Ojai Lines

I. My Back to the Mirror

Where, in what I see, to believe?
The fog, or what breaks through the smoke?
The orange villas stepping down Agoura Hills
or the original ones in Italy?
The shapes beyond the window, or the ones more palpable
on the wall?
Who, but me, determines whether
A feather is a gift of love
from an unseen admiring tree
Or the inevitable shedding of what must
grow beyond measure, or die?

If purple comes between these mountains,
Is it not because I brought it?
How else could it wash my face, or clothe my eyes?
I feel its wings flap and I whirr within,
A hum that drums up fancies like cotton candy...

How can this world where it all falls be so unyielding?
Is there not an opening, in the shadowy folds,
For all the rearranging I do already?

II. Sunset at Meditation Mount

At the end of the trail
The yellow chamomile and silver-green sage
Dissolve to the red wounds of myth
As the gold sky darkens the mountains
And the orange groves glow in valley folds below.
At a sluice in the hill all is quiet
Except the moccasins of birds
And the blades of gnats—
Samsung at each spot
Even the rock I knock over as I write this
Bears the weight of perfection.

I must face this moment alone
As some kind of recorder for a higher buddha
You can't hear laugh
Even in the loudest breeze.
Those I share it with
Fall back like Waldo into the moment.
It all unfolds so perfectly
Breadcrumbs of spirit
Around the abyss.

III. Turquoise Freedom

The line to the dome
Its echo and glow
Of the scream of our desperate hearts
No longer must I wait there
With a white fez atop my skull—
Instead I can ply with claws and feathers
Whatever my eye finds in flight
Cut off, unfathomable.

Not the known, so afraid to be wrong
it's rarely right,
Nor the seen, so in love with its reflection
it can't perceive what is looking,
Instead, a clean line, say, of a blue color
One large enough for the emptiness within,
That doesn't splinter in its own confusion,
That can create in me a miracle—of vision.

There is something of myself in
the constant fluttering
Because there is, always, someplace to land
albeit briefly
Not to connect, or to attack,
but to breathe—freely.