Plans

I’m always making maps

And drawing up diagrams

Of the changes I will make.

If I can see a schematic, I think,

I’ll be able to follow through.

I will make habits that will change me,

Get me into shape.

Try as I might, none of the plans

Look quite right, or have the best words

To address my situation.

So I take two steps forward and one step back.

And before I get discouraged

I remember that I’m not marching but dancing,

And that, as a matter fact, these steps

That are the same steps I’ve taken a million times before

Have never brought me to exactly the same place.

Music Being Unmade

Long ago and far away

When a tree was my friend

And the wind my playmate

I followed frivolity hither and yon

And never once wondered how long I’d be young.

Over the rivers and cities and moors,

Up the down staircase,

Across bare wooden floors,

I carried my babies and sang them to soothe,

I counted red apples, made rhymes, Stories too.

But none were as fine as the ones that weren’t mine

But belonged to the sea, the skies and to time.

Now I am silent as I sit in the shade, at one with  the music being unmade

All Is Well

Thunder, more felt than heard,

crickets and distant bells,

The pipes in the sound garden bump shoulders and let their songs go out into the world.

All is well. All is well. All is well is all they tell.

Billy Pilgrim’s Boots

They were handed down from my father’s father

and worn everyday

and slept in for fear of them being stolen in the night.

Actually, there was nothing to hand down except the thought

of a boot.

Crunching gravel and snow in winter and in spring

and tromping through mud in summer,

or slipping over fallen red, orange and yellow leaves in the

month before Halloween.

Walking on, ’round the circut of houses, I thought, “Its not far now,

it’s not far from here.”

I could see the green siding of the house from down the street, but no matter

how close I got, it was still not the right time/space zone

to call it home. The house was always under construction.

So I must trust in the wind,

the unpredictible wind.