Equinox

SPRING EQUINOX, 2019

Changing mountains, not leaving them.

Heading south in mothership. Sierras

alongside Karen--Look--

Ski and sew--All winter with Keats,

snowpack strong. Arrived, 1819,

young man with sore throat. A couple

biographies, poems and letters:

An open time. He would defend the oppressed.

Smudge difference between seen and heard,

erased and disappeared. Entry and access.

If poetry is dreaming, what makes us real?

Conscience-calmed, the soldier healed,

and bird-song. Snow-mold raked

from grass renews tiny roots.

I sit with my teacher, book in lap

reading Blake's Everlasting Gospel.

Christ's nose, hooked or snubbed?

Yours or mine? Well? Maybe that

could make the president laugh.

Distance, and all that's denied, inspired.

Maybe that's asking too much. Dressed

in civil rights denim, the teacher howls,

younger, meandering in memory.

Episodic, transparent juice-quench--

and all the dead whose names are in our lips,

receiving what's offered, a full cup

before turning page. To be

in the perfect sense of otherness

freeing one of return's necessity.

How man walks after promise.

Jim

22 March 2019