Drunkard's Run

Un (Crawdad Creek)

Back at the August campsite,
Following January,
After flash floods and snowstorms
Had transformed the dusty scene
In ways even weary eyes
Couldn't fail to see, someone
Wants to believe this place is

Real, the events transient
That bent its reality,
The bodies that revisit,
Real, and the same as themselves
When they were here, although changed
Since the hot nights when lightning
Dashed the stars and threatened rain.

The sonnet should have finished
Then, or a long time ago,
But everything continues.
The gypsy pavilion's gone,
The homelessness is over,
Like all homelessness, at best,
For now. The low water's cold.

Do (Winter's Over, Days Will Linger)

Living is not a life
However locked to one body
Awareness might feel

Not even only the sum
Total of countable lives
Digging into that body

Interacting with that body
Poured into the gone
Generations making it go

Living is the sensation
Of being a living container
For wherever dreaming goes

Twa (Right Name, Wrong Number)

Forgive me my unenlightenment,
But surely "awakening" is not
The metaphor for enlightenment
Best suited to an insomniac.
Calm thyself, sleepless man. You do dream.
In fact all that awareness ever
Does is surface and submerge in dreams,
Different dream rules for different dream kinds,

None of a kind you can control.

A truck rumbles by on the outside
Road past your sunlit inner bedroom.
Early this morning, your daughter
Woke in the dark demanding you come
To her bedside to hear all her dreams.
They were astonishingly more detailed
In recollection than yours have been

For as long as you've been forgetting.
The light in this water makes these waves.