mike hiler poetry

                                        END                              Stone’s Source  /61            AFTERWARD  -  AFTERWORD      OPENING   I set the steel cage "live trap" to rid my chickens of death and nightmare and found, the next morning, the trap locked shut, the bait gone, and a tuft of raccoon fur along one side where she had pushed and pushed against an invisible weakness toward freedom. She found the open end, out past which this cage maker hoped to limit her dreams and end her coming and going.   The opening that draws us:   The child to the cardboard box to play,,, the cat to the paper bag,,, the fetus feels toward one exit only which will define it's warm liquid death toward growth.   Inside what container does each of us long to escape?  And who, for all this coming and going , knows any other purpose:   The opening, the invisible spot, out through which a lack of resistance defines for us our freedom. 62

    Stone’s Source, POSTSCRIPT  /60     Spires and Peaks, Ridges and sub-ridges,   shoulders and benches of exposed rock, spruce cones and dust, subalpine fir and dwarfed plants clinging to the places where Mountain goats hide and the goats themselves.   Bald nobs, and talus Passes and gaps.   The canvas was dirt and slope. The color grew out of sunlight as it arched over and blended throughout the day. The thicket was time, laid on in sheets, the story was all the stories that had ever been told.   Except for the one which the others forgot,   inside that cold morning, shared with memory.   60

                                        Stone's Source - Part #  IV  /56   I do not choose to glorify the inside of existence, nor its surface, or the hands of time passing into midnight or across other distances which also pass and which do not come back.   I do not choose to glorify the ways which ruin, in infamy, predates experience, nor the experience, nor the infamy.   I do not choose to glorify all that has been left here by the time of that instant or the balance of its return which is empty, or the way around its return which is cold or the way through its return which we all fear if we know it and ignore if we don't. That is not worth the glory of one voice in hope or the others without color or shape. They do not issue from the device of its form, and its form is like that when it visits stars or star-shaped stones, or the liquid orbs of space, which is glory                which is unmeasurable.   I do not choose to glorify the colors in their spectrum, the elements

                                                                                                                           Photo by Jo N. Miles   Stone's Source - Part #III      /52       Rather than glorify this or any day I would rather glorify the moment, the unfailing moment which surpasses us and which asks for no glory.   I do not choose to glorify the words which make up the stories told in hope and promise. Rather I choose to glorify the simplest stories, which end as through man did not tell them and which end as though there is no ending.   It is not enough that the glorification of the spirit must find form, or that the meddling of gods seeks shelter within the breast of people. It is not fitting that their heart finds glory in worshipping those gods, or that the very blood flows in the river at the alter of worship. It passes in the night, as the glory of those gods is hollow, that they speak in the acid tongues of the leaves of grass or the rustling of ripe rice, or in

                                                                                                                  Autumn, Western Larch highlights     Stone's Source, Part #II   /48   I do not choose to glorify the cadences of the mind which mirror the marching of boots on cold pavement, or the songs which cross borders at night, transporting fear.   I do not choose to glorify the tricks of the mind which leave the body in uncompromising situations across a landscape as bare as Golgotha, behind bars of conscience or steel, or littered across a landscape of fear.     I do not choose to glorify the colors which draw us, all of us, in our efforts to win or to control, or to steal, as the thief steals in us, away before dawn the imagination into bright shadows where we are strangers.                  I do not choose to glorify that which I understand years later, as age creeps through the crevice of pain, as the landscape changes because of our toil, as the response of earth to uglines