V. You have said the righteous is like a tree planted in a garden by a river. The world passes by and they wonder: Who are these that stand like guards of no gold?

They are silent. Then they speak but not words understandable to natural ears. They are still. Then they move as if by force. They are deaf, but silence is like hearing.

The world mocks, the world laughs: the world. But Your river runs from spring to ocean and in the slow and deep You are there.

The roots of Your trees emerge from the bank to take more urgently what nurtures them, and they lean out over the river, that to revere.

IV There, a shaft of light falls on a gnarled branch cut down some time ago and left alone. And, there, the river's shallows gurgle round a limb like a claw lifeless on the bed.

A tree stands pained from the loss of its hand like a man on a corner in a world of concrete and steel, bewildered by cars that pass and people who speak without talking

because the things he called his life are gone and unreachable. Though he grit his teeth and strain to get them back, still they are gone.

And in the garden the snake rattle curses for the Gardener comes to shape those He loves. But the snake will not find one leaf fallen.

They speak, these of the congregation,as the wind moves unseen when it comes, only heard as each one is touched by it, and looked for when it leaves the garden silent.

Then it stirs the maple, leaves like a wave under its touch rustle down words to stillness. The wind gone again, then appears below where, distant, the anxious elm flutters.

The bird stares down from limbs not her own. The rattle snake coils up and waits among the pruned branches and starving weeds

and parched soil sifts in from out like sand until the wind, gathered up, drives these gone and the trees groan among themselves and sing.

You have taken them from across the world.Uprooted from their native soil, planted in this foreign sanctuary, strangers by instinct, they grow together.

The Banksia Rose creeps her sinewed vines ‘round the rough branches of the ancient oak; the gray smoothed trunk of the Honey Locust patient behind the swaying Jerusalem Thorn.

Such coexistence not found in nature You make a habitat in Your garden that enforests, for on it no bounds are set.

Where once there was barren land, the elm gently ‘clines across the bamboo straight of the ground that resonates to the footsteps of God.

I. You have said the righteous is like a tree planted in a garden by a river. Your river runs its course from spring to ocean carving its slow and deep mark in the earth;

rushing its way through the wild lands, stone gorges and meadows painfully green; looping back and forth the valley like a string in frozen fall to the mouth of the sea.

Where the river is most deep and slow channels divert to water Your trees and surround them as far as they might grow.

They grow tall from Your care and their roots entangle for theirs is not to journey. But the world passes by scoffing under their shade

We were desperate to get out of the apartment,even that late in the day. Storms roved east, disillusioned gold miners headed back into the desert, and we rode under as far as the mountains until the pines were thick and the rain fell faucets between gapping lace work of needles.

Gray light deepened. Darkness crept down the ridges, grew in soft spaces amid the trees and covered the swollen creek its mad rushing- and the pool. The mist of the water fall raised its slow, cold heart to the rain.

We walked the paths along the creek and rain ran down our hooded coats. Cold undeniable forced us in. Squares of light opened out into the night and the fire touched our faces and our clothes- those that we finally shed to the floor to feel the waver of heat set free on skin. Did we finally know what we had been waiting to know all our lives? And now? When I shiver?

Thelonious used to call life and death play things.Rocking mirth on his knee, he spoke in dissonant bursts. He led us to the night sky lake where he sent out accusations to bob on havoc-rippled reflections of the moon and to float ashore to the line of us.

I watched him like a man watches the gauge go to end, gripping the wheel and steering though he just as well stop. It will stop here or it will stop there, and here or there are both a thousand miles from towns and borders in a waste of dry words split before and behind by a long black line.

Death is easy. It paints what it has heard of beauty and then describes the painting while shadows pool in its sallow cheeks. Death's words are severed hands that scratch and scatter like November leaves on cracked and gray, forgotten streets. Death hobbles down empty halls on broken feet, calling for the doctor with a bitter back to God.

Yet hasn't my heart found definition in words? None other than the tongue can lift up this confession: I stood with him by the lake pronouncing accusations until I became dizzy from the hazard alterations of light and dark, hypnotizing into memory with a permanence that seemed not to weigh on the others. Their words were tossed about to someone else's shore, but the wind brought mine to my feet.

Death is easy, yes, but life is hard. We struggle, my friend, and always have.

Your lover sits in the straight backed chairwith her old lady's shawl, draped over the green cushion, and her old lady's charms within her acoustic body.

Years ago you made those climbing notes in the dark halls of tall stone when the thousand associations held out palms of echoes and gave to thunder. You were the master facing his slavery.

Now, with the mysterious halls abandoned, with all associations left there and your mind forced into the words that people hang on for grace or for condemnation, your lover waits to speak. But when she does, will it matter what she says?

When I was asleep in the dark heat,A dove cooed and woke me. When I blanched with sweat on my sheets, A breeze stirred in the oak.

When I was lost for want of love, I had met her years before. When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I found her where she'd been.

When they despised me for a dime, They were hidden from my view. When they praised me for my works, I had changed very little.

When I drove that road ‘tween hills and river, I never thought of life or death. When he crashed in the tangle of trees, I was the man that drove him home.

When I was guilty and covering my deeds, The Ghost came hard on my mind. He directs the secret traces of my actions. He haunts the secret corners of my motivation.

A basket with a baby inside slides onto the breeze-touched river. Crocodiles swim hungrily in the sun. I was born into a world of doom, but for the wind, Which nudged me towards the gently bending reeds.

Narrow road scars high mountains.Green-yellow grass bends with the wind. We'll never know what lies tucked into the folds of trees.

We cut through the passes that hold themselves strong and wind down sharp into blind ravines, then back up, climbing slow like pilgrims on the steep angles of a foreign land.

Wood and wire fence stakes the rounded edge of some forgotten boundary. Gray, splintering posts have stood so long they can only stand still. We crest another pass and sink a little seeing the mountains to come.

The hardest part of anything is just before the end. All the hours and all the miles multiply their fatigue, but I know the sun will dim in the salt mist of ocean spray.

Narrow road scars high mountains. Green-yellow grass bends with the wind.

When the wind had blown against the smokeand cleared the valley, the sun shone its light unveiled until the storms came and rain relieved the blackened hills with the moist promise of green.

I believe I'm blinded by the things I've taught myself to see. The days, the dreams, the thoughts curtain my eyes while you search them for one sparkling attention. Then I wake to find the years of us you hold, not shown in age, but hidden for me alone; our youth's blossom not once taken, not had and lost, not dying.

That night lightning flickered over the foothills.Thunder clouds suggested rain and then denied it.

What terrain was laid down between us? And how? No two could ever maintain such a distance as in the rumple a sheet makes between naked bodies or the sound of promises rolled across the canyons or the flashes of erotic revealing only two people staring at opposite walls.

On the last clear day spirals of smoke stabbed the range and their plumes drifted south like signals of blindness.

The roads of Illinois are like the lines on Kathy's apron, straight but for gentle swells of land,

burnt like seared iron edges into the thicker fabric

of green forests and bending corn fields

all heavy in the heat.

Kathy works what she has worked,

rolling and cutting her world to existence.

The stove's continual heat keeps sweat on her cheek

that bonds the straying strands of fading dust brown hair to skin.

Sometimes she thinks the porch relief

and steps out to between the sheet of land and blanket of sky.

She toys with the hem of her apron,

but swears the roads she sees are so long

they can bear you forever.

Most nights I drink at Charlie’s.

He sits at the bar, and don’t think I haven’t seen him.

His reflection behind the bottles stares out at him.

At first he tried to look away, but it followed him like a gossip.

Now he listens with elbows on the grimy wood

and earth blackened hand holding up his tired forehead.

One night I was drunk enough to care

and heard it ask him about the fields,

the crop, the hell of not making it

again and again.

I swayed standing and wanted to tell him

his wife comes out on the porch and watches for a chance to leave.

I could see myself on that stool living the life of worn out jeans and dirty flannel.

God help me.

In Illinois the wind rides up the bellies of thunder clouds,

pushes through trees and shakes them into frenzied life.

It’s all fury and strain until the thunder comes and shatters into rain.

The struggles fades and the summer smothers everything.

I can only chose what I’m given.

Anything can fill me up, blow right through me and leave me vacant again.

The porch is empty.

I don’t see him at Charlie’s anymore,

and some nights I pray they’re gone as far west as the coast.

God help my beggar soul if Kathy ever looked into the field

and saw me watching, hands buried in the dirt, waiting.

It never comes like they say it does,

never sweet, never tender,

never cold, never dramatic;

like a Freudian, like a dragon,

like a light, like a ghost

or any other symbol

on the list of bad explanations;

never like anything you want,

never like a dream of soft flesh and never endings,

never like the conscious slips we make

after we’ve determined how we live;

never hard, never easy,

never clear, never muddy;

never any one thing we can say,

but always many things we can’t.

Clear day, mid-winter.

Cold wind blew up the ridge.

Hands in pockets,

I stared down at burnt ground.

It never comes like they say it does.

During the spring, the hills had flowered and turned green.

But when they came down from the north

through the pass in the mountains,

the hills had lost their life to brown waves of heat.

The barren valley stretched long under the hot wind.

She sat on the couch, small,

alone in the vacant room,

gazed at displaced objects

sitting like buds in crumpled flowerings of newspaper.

An empty picture frame,

a box still wrapped in blue and pink,

sympathy cards stared from among the scattered items.

Bare walls held no imagination

and objects no motivation.

When I come in

She has given up the couch

for a paper fan and a rocking chair by the window,

hand resting hollow on her stomach.

The dusty street runs through skeleton houses

constructed on untillable fields.

She gazes between street lights rising before their need

to beyond the hills.

Thunder clouds are forming over the mountains.

The folded napkin is exquisite over the saucer

with a corner of green counter top distorted through the glass.

The cup is half, and steam still rises above paper and envelope.

The words in ink move, elaborate

and state intention quite beyond

any corpse of thought.

The envelope has a stamp,

and on the stamp, a still life.

Two pears, one superimposed over the other.

In the cafe

conversations familiar from the centuries are told quickly.

An empty paper cup blows past.

Feet from somewhere scurry to catch it.

On the table of a night and morning life

is a summer’s collection of unopened mail,

unmailed openings, glasses that held liquor

and mugs that held coffee.

What is seen beyond this half-reflection in the window?

Movements of flesh, business suits and cigarettes.

But the seated mind returns to the reflection.

We never rode them, delicate machines that first tied the world

round with iron string and set life speeding

to its fever pace;

nor the cruel beasts

pulling loads through mountains unwilling

of tunnels blasted and long

where the beasts carried crews to suffocate;

nor the dining cars,

elegant to eat off china unique to the line

and search final shapes of a twilight world pass to night

and be forgotten under strength of electric light;

nor the box cars

that bore the dreams of harder men

from dust and famine to the farms of California,

men who never once gave to anger without they first

embittered the bed from which it rose.

No,

when we went it was Amtrak 3 AM

waiting while the town slept as if deserted,

and Billy stumbled from his truck when the train came,

having stoned his senses for the ride,

and rode the observation car, red eyes glazed at the dawning world,

and spoke of how stupid are sheep;

and Amber came on down the line

crying out of her boy friend into my friend

under the gentle mockery of the conductor;

and night again in the dining car,

hard plastic booths round cheap laminate tables

where Bob-with-hair-like-this played cards,

gave us tips on roller derby

and told us of the time he gave the finger to the devil;

and the long hours in airline seats

breathing recycled air in the dead of night,

wondering when our stop would come, or dawn,

and an unstudied for test in History on Monday

and wishing I could care at least about that

but only thinking to myself:

Matt has his license,

why didn’t we just drive?

This blog needs some poetry, which I am not competent to provide. Happily my brother is a fine poet, and has agreed to let me post his new series. Here is the first. "Everything I Need Is East of Here"

By Christopher Raley

The west is rich with golden dreams shining in our eyes,

and owners of our sight hang their houses out on cliffs

while waves continually blow and breathe

to crumble sand-stone and mix it red in rip tides.

I don’t need a house in a setting world or a screen,

flat essence, strong skin or frail bone.

I know a land where thunderheads stack into the blue

and charge you down like wrath over the lake.

You lock fear at the oars and when the planks start to snap

you know everything you need is where the sun rises

and the desert waits to bloom.