Walking Stick

The open gate may be the faint sunrise
or dawn’s violet shade on the long grass.

The way on may be the cracked asphalt
road by the landfill. Or follow the frog 
chorus echoed off the banks of the slough.

Welcome may reach you through that rosy bruise 
you don’t know how you sustained, 

                                                           by the current
coursing its fissure between hemispheres
behind your eyes,
                              

                               or on the sloshing
bloody bilgewater that’s filled the quiet
inside your ears.

                             The air might carry
a mix off the freeway, a river of messages
only a bottomed-out soul like yours can hear 

clearly in moments like this, like Joseph’s 
his hours alone in the pit, his clay 
enclosure a great instrument’s resonator, 

                                                                    so he knows
somewhere calls him from here. Even if
your house for now is a torn nylon shell 
in the scant shade of a disheveled eucalyptus

I’ve just sped by as part of the roar 
on the 110 between LA and Pasadena, even

though you keep trying to close your life down
for remodeling, maybe, a way—

                                                       a crow comes 
to know you, a kid with a walking stick tromps 
not too close and nods some days…in all this 
bramble of hiss-and-growl, a music.