by Alan Harris
1990
I cry out into the silence to let me hear it.
No reply but silence.
|
Free PDF download of this entire book: Blue Sky in Buckets in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (21 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
Blue Sky in Buckets
|
I asked the blue sky today why people suffer. It must not have known, for it just stayed blue. I asked my friend why people suffer. He said because they try to stuff the blue sky into their little buckets and fail. But the blue sky comes all the way down to the ground. It fills every bucket that's not full of something else already. So how do we not suffer? Just dump out our buckets and breathe easy. No stuffing necessary. |
PDF for printing
Commuter Queries the Sun
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
My trusty train hauls me orangeward from this 5 o'clock plastic city into an on-time sunset. Fried-egg friend, over easy in the wispy west, innerly whisper me what you are. A star? Yes, but are you a you or merely a major it? May I commune with you in the hollow of my heart? Dissolve shallow knowledge? Understand you? Humbly may I harvest your richer spectrum than my life in the office offers? If I knew you, would I be you? To reach your light must I groan with long effort and escalation? Or simply relax with easy exhalation? Unanswering, you fold the shimmering cloudy whites around your blazing yolk and drop away. Breath of good night is felt below my horizon. Suddenly I see you shooting aloft for thirty seconds a brilliant vertical shaft of orange as if to acknowledge we know we know each other. My train trundles on. |
PDF for printing
Stray
|
As I gaze nightward at our volunteer chandelier of stars light-years away (each point a twinkly memory of a light that was), a white tomcat approaches me like an old friend and brushes my pantleg, crying up from the snow as if in hungry agony. I fetch some dry cat food, pour it into a Styrofoam tray on my porch, and watch him dine with great crunching. My eyes in the blazing sky again, I drink measureless ancient light into my emptiness as a gift from the magnificent All-of-it. Is our future in the stars? I laugh aloud into the night air, feeling the moment so mightily I care little for any answer. The speckled black overhead ocean absorbs my laugh with dignity while the white stray, finished with his meal, wipes his chin on my pantleg. A universe above and a cat below circumscribe my being in this delicate wintry instant-- love coming from both ways. |
PDF for printing
To My Wife
|
Your glance is beautiful when I muster the calm courage to look you in the eye. Your voice sounds like a symphony when I listen to all of its overtones. Your heart sings like a canary in a cage, heedless of supposed captivity. You light a candle behind my eyes which illuminates my gloomy mind. Together we plunge down this life's waterfall, two drops on our way to the sea. We will not forget these days nor want to. Our love has no relation to time or place. We love. |
PDF for printing
Saturday Walk
|
I am nothing. I walk my fleshy shell along the street, seeing the squirrels at play and hearing the early spring birds. No, I am not invisible yet. This body has size and mass and cruises well on automatic pilot. Any bird that cares can see me. But the breeze whistles in my ears as if I were hollow, and that's how I feel--ecstatically hollow-- here for now, but empty of place. I am the neighborhood today-- I am the sidewalk, the bare but budding trees. I am the children on bicycles and skateboards. No iota in me stops or diverts the fresh flowing of life. The sun shines straight through me, and I like the cool feeling inside. Monday in the office I will be something again. I will have a title and a salary and a desk and a boss. Mondays must perhaps be. Deadlines, crises, meetings, phone calls-- all these may have their place. But walking now outdoors, I drift along free and empty. Nothing can touch me when I am nothing. |
PDF for printing
To My Body
|
Dear dundering obedient blob that I have lived through these 45 years, have I ridden in you or have you ridden on me? No Solomon could ever distinguish us-- your actions me, your pains me, and you me-- but I somehow not you. There will be a sacred day when you fold your way into the earth as I slip freely into the air as much alive as you dead. I thank you deeply from inside for long service as my antenna into a tragic comedy program I almost dare enjoy. |
PDF for printing
Library
|
Books of mine, silent friends on the shelves, rows and rows of spines erect, ready for reception. Plodding through the pages of these friends, will I find any life? Any electricity? I find concepts built upon concepts built upon concepts, traded and stolen and borrowed and twisted from one to another until the cows drink milk shakes. My friends in rows are corpses in a mental mausoleum. I wish them well in their neat slots, but I must live awake and alive and alert and aware. Thank you, my friends, for the memories, but mother moment jerks me to attention. I will sing the now into the here until I join you upon the shelves. |
PDF for printing
Letting Go
|
March rattling the windows and thoughts buzzing in my brain keep me from dropping into a Sunday afternoon nap. Outside, the musical moans of swaying trees rise and fall, and a persistent branch rubs on the shingles above. Sinking now in spite of the noise, I drift down through my senses toward the silky bliss that beckons below. Just at the point of falling free, I hear a windy crescendo play catchy rhythms on the window panes again. Allow me my nap, dear windows. I am swaying with the trees. Let me fall into the source. Let me fall.... |
PDF for printing
River Pair
|
We spend a few sunlit minutes by the river between wafting willows above and the sea-bound twinkling current below, watching two ducks quack and dive for food. We have learned to be quiet, letting the silent breeze of love sway us together in spirit like these oscillating cattails near the bank. Younger, we captured each other swimming in a marriageward current of living water, not knowing quite who we were nor where we were bound. Older, we have danced a lively jig, stubbed a toe, raised a child, blindly hurt each other, healed each other's wounds. As we sit here and mirror the present to each other in quaint communion, gazing at two ducks gliding downstream, there is nothing at all to say or do. |
PDF for printing
Humid Evening
|
I finger gently the meshy steel diagonals in our manufactured backyard fence as lightning bugs dazzle a slow-dance in the swimmy summer-wet air. The therapeutic pendulum of a breeze-driven willow branch entrances me, and merely glancing at our telephone pole mutely poking into the yellow setting sky flares a human fragrance in me. Grasp me by the arm and try to feel my feelings if you can, as flimsy and confused as the evening sounds reflecting about our house and joining the silence of grass. Praise the Lord of Emptiness as evening's first star suggests its way through the stratosphere, retinas all over the city tickling with its improbable light. Breathe the whole slippery sky with me. Kings have died failing to acquire a splinter of our well-being. Look at the grass and the fireflies and the fence, all swimming in a soup of quaintly offered love from some source unknown despite knowers. |
PDF for printing
The Child
|
Hello, little man, what are you doing here?
I just want to have a part in your life. What would you like to do? I would like to play and laugh. How would you propose we do that? Just throw everything up in the air sometimes, and let it all go. No, we can't do that. It wouldn't be respectable. Well, I want to play, and you won't let me. OK, then, let yourself play a little. I'll look the other way. I'll play over here in the corner with my sand toys. Who are you? Why are you in here wanting to play? I'm just somebody who is here like you are. We're here together. Would you like to ride on my shoulders? Yes, that would be fun. OK, up you go. Now we're really high, aren't we? I like this. You have to sit still. I can't hold you if you're wiggling around. Wow! This is fun. Why don't we do this all day? I might get tired. Besides, what would people say if I had you all day? They might say you were having fun. Yes, this is kind of fun. Let's do this some more. Now you can put me down. That's enough fun. Who are you? You look familiar. I am you before you got respectable. |
PDF for printing
Hot Date or Soul Mate?
|
Your gaze Betrays Your dip Of lip. I know The flow Of thought You've bought. Your eye Won't lie. Confined Behind Your mask, You ask, "Won't you Be true?" Nor I Will lie-- I'm true With you. |
PDF for printing
Through the Center
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
In the humid stillness of this August afternoon I watch a spider spinning its web in the ceiling corner above what some may call my deathbed. Is there a faint whisper? I hold my breath to hear it. No, no sound at all-- a silent eight-legged dance on the wallpaper border, a twirling in air, a catching on a thought. Share the secret of your web's design with me, fellow spinner in space, and I'll reveal it to mankind in homely phrases, given a few more days on earth. Fill me with your simple wisdom as I lay complexities aside. What is this long-lost feeling? As your web takes flimsy form, my room grows dim, then dark-- this air will not be breathed. Some force is kindly lifting me to your delicate ceiling circle that I may venture through the center toward our one and only Light. |
PDF for printing
Doing What One Can Do
|
Mostly the world thumps as it revolves, like a tire about to blow out bigtime. Some little place on earth has an owie that nobody will kiss, an owie that throbs and stinks. Will someone please kiss the latest wars? Just a couple of smackers to make them feel better? Would you, YOU, kiss something that rancid? Or will you just ride along in your body, reading your newspaper and saying "I'll be darned"? This world needs a gigantic, resounding kiss that will echo down the centuries as the turning point at which mankind dropped its murderous mind and gave and loved and gave and loved some more. My lips are pursed to give this kiss, but where should it be administered? Where is the world, indeed? Where is mankind? These easy questions are as profound as Zen. My heart wells up with unconditional love to heal and cure and save and mend, but there's no world to kiss, no mankind. Ignorant of my good intentions and holy purpose, the world goes on thumping like a terrible tire while I and a million other do-gooders fail to kiss its lump. "Let the world be the lopsided world," my head whispers to me. "The world chooses perfectly what is needed for its growth, and so do all the people who are in the world." But letting what is be what is is too wrenching for my heart. Call me whatever you wish-- I now plant this giant smacker in the air so that Earth and I may groove aright among the silences. |
PDF for printing
Ride
|
Commuter train bears between the wavy irons most precious cargo. Passengers talking, sleeping, reading newspapers, eighty miles per hour. Unique life stories glowing within these bodies filing toward sunset. |
PDF for printing
Parting Words
|
I soon must leave this earth. What would you ask of me, young man? How shall I live my own life, oh dying man? Live so that you energize each day. Give some small gift to humanity every day. Love the child within you every day. What is your way of finding truth, oh dying man? Truth is seen, not found. You may see truth in the center of your head as pictures on a screen. Truth is not the pictures, but truth is in the seeing. Be wary of memory pictures, for they fade and distort. And observe the impermanence of hopes and fears, which rise and fall like waves on an inner sea. To see truth, just look--now, now, now. What should I know about love, oh dying man? Love, as a word, has been to the heights and the depths, so trouble yourself little over knowing the word. If you know the beauty of a blooming daffodil, the magic in a young woman's gaze, the thrill of seeing your first child, then you know love. If you give a gift to someone, then you love-- not the gift you buy at a store and wrap, but a living gift of sharing, of nurturing when most needed. May God bless you, oh dying man. I now must depart, but I shall see you again through other eyes. |
PDF for printing
|
Previous Poetry Collection: Echoes of the Decalogue (1990) |
Poetry Home Page |
Next Poetry Collection: Inward in Words (1990) |