To sandblast our reality with art
To walk alone the clocking air
With flashes of the tallest childhood skies
Above unspooled adulthood's streets
That weave along a cherished memory
Of a gazebo and a lakeside with gondolas
A fine and wordless springtime
Blowing out of April first
The soft assurance
That there comes another year
And that
(as if some sudden pleasing siren to awakened muscles)
Morning bursts
From sleepy-most contentions
And through eye-devised precision of
Resistance to spirits murderous
That populate the low communal
Evocation of the epoch on the screen
And that there comes an afternoon
Adjusting
(under the mystery of daytime moons
a charge to eye)
A forehead to the frequency of light waves in the sky,
And
- Past the libra of my skin that feels so much,
Past my sweet cancer claws of Venus
That would melt to ocean foam
Beneath your touch..  
Into some choicely delinated
- yet, like an echo in a canyon -
With unsimulacra'ed human gnosis
Still profoundly kindred
(And by love distilled)
Good boddhisattva work of life
Laid bare
Within a gap in rushing clouds
A smile that cuts across each weighty stare
And says
That in the heart
There ever live
Obscure anticipations of eternal Easter
When we search, we find,
Give thanks, rejoice, and plant...
Where songs remain,
As hair is shed...
Where earnest hope somehow remains on airy beams
Along the other things which carry on
A breath that enters in the wind
Like everything
That need not any fancied demonstrations
Nor require belief
To be perceived
When fickle time
Inevitably ripens
Stringless, gushed,
A happiness that comes again perhaps
A place
Can't possibly require
For a mind to think it so
Or for a despot world to so ascribe
In any certain way
But simply to be threaded through
A certainty of soul s
In every passage forth
Along the borders of one's self-exhaustive days
While fostering sure words
And sudden meetings
Of a welcome sort
That may,
And even through the shadows of disasters,
Reaffirm
A symmetry of self and leaf
Upon a breath unburdened by great sense or scheme
And that,
After a breakfast and a romp,
A drink of water, and a yawn,
Could pull
Out of a messy shuffled deck
A series of tens
With every element among them
And then smile
To trace some brand new constellation
To give grace to
Idle journeys
Along the rims of days
That calendars defy
Again, again

That give a sense to dawnings
That in a messy bed
For long forlon
Would wake again and whisper
"I am fine" 

And just to think...
To think...

We're sitting on the hill the other week
It's April's first
You seem to hold each passing quantum
Dearly
In your eyes
And I lay back
The world is pure relief
If almost brief and almost tentative
And almost certain
Ways

(The UBER driver just last night: 
-"My daughter...
She born on April Fools', you know?!
Was weighed ten pounds...
Now weighs 130!
And when I
Was born I weighted just five!
I was three hundred,
And not so long ago, you know,
I lost so much last year!
It's so good!

- Oh, what's it like to have a birthday fall on April fool's?!

- It'd so silly! It's been so good for me.
Such silly pranks!
I love to see her birthday face! 
She hates them sort of...
But it's fun!
And then my son was born on Halloween...
And then the other one -
This one had passed
(She paused, with a smile) -
Well, he was born on Mother's Day...
So, all my children ...
Born on creepy days!"

She laughs away.
And drives us on our way
Through late night Concord.

"- And isn't that so crazy! 
We live on parallel streets.
With you on Raymond,
Me on Temple...
I used to always turn on Raymond by mistake!
And you in 1244,
Me in 1144!
And I was thinking,
Why, maybe it is time for me to take it home tonight!"

I say,
"Was this a sign then?"

- "Ha! But ain't that right!
Why, is your house a flat-top?"

"I don't know... The roof is slightly curved I think..."

- "Well, mine is flat! 
From 1955, you know.
There were such ancient newspapers in the walls!
There was this actress in the first one
...
Forgot what she was called...
She was sixteen and so so famous!
And for her birthday getting
Her first telephone!
And nowadays even the eight-year-olds all have their cell phones!"

I told her of my brother and of time.
How generation separate us slightly,
Ever so...

She nodded, having grown up in the ancient 70's, she said,
"The kids are fucking crazy nowadays! 
I guess that's life now though..."
Again she laughs. 
We're turning onto Center:
We pass Pacheco Bowl, the massive antique store, the two casinos, the gas stations...
But neither of our pilgrims notes these sighs...
Instead we keep returning to the talk of homes
That wait for us a little further ways through night.
She chatters, driving slow,
"Why, all the windows are so tall inside my kitchen!
And just too much,
Just so much light gets in!
My house... Argh, 
Why it always gets so warm in summer!"

- "I think that it's a good thing,
Just to have more light... 
The warmth...",
I muse.

And she grins out:
- "Yes, yes, I guess it's good to get so warm!"

Then, when we've just about arrived, She says:

"Ah, but look at all those cute racoons out there!"

And I see only shadows
Fleeing from the sidewalk
Into a dimly rosy underbrush,
But go recalling
In excited voice
That family of skunks
Who, just like ducks that, in cartoons, can cross the road in row,
Would walk in cutest lines sometimes
And never spray at us at all!
She laughs so hard.
And then we part. 
It is a Saturday.
And Easter's blaring from the calendar,
Uniting East and West.

I make some food and change,
Then think of you while resting in my bed....

I try to catch a calm dozed smile
And send it through
The flux of time and space
And thought and strain...
Then for a moment it would feel
Likely I succeed
And something does key in:
Again we're on that hillside -
April first -
Now it's a place beyond all flux,
And death, and birth.
And heaven/haven eases down upon the earth and sprawls unspooled
And seamless
Over outlines of all our disparate truths
And with some warmth,
Would wrap itself around the frequent distance of our souls.

I think of you some moments more -
I know that you're asleep -
I lay and wonder what you're dreaming of
When dreaming's deeper than the deep...
And wondering becomes a happy dream somehow, 
For I see brighter and more varied things
Than what you told me once,
When asked...
So I rejoice
While also getting sailed out
Into sleep...

Where peace in life
Is not at all some idle proposition;
Where work and will and thought
Are functions of the same Momentum's seamless motion
Which affirmations frame
With words and images that slowly
Flare into existence
Tomorrow's sets of calendars
And diaries of journeys
Which may be
Written in so many different hands,
But with a purpose and a passion,
Beneath the flux,
Still certain.