mike hiler poetry

    Shards  /13   The one act within which tomorrow could tell her story was just the beginning of the other stories she told, of the other stories she would live through to the dawn she knew so well. She was there to teach.   On the other side of the valley of time her friend yesterday lifts his drowsy head from the pillow of now, yawns sleepily and goes back to the dreams from which he came.  He knows too well the changes of chance.   Evening settles over this quiet town.  It also knows a tale or two, and the time when we will sleep doesn't even look up as she passes me on her dark way home.     13.   

  The Bathroom Door's Revenge  /12   Others have spoken of river's timeless flow, of waterfalls pounding the center of the Earth to sand, or the glory of a thunderstorm after it has reduced the wash job on the their favorite car to mud.   But I must marvel instead at PISS; passing through on the way from liver back to a sterile and salty past, or washing up a bar from Gall to test the organisms most sensitive nerve as it lays in wait for its opposite to turn out of,   Cascading through regularity over the spillway of what is enough of what we had thought would be ours for the taking.   Does the thunderstorm surprise? Does the heaving tumble of Niagara in any way remind man of his honeymoon with the diaper? Does the River never sleep?   But piss is more of a response than a question, like some nervous passing to a slower pulse, reminding us to liquidate the urge and to pour ourselves daily with feeling.   And what of that life and death str

  Metaphor  /11   The voice of the river names itself, then turns another bend   toward closing stillness; ocean's pine box where noise becomes music and sound becomes the dryness of loose leaves seeking a lee.   I felt myself flow then: the tumble in a kind of dream and reached toward the pool quiet grave   passing out of reach like a stick turning on the river  past out-stretched arms.    The river is a metaphor but so is the grave.   11.

                                                    For JN  /10.   Those furthest hills, because they speak, have known me from my sleep and now, as whisper, keep their promise of when we next meet and how we will be seeing each other then.   For me though, I must travel that Ridge and slowly turn the circle of its day out of the Earth for Sunlight and across Burnt sky for something new to touch.   With these words we speak, hill and me, and grow as mountains know the higher by being with them one and with them one of three. Photo by Jo N. Miles    10.   

      Once  /9.   The time has come and gone,   used wisely or not at all   doesn't matter.  That it was Mine, now spent, I hold what's left   past memory and profit.   Here with me now is that moment   of mind's one thought; the stillness,   the vacant. I lay down this pen And walk to that opening in a wall where beyond   my bed awaits.   Looking out at this winter I remember a   field of green, the brown to   turning soil and loosened sky, the sounds and smells, the darkened surface   swells, the moments fly.   To mind and time the meaning holds,   there where two worlds merge,   and thoughts for feelings join:   The gardener is they  whom a garden grows within.  All else to see and holds the rows                          as seasons turn and spin.    9.   

    The Singer  /8.     Within the path of reason a singer goes about that task from which there is no way out. This song, like other numerous sounds which issue from the Universe, speaks in tongues disguised as human concepts called nature, or children, or simply the quietness of any part of each day.   After the singer has forgotten the song, others will take their place, pick up where it left off, forge new ground on a stage of clouds and spit.   The horse in the stable, the low lying clouds of autumn, the color which speaks to hunters of birds or the birds themselves exercising a wing. These items of infamy catalog for humankind the usual and the unusual.   The singer and song join in thin resolve, the hunter and the hunted, their own audience, or simply sounds with no chord or discord.  And the reasons to sing, like the first cool night of autumn, stands alone to be unsurpassed. They are remembered in the logic beyond logic and for reasons which resolve the irrational and result i

        Question  /7.        Have you seen         that winding road,             we all have passed, seen,                 wandered?       Did you know it hot        its black            its one-way valley                 threshold hope?       Wander then,        see,           be there                 or descend its slope,       that       breakneck speed            yellow line                 destiny. Photo by Kristin Hiler    7.      

  A Day In The Life  /6.   When the eastern star rises   into the eastern sky   and those colors which ring the world   at daybreak travel on by,   from there to here before going on,   After the cock crows, after the wind     turns again the willows and the     one or two unknown creatures murmur the events of night   Followed by the first cautious   streaks of light. The long shadows   in the tall grass break their   favorite smell by this verdure and turning once through the heavens   gaze square-eyed into the blue.   There is now a single spot before     which all else heats past noon,     a darkened stone with no shadow And only for as long as the   afternoon grows that the body   of a million evenings will fall from   the sky and not return.   It departs more quietly than it   came, on paths of stone   and grass, in a basket   of clay and sand.   But now the world itself fades and     these streaks are known by night.   And night? Night has its own mysteries.    6.

  Clear and Subtle Mind                                                     Photo by Jo N. Miles Clear And Subtle Mind  /5.   There is one fact on which the Universe turns, unspeakable, unspoken, known through metaphor or the senses of rhyme and rhythm.   One view of that symmetry deals with the varieties of procreation in the hollows of life's landscape or the dark brooding Olga as she slides toward the sea.  Another possibility, (and only a possibility in passing) is the short and quaintly equidistant rhyme which spreads the canvas of her closing flowers and sky of red.   If from this soon forgotten, brightly colored lamp the diary reads itself, like the color blue looking up from the lake bottom, or the wetness of a much beloved frog in heat.   Beyond the infinite possibilities remains one which is not included, except as a secret unguarded moment among relations:  The cottage floor with its cracks and pegs, the orbicular now, the pierced ear lobe, the periodic.  And each to all

                                                                                         Surface  /4.   It shapes the surface of the stone, leading in all directions and away from self into a world too large to follow, and a place where the darkness grasps the closed fist.   Though the blind color of reason holds firm that door from which you might return through time and time again, adding once or twice the skilled architect of numbers in that valley of faceless but not nameless, homeless but not blameless others.   From the top of that huge rock the sunset spread in both directions and the sunrise was a pebble, caught in flight by the moment's reason and allowed, as a river is allowed, to fall and rise with the tide of stars.   Once again the impressions of a hasty retreat were left in the sand, were scattered to the four winds,  were interpreted in a context removed from which impressions gather dust along the shore of ten thousand lakes or huddled around that pebble   which you

      Deer Lake  /3.      A year ago it was the rain on my roof reminding me of the lives I have led,,, and the other places I have lived.   Tonight, on my tent, the same drops in exactly the same random pattern which never stops until I sleep,   seeking harmony. (also published in   Buckskin Larch   /2011)     3.