Hiking Stone Mountain TrailFifty yearsup these slopes, in & out bareboned canyons Walking stick lacquered with a million-dollar sheenMercury sailing through high-altitude blueLifeperfectly still, movingbefore the eyeSun upside down as I bend to tie a shoe.Stealing the FruitCold morning.Sit down to work, warm my handsunder my legs--Get in the modewatching coyote slip under the gateeyeing fallen apples.The song I'd sing soft, uproarious, bush burning stilled in the breeze Must be a slip through the gatelike coyote, stealing the fruit that sends me.Floating with the Current "What wonder to be where you areand know it," Joanne writes.To let the path end right where you stop, find yourselfat center, snowgeese circling, sunlight flooding the plain. A place where mountains rise, valleys sink, and shadows move in uncertain light,where, just out the door the brink of something irregular is exposed: rugged, undefined --time, without its usual frame.A knife-sharp butte on the horizongrowing thinner in the wind .

The weightless curveof the river, deepening the gorge .How imagination gathers, fills the pail with moonlight then leaves you to the place itself, what holds you.Wishing for RainThe long stretch of fields . apricot dazzle where the sun has set.Go in, close the door, let the moonfill my glass through the window.I'd like rain tonightI'd like sails!Want the songbirds backunder the eaves, frogs up fromtheir inside-out galaxies. I need those reminders--Need the spring rain a clear and secret rapfrom the upper Realm just to know I'm really cranking.Bright No Cloud DayMy age spotshave vanished, look at them go! Off seeding the Journey with better understandingOff decorating the sundial with fluttering hosannas Called by the swoonof the horizon, into the Bardo realm of the dead, who know Time is finally on their side.

No earth shaking message,yet here it is on a bright no-cloud daylike shavings of fools goldcupped in heaven's air.