The Monterey Poetry Review is publishing again along the coast of California. You can check out two poems of mine here:
2 Poems in Monterey Poetry Review
Just scroll down till you see my name, and read some of the other wonderful work along the way! Or read them below:
The Dreams of Antelope
In Yosemite, they introduced wolves back into the mountains, which fed again on the antelope, which stopped over-eating the willow trees, so the birds returned to sing and beavers started making dams again from the fallen branches, resurrecting the marshes, and once more everything started turning green because a wild predator was allowed back into the dreams of antelope.
The Mystical Stand-up Comedians
Sitting by morning fire,
I arrange books on wooden table,
ponder the cover of Bly’s Morning Poems,
open another instead, begin reading
The Spiritual Athlete In An Orange Robe and,
foggy, think I am still reading Bly. I laugh
at his irreverence, my meditator-friends flinching
at lines such as He sits inside a shrine room all day,
so that God has to go outdoors and praise the rocks.
I love this line, a permission to lift eyes from navel,
to run wildly through the enraptured day
rather than sitting immobile as a cross-legged
contortionist. But it takes an old rascal like Bly
to wag his finger at the spiritual authorities.
After a bite of oatmeal, pinch of brown sugar,
sip of coffee, I wake up, notice I am not
reading Bly, but Kabir—15th century Indian poet
writing ecstatic bhakti verse amid the staid
Hindu bureaucracies—and I laugh again.
The mystical stand-up comedians span the centuries,
remind us spirit is not a competition,
but the comic timing of cosmic humor,
the stick in the rib, the ungodly guffaw,
enlightenment the subtle joke remembered
by the man in the back pew, running now
from the church, falling down on the grass,
laughing.