Love and Death

Death and Love

There are two questions in

Life

How to achieve lasting love

And how to die

All else is myriad pink 

blooms

On one camellia bush

The rest is approaching thunder

Deepening damp a
Breeze

All actions from the meditation of

Bodhisattvas

Rantings from Libya

Chattering of talk show hosts

Sipping champagne

Downing Irish ale

To slipping naked into a lake at

Night

Are questions of love and death

As surely as green grass needs rain

Apricot Jam

Apricot Jam

My day began with cheese toast and

Apricot jam

Sitting on the screen porch

Our porch for eighteen years

I warmed my throat with French-pressed

Coffee

It was the fourth or fifth or sixth day of

Rain rain like never before here

Cool like the cure for melancholy

The Times had a long magazine article on

Jung

That now a dozen hours later I grow eager to

Read to take to bed our bed

To read as I let you go

San Francisco

Let you go as the ambien lets go my
Brain 

As solitude merges with dream


Jack 9/20/09

A Way

A Way

Recall our afternoon
Nashville
Napping abed
An embrace kisses
As we confess stress
Loss of temper we take out
On each other

In separate cities
We suffer still
Outburst hurt feeling
Resentment
Yet keep the
Awe
Twenty years of
Bare bones love
Inspires.

For Darryl, September 2009

Starr's Porch

Starr's Porch

There is plenitude on your screen porch
Where the doves from Mexico sit 
As the wind chimes deep intone 
The smile of your Buddha

The tweet of small birds in your yard

While you are away tuning your car

Bubbles of Buddha effervesce
From my champagne
As the smell of your terriers

And the fly buzzing from screen to screen

And the yap yap of your rusty ceiling fan 
Make me laugh

You and your porch are

Pure plum happiness.

Jack-- Sept. 2009