In Enemy Territory

2/2006, San Clemente, CA & 2/2008, Scottsdale, AZ

The questionings roll in unceasing,
Explode to white foam like tightened strings
Around the Earth’s throb of yearning
And pull back along the black skin of shore…
There’s no answering this form
There are no laws
Without conflict or contradiction…
It all seems real because it obeys the moment’s command
While I, free to choose what I wish to keep or lose,
Seem false—the waves, by way of reply, say
Like incomprehensible elders only that I am so very young,
I have not yet seen the stately hillsides falling
And I am nearly convinced, until I remember—
Somehow—hiding in these caves for lifetimes
Collapsing as the warnings came, which I heeded
To die again and again, only to see now, in an air
Of privilege, just how much of myself was expended
To have the choice, now, to see that
All there is to know is somehow covered, like a bookie’s bet.
The pharaohs built their tombs
With mind and eyes and voice
But there are only skulls in cases
To explain away the ruins.
There is no answer, except in looking for it
In each wave pushing against the shore like a goodbye.
The only opening is what emerges out of me,
Not anything but the cry of all knowledge
Looking for a source long lost, a golden
Yielding eye across the middle of the sea,
An invisible kingdom in opposition to everything,
The stone-cold look and feel
I must go up against every moment
Just to say
“I am.”

So easily we are moved by voices in the wind
But nothing ever seems to want to move at our voice
Outside itself, to sense, except what we make of it
With our mind’s sweet aligning to the strange
Creating something to recognize, as familiar.
Unable to remember, we only stare
Under coffin roofs at wide pictures.