I am distancing from where
I have been mile by mile
reading exit signs with names
of towns and villages that do
not call to me. Passing over
streams and rivers, alongside
woodlands and farmlands
I get closer to my heartland
where memories mix love and loss,
joy and sorrow, desire.
I am where I can hear,
“You’re almost there.”
-Byron Hoot
some stories are true
and resonate in the heart
with a vibrant rush
other tales are tall
and grow from our sleepy soil
to reach for the stars
ken ostrander
I said, “I’m nearly seventy” realizing
I was practicing for that day to say,
“I am seventy” without stumbling over
the language, the implications of time
and eternity, the certainty of apocalypse
after that last breath that exchanges now
for what’s next. It’s a number of gravitas,
of something more where less is promised
and the evaluation of what to do, to say,
to feel, to think makes the phrase “less
is more” a prophecy to be fulfilled.
Heartbeat and breath, sight and sound,
the richness of taste and touch, the scent
of that divine presence of someone fully
next to me are treasures enough to receive
and give away. “I’m nearly seventy,” I
say to myself; I think that sounds okay.
-Byron Hoot
It is a November day of gray ambience,
a slow sip of alcohol lasting the entire
day, the slow slippage of clothes sliding
down, crumbled, discarded until
tomorrow as the conversation sounds
like a blues riff of loss and love
and the laughter in-between hiding
the fear and hope of today not lasting
forever as now is whispered in caress
and taste, the liquored breath of love
exchanged as if a resuscitation for what
does not want to end, the lie the denial
of all time and eternity and how sometimes
you have to be nearly dead to be brought
back to love again. How slow this gray
November day moves, the snowflakes
falling the way the heart says, “And then?”
-Byron Hoot
The phone message began
with my first name so I
knew it was a stranger.
I thought, What if time had
slipped? What if I was being
given a chance to redeem
my life? Make other choices
than the ones chosen?
:
I thought of my family
and friends, those I love,
of all the stories, of where
I am and who I am,
waited for the message to end.
-Byron Hoot
The black bear was standing upright
by the stream contemplating
the calculations of arm speed, claw
quickness, the speed of the stream,
the fish moving, the way the water
distorts vision, the shadows
from the trees on the water.
Growled, “Sun’s in my eyes.”
waved as I passed by.
-Byron Hoot
I am wrestling with demons
whose family resemblance
is unnerving. I don’t know
if the dead have come alive
from pictures or if a family
reunion has been called and I’m
the last to know. But here they
are before me – the most
desirous and the least; of course,
the dead are dead and that’s
a problem for any appeal they
have to the living and why
the what has been always appears
demonic. There are few realities
that survive richly, untattered
into here and now, that eternity
which mocks all time
crying – “Look what has been!”
The words they lived their lives
by as empty then as now. I greet
them, give my response, “I am
that I am.” see ashes to ashes,
dust to dust crumble again.
-Byron Hoot
I wonder about the birds
who fly across
as I’m driving, swerve
underneath, appearing
and disappearing like shamans
in the twinkling of eyes --
unprovable and undeniable.
What worries me is how many
moments I’ve had like that
beyond everything except
the certainty that lingering image
of someone entering and not
re-appearing, that echo waiting
for a word that never comes
like those birds who fly
in front of me I see on one
but not the other side.
-Byron Hoot
