There are immeasurable things.

I don’t care what science says;
as important and respectable as it is
and as important and respectable
as we must be in rendering to it
all of what it deserves,

there are immeasurable things
that long for a scale made
from dragon tears, or for tears made
from dragon scales; there are tales
that are true with no evidence of their truth
and imaginary mountains as daunting
as any solid range.  

Scoffers will tell you otherwise, of course.
Skeptics will snap and snipe you silly.
Ridicule for breakfast, scorn for dinner,
a diet of derision all day long
and pretty soon you will start to starve
from all the trash bile you’ll be consuming.

In the midst of that remember
that there are things worth holding
that you cannot hold and beings worth knowing
who will not manifest before you. 
Among the mountains you cannot climb
are valleys where you can rest
and the map you must use to get there

is undrawn, unprinted,
as solid as dragon scales
and as clear as the fog 
around the tops of those mountains.

You’re in the foothills now
just by reading this. If you think
it’s nonsense and you turn away
it’s nonsense.

If you decide to follow
it’s still nonsense.

If you follow to the end.
If you follow it partway.
If you take one step toward it
it’s still nonsense,
an immeasurable country,
a borderland where you might belong.

My day is breaking my heart.

In addition to 
sparrows and starlings,
downy woodpeckers
and nuthatches on the ground
below the feeders,
today I have welcomed
one cardinal, one catbird, 
and a grackle to the yard.

My day is breaking my heart.

All these lives dependent 
to some degree upon me,
and more appearing all the time.

My day is breaking my heart.

I don’t have any desire to chase away
the squirrel who is hanging now,
inverted, from the double cage.
A sparrow on the top of
the spindle bush, waiting;
can’t see any other birds
but they must be close because I know
if I bang on the window
and the squirrel leaps away 
they’ll be back in no time.

My day is breaking my heart.

All I can do is look out the window
and do my part when the feed runs out.
All I can do is wonder if I’ve ever done enough
and know deep within that I have not,

and that is enough to break my heart
once a day, every day,
a thousand times a day,

though I know the birds
will survive without me
and the day itself
doesn’t care if I die.

No vicious handful of pain,
no breakbeat shatter of nerves when I step,
no cautious calculation of what I’ve eaten, in fact
no need to calculate at all beyond 
deciding whether or not I’m full:

I imagine life before diabetes
was something else,
if only I could remember.

It’s like recalling life
before I was born.
I know it happened
but I was different then.
Another form. Another body.

I’m doing fine in most ways
but every time I cringe 
and twinge, each time
I blast the naked nerves of my feet,
every time I cannot feel
a bottle cap, every clumsy second 
when I manage to turn a knob by pushing through 
the unnatural numbness in the fingers,

I realize I cannot imagine anymore
the time when none of these acts 
would have registered
as momentous. 

Some say a city is a sin
and a farm is a blessing.

I know more these days
of city and sin, although 

I grew up near such graces,
spent little time there, knew them

only in passing from car windows
and bike rides. 

In my home town we had dairy farms
that grew corn to feed the cows, 

with farm stands built of scrap wood
selling vegetables on the edges of gravel lots

full of dusted cars and families
selecting just the right tomatoes and such.

Some of those stands worked 
by the honor system — leave your money

in the box, take what you need;
they weren’t robbed often, if you can believe it.

I promise you they were there, and they may still be there. 
They may still feed the people of my hometown 

and the small towns around it.  
I have friends who say they’re still there,

and I believe them no matter how far away
they seem to me now here where produce

is found only upon misting shelves in cold aisles,
or an urban farmer’s market once a week 

in a gravel lot full of people
from all over this city:

a blessing in the center of sin,
if sin it is. I will not call it a sin

although the dream of a farm
is powerful salvation when the asphalt

is steaming after a rain that falls
on ground that cannot grow a pure thing

if if can grown anything at all; maybe
a city is a sin and all the God there is

is only found out there in the smell
of fresh-turned soil. I don’t know.

What I do know is that when I hold earth
in my hand I feel something

I do not feel often here,
and when I do, I want to cry out

that I have missed this
for a long, long time now

and holding this
takes me somewhere close

to the blessing
I once called home.

Don’t care if you like me.
Poets don’t need to be liked.
Heard is enough, if you you want to help out,
but liked is more than we need.

As people, yes, we want to be liked.
But as much as we channel
people, people we are not,
sometimes being liked is extra, 
not critical as long as we are 
heard. Sometimes we don’t even 

channel people. We speak for stones
and bricks and guns and maybe now and then
a tree or two.  Maybe a bird, and we’re in this
for the evocative song or report from the barrel
and not for being liked.  It’s easier, you see,

if they think we’re angry or sad or messed up behind
their dislike of us when truth be told
we’re easily as happy as hell to be mentioned
or noticed instead of liked. We leave liking

to the politicians.  We leave it to those
we speak of: the wronged and saddened, 
the oppressed and dead and all the broken.
Like them if you want to like anyone
as we are the ones who should step beyond

the categories if we want to be true
to the calling.  For me at least
I don’t care it you like me. I don’t care
for your liking.  How shallow were my poems
if you even have an inkling of comfort from them?
How much did I miss
if you like me
for having written them?

A mockingbird just landed on the railing.
It stares through me as if I were not here.

I may not be here.
True, I may have passed through

and left a mark in the air
but that bird either sees it

and sees nothing worth imitating, 
nothing calling out for it to copy,

or it sees nothing at all.
We are three feet apart.

I am not moving. My body
will not move toward the light,

or perhaps light
will not fix itself upon me.

I sit in the shade
and the bird sees nothing

or sees me and does not care.
I hold my breath

and hope to exist again, differently,
when the bird is gone, if I have existed at all;

I feel like a ghost
or spirit honored 

by this bird’s disregard, so often
have I been an object of fear;

if I resume presence
upon its departure

may I remain less terror than landscape,
less threat than fellow being to all.