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Some Poems from Beso the Donkey
Beso the Donkey
Beso the Donkey
lives out his days in a small pasture.
He appears stoic in the rain
and stands still
beneath the merciless sun.
You could almost believe that a rock
to eat, dust to drink,
are all that he needs.
You would be more wrong
than the one who named him Beso
thinking that the kiss he gave
for a sliver of apple
was love.
Beso's Mind
My agreement with gravity
compounds with age.
I dip my nose in the Milky Way
and feel how deep.
I wander far from my head
and its donkey-tying stake.
from A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances
Living In Perilous Times
Six inches of the seas have lifted
into the sky and rain down.
-Reuters
Late light pools on the twisty path,
woodpeckers nail evening shadows to trees
and telephone poles.
I was the baby of the family and never knew
what was going on or why.
John Coltrane said he would ask
Thelonious Monk questions with his horn
and get answers to questions
he never thought to ask.
Last night, brother cat, the moon painted
the blossoms on our old apple tree
and the great horned owl.
Do you think this means we’re going to be
alright, little cabbage white?
Unless one owl closes one eye too many
and the entire dream unravels.
We’re running along the same knife edge
as the quail—are you in love with your fine
forward-curving plume, my friend?
You can walk on the sun and the moon
where they’ve come all this way to lie down.
Honey For The Women
Earth wins its argument again.
I sit beneath a tree to rest, filled with living
like a worm full of dirt, and I Euripides
about the women I’ve known.
My fingers find a crusty dead bee in the grass,
weightless, more profound than the Song of Solomon.
Inside its husk, a hundred million years of nectar dances,
flowers of the world, and the world’s sweetness.
But I robbed the tree of a kernel of food
by picking it up and so I put it down.
If I never get up, and no one finds me,
will bees make a hive of my body as in Samson’s lion
and honey, from alfalfa and sage,
next spring?
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