[Golden Shovels. Based on Imitation of Christ in October, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North in November. For source sentences, read the last word of each line, top to bottom.]

10/24

before the snow in the dark at the door head for the

sled and the long bright hill of saints

who glow like eclipses. full-to-warp of

momentum. there’s time before school for sluice. my God

how fast the night is motorcycling head first into morning, and

here comes planetary awareness of all

we can’t hold, all we’re held by. devout

for the moon, we huff frost into mittens: small circle or duad of friends

in comprehensive space ordered by the slash of

the waxed runners. good Christ

such speed, this life is a hill of nights

in the parallel and vanish of what we did

when we were not

ooking, what we look

at when we are direct, when sled carries us to

what we want, what

the ashed calories as the spent night pleases

releasing to the

breathing, to the body

of the eight-year-old who is neither in the moment in his years nor

other than vanished, a flexible flier shooting down to

the root of the first dark/strange unknown where the

hope for things unseams things

and: slowing to plain, now we who have seen that

trace is a math that can’t declare nouns and verbs, our moves are

vibraphone skin skin touch tones, our central soul now popular

in the slim sun-rose, rising to eclipse from

its own, other-side dark time

to come as seam to

the bus, the breakfast, the/our time

10/25

Apple out of the night. The accident of the body slices license to heart. Their

sonship, daughterhood, the whole

child holds from fall, faithful and lifted by hope

the way your breath taught my lips to praise and

your snow stunned diffuse autumn, training aim

to a focal, the temper of velocity centered

and on the move, on

the more. It’s always a good time for pie; now the

allspice and sugar break down, bake to the everlasting

smart of your slap-the-plate, molten, fissile-flaked good.

10/26

Child, sit in the ambulance and wait for Jesus. Skeletons in the snow. Their

bones – especially hand knuckles – flurry, whole

snows fold the swales, and desire

for you burs wings upsprung from the back, flight pointed

transverse, invisible gusts – their blank – bears you upward

from the stiff crepe of rippled banks to

the sun’s hidden kitchen; you know where your bread is buttered and the

care you owe meets your show in lasting

breakfast. Night soaks out our poisons and

the thin skin of invisible

lips kiss our thinness in the home-for-good realm,

and we are quiet lest

a move outside of healing startle up a word-strangle, a knot against the

promised breath, meting, silent reading out of love

for what is strong in us, the apocalypse of

a sailing dying into what

was a horde and is

now a floating trunk, expired of all visible

stock of broken boots and stitch-sprung wool. Tide-drag

and wind-push, snow, seasons, weather them

out and swallow them down

as swallows, the birds, scour blues to

rise up out of lower

worlds and change our objects to things.

10/27/22

Burst of salt when you bite the heart of the gutted fish: what you do

when soul carp comes fluttering parabolas in your hands, not

to pledge the elastic soul to crisis but so as to lose

everything and tear it all down to the salt of the heart,

so when you know by body to what your goodness aspires, so that then,

we may be children again my brother,

fish guts popping in the campfire. We take in

the wiry knife-light as starlight, pursuing

a new probe of death with your

dreams in our head, by spiritual

fishing brought around to this good fall’s night-life.

10/28/22

Wolf bones crawl out of a wolf, turn to fig tree in the wolf-coat grey light. There

in branches, this time of year, weather’s map plays instead of fruit; the leaf’s arena is

a stir of cold space. You hit the tree with a stick, not yet

safe and out of time;

the wolf-gone-tree, its upward gun bluing, sheens the lasting status of a frightful thing and

where you turn, and when you turn, forest still forest, the zones of what she said, have your

back and nothing can quite catch you in the whirl hour,

out of control. Spared for. Come home to me, she says, this is

not a journey, you are not

a lost pilgrim and the time for lush risks on this broad order is past.

10/29/22

We go through three pans of food before anybody knows why

this is all about dancing out of nowhere, but we want that wedding day feel without delay.

Cling our boat to your ocean, our wind to your

sea, certain, without tension, a horizon is made of touches. On purpose?

10/30/22 [lone source word: “arise”]

When you wake up it’ll be Halloween.

Your friends won’t know you by ghost.

Sheet, eyes poked, peep goat-gentle.

Ghost, your head an immaterial bone

angled to hold prey-animal eyes.

You have not lately been able to say if you

are the kid of you playing ghost or

a ghost that forgets what-all dies.

Do not traduce the dead they bank the

will to eulogy.

The night’s natural tune is reville and

these showy horrors are the heart-

silent song, the telltale pulse that

draws you back through the

mind’s hurt zones

to see again (a ghost has no rods, no cones).

A throat or dolphin hums to your drowned ear: arise.

10/31/22

Begin: Joseph as a young man, Joseph as a boy, now’s a how and when to: begin –

at Mary at 11, at

once, at three, all these hands, at once

and with fall deliver late gourds to beauty and

say nothing, when in the dark morning the freeze and houseless cat say:

“Now the rough matches the mild. Now

is your move through the dead’s day, the giving way is

the build out kind of kindness, is the

time of wildness, the time

to redact, to

act out and out, unbeheld and unbeholden, to act,

now for the sake of the spiced pie and the invention of the dog, now

is a match struck against the jeans not even for the candle but to see that the candle is

the hospice worker for the chilly dark, hand in hand with the

time that holds back knowing that to show is to withhold nothing, time

to cross the field to the mill to

fight throwing apples, the scent of the whole fruit, breathe and fight,

now that a season’s practice, chancier than chance, on purpose/without will, now

that now is where your memory is

the wind through the

proper door, absent door, at a proper

time, now’s not the time

to count but to

amend, a poverty-edit to local zero, October’s end, harvest’s chop, amen, amend.”

11/1/22

Coffee cools and the red coil blacks. Kashima

gust, saint-swipe, then walk again, gravel the sound of ink ground for journal

pages cured with salt. The moon, early, swells past half, cherishing

dark and loving light to the

edged insight of frost’s

fungus-root memory that ripples: breath under a forest of

great, forgetful trees who, ready, before sun, relearn the heliotrope from scratch on this

harp of a deer-path, mile-mile for the follower

into a north of

jessant red on this side of the

keeper’s peak, over to the poetic

lucence of Tijeras Preserve. Roll under and in the spirit,

meal of wanting, I

noun the fast slip where specificity without haste was just resolved,

opal on the hoist chert. Resolve to

pilgrim up the coiling switchbacks to see

the queered sky and back up the

route never yet innocent of the moon

that shines envoy over

the scene of the

useful nearly-winter mountains.

Vert earth to uproar of

Wishes.

Hey Kashima, xerophilic in the salt, shrine

your yes out, on purpose but without will, right on this

zilch of apprehension, this caustic, this autumn.

11/2/22

Empty as a pot these last few months

and weeks and now minutes are strays on graves and

move a hole deeper down days

into hungers and thirsts heretofore un. Here are

the neighbor’s twins asleep on the shoulders of the

rk a.m. The pre-dawn studies and teaches our names, out with wayfarers

on this chilly road of

clay across the state to a

rodeo posting old 94 and a hundred

bottles of beer on the wall; marshalled generations;

the spectrum rises yellow on up from the

mountain, from the years,

finding thirst hunger water and food too,

bottle rocket arc of shine going

parable back down and

the beaver-red-moon’s coming;

the Christmas and the Lent are

too. We rocket, revolve, we red moon: wanderers.

11/3/22

Over by the

grocery the monk,

bowed, still, was

listening, dressed

as she dresses and the free-will choir ad hoc there dressed in

patched flow per clouds alike in the way of robes

/swung gray and black

modeling cold, as

the huddled singers, twenty deep, each with a

folder full of sheets chimed fit to quiet the crow,

catch-breath and charm holiness with

melody stripped to the bone, congruent, each a

tuner’s tongue dipped pollen from the true note to pouch

in the synchrony of our listening, while waiting for

for the train. They walked the few blocks for Pepsi and chips, and stirred to a sacred

mill this sound, making us all one bent monk, objects

consonant with their concentration, hanging

the weight of our hearing from

the vine-soft stalk of surrendered will. Conductor folded his

lips stretched his neck

piped then sang “ready” and

we finished the verse, in an

act against the train’s horn and the tracks forever diminishing vanish. An image

arranged of

yellow leaves blows around the

head of autumn’s Buddha

and they still sing, singing gone, the sun descending

back of the

generous keep of the mountain

that the sky placed

right there, reverently

swallowing time in

an act of good faith for a

cabal of portable

lace-frail patched and rippling polyphony that turns Silver Street Market to a shrine

dedicated to the one bird on

the one same note the monk hums in company, in her/his

thousand-year tone. Back they’re gone they never come back.

11/4/22

Sky so thick and low all I want to do is listen to Link Wray with the phone off

singing la-la with fuzzed throat, slinking hip-swung the way he

threw each chord downstroke to hell and disordered us splayed, spent, strutted

and born, memory thumping

like contraband in the trunk of his

Thunderbird, thundercat, thunderwolf. He mashes his staff

against Meribah one last time, each of us alone

and even nestled, powerchords in

rapid development up into the

freezing anticipation of the last bever the universe

will pour out red, no

mornings left, or none we want to learn to play once we’ve played to rattle barriers

down to fuel for forge-wet secrets kept between

me and you, you and me I’m telling you, links between us and him

and those candle-pause clouds. Friday at the

rodeo and they let the bulls amble gateless

through the arena, out the arena, back up mountains. You are the gate.

11/5/22

Floor mopped, coffee down, I

am, I am not. Put Joy Harjo’s No Huli on the record player and however

you look at it: out of the dark, day will slip and hit first speech, antemeridian am,

and the tree grows out the center of the table of the spiritually poor, neither

fig nor plum, thickly sapped, molasses in flow even on so cold a

morning, neither dark room or sky, open as a monk

or vinyl spun centrifugal, circle flung dark, and wind nor

rain nor groom of night a

waker, forgiven and charged, a coffee man

in the crow-rupture sleek of

heavy o’clock, the

record of the world

is a renunciation groove I

can Fleance to, when “be” always could

whirr to wheel. Cloudy all day yesterday, today will be

cloudy too. That’s what a day’s called

when it’s dutiful, takes on the order of castling ions up a

staff, across a clef, notes sung loose trackless as a bat—

finally weatherless in

original space, between

the finger and a harp, between a

tried bird in kyu barely fillip to a branch and

the lightning diagrams a

wild sentence. This light fall to last speech, “was,” and climbs home quiet as a mouse.

11/6/22

Like allspice for cinnamon, trade out life lost for life ongoing in

a recipe that calls on the wild-fried and the

deep-sweet. Savor with memory tongue early

enough to remember the dream, a dream strong enough for afternoon,

the one where Lori writes Belongo and Jawole dances it in the rain

in the summer right when that cold fall began

to turn our backs from youth to

mom who cracks her hip with small fall

and mends and falls and mend in dreams, dancing incessantly.

I wouldn’t have drunk that soup with the bees in it

if things were really what they seemed

/and if we
didn’t believe, together, that the buzzing, dark dancing radicles of rage had

inished enough honey for us out there in the worlds waking lost

through nonchalance of maker’s move. On any

given morning, in the castle of any safe afternoon, there’s the chance

that yearning – in stew or pie with ambush of

your mentorship – will show what we’re seeing

now: the incessance, the impossibility of the

slow-to-round Beaver Moon.

11/7/22

Reach for the cup; nothing there. I

wear my winter hat at the kitchen table, set

the Bakelite timer, wrack to thirty, keep an ear out

for disasters in near rooms and microscopic riot on

up into Zion night. I set down what I can to get out on a

trail of cardamom-rich dust, a journey

that kicks through wait-time’s debris, leaf-trash that blows the acre in the middle of

ten-years-prayer; a

trance pattern of a hundred thousand

footprints disappears into the silence of your heart. Triple A, double A leagues

and anyway, the game of home; were packing

a valise with forget-me-wills, no

breakfast till the timer zings. Light: moonset provisions.

11/8/22

Try to try to lift it/tore/I

/tangle in shirt force torque where we leaned

/were two brooms in a clean room on

the beaver moon, that chalk house where the

looters hid loot and fled; the neighbors picked it clean, swept it out; you take your staff

and hobble up the ice light of

a day untrustworthy and gray as a creative site on an

unnatural coax of a warm day, new leaf on ancient

fig and sharp of sawn pine. You are sent a love of work from another old person who,

it turns out, is married to you, and who, it

turns out, is

steady on the shirt button. I remember you said,

“Christmas,” right as we entered

the vapor off the boil of figs for a pie and crossed into

nothing but life itself, that love of work, a nothingness

pie, not sweet but from sweet under

the eclipse of the moon after the

harvest moon, the fig-dark midnight

of the now-so-near frost moon.