home,
says he's going out to gather food
for the chicks, that's what he says.

Scarlet epaulets go to the other home,
the one she doesn't know,
the one he thinks she doesn't know,

and mates with the other her.
The epaulets go to the sentinel tree
and sing of lust.

Preston Beach

Down the beach, in the ocean dust,
families cluster around plastic buckets,
rig lures, bate hooks,
the clusters are like barnacles,
poles extended to sweep the surf.

At the top of the beach a tarp is rigged
in the driftwood, grandma tends a fire,
"we'd be better off cooking the bait."
Just beyond the surf,
three red-throated loons dive.

Down the beach, in the ocean dust,
gulls cluster around a sand shark
grandma refused to cook,
she drew a line in the sand.

Yellow Pages

Sun lights the morning sky,
the neighbor rooster makes sure
we know he's still in the yard,
I get my tea and make a list

for the day, I scan the yellow pages
and lose touch with the sun and rooster,
the categories are wrong, there's no section
for big boring store, the yellows fit

somebody's notion of how life works,
they are not me. The rest of the day
I walk the path down Sylvia Creek
and look for things not in the yellows,

right understanding, means of livelihood,
intellectual activity and contemplation.
In the evening back at the cabin
with my glass of wine I need lust,

gluttony, and sloth, I check the yellows
for a boring eatery and a tasty waitress.
The rooster gives up and goes to bed.

Escapees

1 –
Jimmy-the-Lip doesn't want to be bothered
so he makes up names, ”I'm under contract
with KGR Corp.," he says,
"to evaluate a research facility,

it's all confidential of course,
all on the hush hush, I'll be in town
for a couple of days, and my report
will depend a lot on how I'm treated

by the locals." Jessie puts a good smile on,
gets a scratch ticket and a refill.

2 –
We take down the street signs
and the escapees don't know where to go,
they mill around on the street,

gather under the sidewalk trees and squawk,
the way gulls gather around pilings.
They see three moves ahead on the checkerboard,

three moves behind on the bed board.
One of the gulls flies off,
three others follow along.

3 –
We go through what will come to be known
as difficult times. Trees have cycles,
heavy fruit one year then ten years off,
ten years of depression for the fruit eaters,

the good times raised our hopes
but it was just a tease,
now we have to scale back.

4 –
Rain changes the smells, it comes in slow,
a few drops, then a deluge that tapers off
until all that's left is storm rumble,
water tumbling down hill, high water

on the Skagit, the smell of muddy water.
Trees slow the water down,
the standing trees and logjams,
like red tape keeping a migration under control.

5 –
I can't use the pond but I like it,
the sunsets reflecting, buzzing insects,
fourteen ducks doing duck things.
On the slope behind the pond a windbreak

shows where Benson scratched out a garden,
where she danced,
when it got quiet he looked up.

White-Throated Sparrow

Light snowfall starts at dusk,
dusting boughs on the evergreens,
accenting the decks outer edge,
during the night the snow heavies up,

the dusting grows to pillows, the accent
is a drift. Close to the wall it's a great day
for a white-throated sparrow, it joins a gaggle
of seeders harvesting the feeder spillover,

a ground-scratcher's line dance,
the best peckings in the neighborhood,
then the weather changes.

Basket

A reed basket hangs on the line
with flowers stuffed in its mouth,
the basket is the skeleton of a marsh,
the flowers cascading corpses,
the victims of mass murder by sickle and scythe.

Spirits of the dead at a prairie graveyard
lean against a fence rail
and think on friends who never returned
from an evening stroll.

Death thinks on a corpse
lost in a marsh, a corpse out of the box.
At the end of a row of gravestones
a basket ceremony fills in the blank,
murder reveres death.

The Moth Goes Around

With new glasses I see the cobwebs
in my cabin, dust I only smelled
before, a moth flittering to dark places
in the printer, curious messages

crawling across the television screen.
Knowing evolutionary biology humbles
the path leading here, astronomical
physics troublizes the road ahead,

today's an egg learning about scrambled,
sunny-side-up, three-chili omelet.
Galileo puts two lenses together
to better see the River of Stars,

he puts away the glass but his thinker
never forgets the proposition,
knowledge that shoves orbits
out of round. I sit in the rocker

with my eyes closed and my thinker
remembers the moth going around the cabin.
The egg takes off its glasses, but it never forgets
which part of the chicken it comes from.