INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS 2: EARLY MORNING I sit with you just before morning You seem not to be person but silent presence Filling the room like air Or the invisible mist         on an ocean morning         cool against my cheeks The warm light of the candle flame Pushes back the night and Calls the waking sun just below the horizon The hands in my lap come together instinctively --         thumb against thumb         palms resting one on another facing the sky -- A circle For a moment I allow my life As the tree outside allows the fall Friend, I don't think I've said thank you enough

UNIVERSES One by one newly discovered solar systems populate our celestial metropolis; they click on in our star charts and imaginations as the stars themselves flicker on in the approaching night. Scientists debate the chances of life on these distant globes hugging their own suns. Are we alone, unique? Or is life -- stranger than we can imagine -- easy, assembling its molecules from the fertile soup of heaving oceans and weaving clouds, the order of protein and DNA asserting itself like a universal law: their fragile, spiraling strands replicating themselves forever, if allowed. Does this cosmic instinct drive itself into consciousness like ours? Do others, light years away, see and know they see? Do their lives count for anything, and does a God watch over their fate? Where, I wonder, does this leave me as I sit a few moments this quiet morning alone, and ponder my own life, so minute and so magnificent?

BEING HUMAN BEING The answer for angels is not enough, the earth of flesh and death and love has its own law and its own joy Praising God is done in a body, supple and fragile, part of the same fabric that nurtures it and takes it back in the end. Our common human bond runs through the pain of birth, the longing for the mother's safe arms, the father's brilliance and security, the independence of the first steps, the first "no" It winds through dreams of what could be, attended by satisfaction and disappointment, the inevitable losses and gains that challenge and sustain the waxing core The path traverses the fear that shakes our inner cosmos and the hope that arises yet again as each breath This precious human birth is not easy sometimes its only support is sheer inertia, the unconscious wisdom of the stomach with its churning acids extracting what we need to live, the ceaseless pulsing of fluids through veins and tubes; survival and endurance inscribed in every cell But then there is shattering beauty the mouth shaped by awe, the eyes glowing in wonder, the heart springing into blue heavens even as it descends deeper into the core. The ground of this earth is what is shared, our species knowledge, the birth, love, joy, hope, fear, sorrow, loss, death, the wisdom and foolishness that are our history and destiny Our song arises from this ground to the angels and our God above to the earth and our God below to all who come this way, our ancestors and children to all things animal, vegetable, mineral to the ones beside us and the ones we miss, to the ones easy and hard to our Mother and Father God and what is beyond. Surely no song without the notes -- just as surely no notes without the song To sing our lives, smaller almost than nothing To sing what is larger than all size To sing with depth and joy because we have no choice but to sing.

A KAYAK ON THE HUDSON Each stroke sends a tiny whirlpool down the river's flow, the water turns a moment inside the funnel then returns to the unbroken brown-green stream. A spring breeze glides along the Hudson water's face, slides south with the current, over the ocean tide pushing north up to Troy. The double headed paddle slices the water right and then left, with a small twist of the wrist – right and then left – a familiar ordered pulse ticking the morning hour away. I watch the kayak floating lightly on the water with hanging white clouds above: I know my life will end, and my children's, and their children's too. I know this flow will continue as it did for centuries Before we thought this earth is ours. I imagine ancestors I share no blood with -- my relations, still -- who took time from fleeting lives to sit by this river, to feel spirit quickening April trees again before turning toward home.

KIN Bright yellow dandelions stretch toward the light, the light shining bright on spring leaves, on new white flowers in the undergrowth, the sky, a blue emptiness -- the wayfarer travels through fully in the scene -- the flaming green caught by sunset in the distant meadow, the silver-blue Hudson River flow moving south with the wind, a bird calls out of the stillness: everything discloses itself, its own unique song words cannot conjure sight of this but the heart can hear the closeness of kind, can feel in itself the branches of the white birch overhead feathered green and fluttering, the red-winged blackbird

UNIO MYSTICA: THE DARK NIGHT My love, be patient with me and wait; I don't want this time to end -- I love this passing moment, I love this bitter-sweet pain I refuse to surrender, I love these tears that Buddhas never cry. You insist and pull me toward you, into the solitary, motionless night -- so dark and sweet, and so terrifying -- but I rise to flee back into bright time, my second home. Like all nights we have met together -- aroused in the thrilling rhythms of two in love or finally still in the sleep of union -- I know this night will turn to light again, as I know this dark heart of all light never moves. My love, you are here now, I would fuse with you in a perfect embrace, I would vanish with you in the dark flash of final delight, between memory and expectation. But, my love, something in me doesn't want to die yet; I want to prolong this deepening twilight, I want to marvel at our exquisite disguises of lover and beloved a while longer.