Rediscovering my love of writing poetry has been one of my greatest joys in my adult life. I honestly thought I'd given it up, but I picked it up again in San Francisco and have never let it go. Poetry and travel go together exquisitely, I think, and nothing makes me happier than reaching a beautiful destination and writing a poem about it.
So here are some I've written in Nepal. They were written in a Pokhara bar, a cloud forest and a riverbank in the Annapurna range's foothills, a restaurant balcony just after finishing Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and in front of the the cremation ghats at the Bagmati River across from Pashupatinath Temple, respectively.
Music of the Spheres
Homesick for a world I’ve never been to,
and sick of having a body,
I stop at a roadside bar
to listen to the guitarist singing over a talking crowd.
Bubbles rush to the top of my drink
and it’s a cool night on planet Earth,
and the six strings move in time with the cosmos
and the points of energy in my back,
And I don’t know if the player knows
anyone is listening, but I hope he keeps playing
if only to keep the warm edges of the dream alive,
if only to keep me lulled in the arms of a summer night.
It reminds me of baseball fields,
reminds me of stars falling, and of all the nights
I spent playing my own guitar.
It reminds me of home
which I always miss, which is always here
in the invisible song always playing out
becoming matter, spinning the world into being —
Major to minor, the collapse of lungs and ice floes
The rise of a gaze, the end of everything
the song always playing on the strings that twine through every bit of the world
The song inside the song,
which all songs try and fail to imitate —
The laugh inside the breath,
the little crack in the corner of a dream.
Sea air rushing in.
Cloud Forest
In the sky
pearls of meaning
drift past the windows
in the projected world
of my mind
There is
a song in the moss
growing over the forgotten
voices and faces
knitted into this
melting earth
To be happy
feels impossible
and these little cracks
in the great machine
fade into the mist
and yet
The hills cry
with tongues of sweetness
forgotten languages
webs of birdsong
the mystery
lives
We live beneath invisible mountains
inside a soup of invisible stars
In the clouds
snow leopards hide
wild orchids pose
cicadas steam
and I taste sweetness
I should stop trying
to be happy
and just
be
There is no meaning
there just
is
River
Take me away from this mind, river —
I’m tired of the searching, the seeking
The never-enoughs, the never-good enoughs —
I want to be made clean and unafraid.
I cannot find peace anywhere I go.
I have never known how to lose myself.
But here, the waters hum and breathe
And the birds warble, and the wind rushes,
And I can imagine what it might be like
To no longer be afraid —
To float like the water across the rocky bed of time
Wheeling through the stars, back to source, back to sound —
To be like the gentle butterfly, the flitting leaves —
To know my place, to know myself
To move in time with the music of the world
To remember the tune, and to sing it.
On Top of the World
On top of the world there are
fluttering prayer flags and
skeletons and empty oxygen canisters.
In the Aegean sea there is a graveyard of lifejackets
and waterwings with Disney princess’s faces on them
on a desert island off the coast, next to a resort town.
In the silence I can hear the screaming
of plastic bottles, and mountains straining
under the weight of heavy gear, artillery, and oil.
They are building factories on the moon.
They are giving the machines sweet seductive voices.
The other side of the world won’t save me yet I run and run to it.
In our hubris to summit the moon
and to own and drain every inch of this earth
we forgot the last truth:
Now the flood is blowing in
and it will obliterate us from this precarious camp on our melting sheath of ice
and will make the world new again.
The flood is inside us now too
in the anxious whirling of ceaseless thoughts
carried in on an endless digital net
and in the vague sense that somewhere we lost the plot —
that all this was an effort to fill an emptiness
that was really a mouth we needed to breathe.
Holy Waters
Smoke on the dirty river
Time woven together on a loom of death and justice
A mysterious light in the sky.
What are we doing here?
What have we done?
I look at the burning world
And I see the whole wheel, a spider’s web.
I see the trash and the motorcycles
The ancient temples, the trees mushrooming above all of it
Clouds above them, birds above that
Who knows what else beyond?
Every one of our ancestors has died
We walk in their memories
Co-creating a world based on a collective agreement that this
Is not a dream, but rather is:
Just this, the benches by the river
Bodies burning, orange garlands and red flags.
Yellow raincoat,
Silver earrings:
Strangers, lovers in other lives.
Everyone here will die
Our children will inherit our promises and our sadness.
Barefoot in the dirty river
Walks the searcher, walk the saints.
Welcome to the world:
A filthy, sacred river
A celebration of death
A brief burning
And look, here come the dancers:
Here come the men carrying the body wrapped in white and flowers:
Out comes a crowd from the crowd
The same cry of the baby when it realizes it is born
Holy, holy, holy
Chiron on Lethe, Jesus on the water
Saints on the river
Praise, praise
This timeless rite.
This place I have always been going to.
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