sweat stinging blisters,

hole in the crankcase,

tarweed, ammonia, oil cloth, lye,

piss running on dust before it soaks in.

True Account of the Saucer People

I was just hoeing up some peas

when this flying saucer landed

and these forces got out

(I call ’em forces ’cause you can’t see ’em

but you can feel ’em there with you–

heck, that’s real hard to explain)

anyway, they started talking, not in our words

but understood in the English lingo

right away in your own head

(geez, that’s even harder to explain)

and one was cussing the other out

I don’t remember exactly

but something like, “You dummy,

you always land on some cracker-ass farmer–

now go get the relativizer

and blast him down to safe time,”

and this other force yarded out a contraption

that you could see, looked like

a blue metal circle inside a silver metal circle,

only all throbbing and a-humming,

and this contraption took a dead bead on me

and ’fore I could even think to run or duck

damn if straight off I got feeling

tireder than a plowing mule at sundown,

and though I started right out

it’s took me two weeks just to get here to tell you

and I ’spect they’re gone by now.

About Time

1

Oh, the jewel in the lotus, ahhhh.

Right now.

Joy in the heart of the moment.

Right now.

The heat of the moment.

This instant.

Blossom of the moment.

Time is a sphere

and the moment right now

the still center

through which everything flows,

a raft meandering with the river,

an easy ride for angels of the Tao.

Always now.

Before you were born,

after you die:

now.

2

Time runs through angels

like rivers through canyons.

Of course, angels may only be

the space between the river

and the canyon rim,

the emptiness left

after water erodes

what was there

away.

3

My brother Bob

was no angel.

Bob’s dead now

but I remember him

like a river in a canyon,

and probably because of the constant pain

he lived with from a ruined leg,

he took refuge when he could

in the blossom of the moment.

I remember one night,

having finished

his seventh spliff of killer,

he nodded and announced,

“Screw the past.

It already happened.”

Rivers don’t run backward.

You remember the river maybe

where you crossed it,

or where you stopped for lunch

at the falls in late spring,

but you remember it now,

the blossom of the moment,

and if I have tears on my cheeks

because Bob isn’t here

to remember it with me–

the flash of the kingfisher,

the banded cream and ash

of alders shivering in the downstream breeze–

time doesn’t stop–

the river slides through the canyon,

pools, falls;

and Bob was right

the past is over,

done, gone,

but I’m not sure,

a sob caught in my throat,

whether I’m the one