In Praise of the Water Cooler

How am i different
From the water cooler?

i exist to refresh and replenish;
In the end, i am emptied.

Even at night, the doors locked,
The hallways frosted with the
Light,
Comforting and impersonal,
Of the overhead fluorescents,

The cooler is ready, vigilant,
Frosted with the perspiration
Of constant effort.

(The workday is no different
From the quietest night --
Existence and service
Know their own rhythms,
To which we are blind.)

Perhaps i am more like
The cup that nourishes me,
But the pattern is the same:

Filled,
Drained,
Emptied,
Discarded,

i go on in an infinity
Of droplets
that refresh, replenish
And rise again.

--Mr. Gobley

The Fallen Nest

My steps were directed to it.
There were two baby birds
And a fallen nest on the ground
Beyond the parking lot.

The flies were already making fast work
Of the nestlings.
And as for the mother --
Already moved on, i suppose,

To thoughts of more eggs,
Another nest.
There is grief but no lapse,
A pause, but no waiting.

It is best not to dwell on
The precarious.
Better to do, and make,
And make do.

By Monday, the nestlings will be gone.
i will, i hope and pray,
Be reading
And breathing
And being,
And ceasing to be.

--Mr. Gobley

In praise of rain on my office window

The highway whispers,
The trees bow.

The world is in every drop;
Every drop is in the world.

The sky throws liquid confetti down
Behind the pictures of my family.

Green and gray are the only colors;
Water and earth are the only elements.

For a moment -- this brief moment --
Sustenance is the order of the universe,

And fear is soothed
By the unguent of plenty.

--Mr. Gobley

Ode to a young apple tree

You were born:

As an immanent idea,
As a pinprick of potential,
As a memory-bearing universe.
You were placed beneath the surface
Of life
And came forth as life:

You identified yourself as a node
Through which the Divine
Chose to exist,
And you proclaimed
This nodal outpouring
Steadfastly and faithfully --

You were a seedling.

You traveled:

On the back of a truck, crowded with
Other nodes of Divine efflux,
You moved at speeds
Of which seedlings,
For eons,
Never dreamed.
You glided along exit ramps
And paused at stoplights,
Watching the spinning cylinders
Of cigarette butts and soda cans
Roll toward extinction
Even as you rolled toward some
New beginning
Or quiet,
Malnourished end.

You were chosen:

A purple ribbon was twined through
Your waxen branches.
A tag reading "SOLD"
was stapled to the ribbon --
An award, an epaulet,
A bestowal of
Arboreal anamnesis.

You would move again:
Your roots would find room,
Your branches would breathe their own air
And fix their future directions,
And all the potential within you
Would soon become a river
Flowing toward your extremities
And back into the secret ground
Of your being.

You waited:

Confined in your plastic cone, you stood
Within sight
Of neighbor and soul mate:
Three inches of rain;
A night in the garage to avoid frost;
Winds from north and south:
The thousand small paroxysms of Spring,

And still,
You stood patiently,
Smelling the earth
Into which you would be placed,
Feeling the stippled shadow
Of a small, secluded home.

You were planted:

Our hands grasped our meager tools
And clawed the marbled earth,
Pulled up ribs of clay.
We sculpted a vault of humus,
Laid a quilt of topsoil,
Then a pillow of peat
With treats laid underneath.

And now:

Your roots,
Bent into ovals
Of artificial confinement, begin to turn outward
To greet the life
That will move through you.

You have been brave and patient.
You have been resolute and modest.
You have been, simply and supremely,
A tree.

You are home.

--Mr. Gobley

In Praise of Loneliness

Sometimes,
All it takes
To feel loved
Is an interlude
Of utter loneliness.

When i am lonely,
Nothing keeps me company
Except
Everything.

The All,
In its placid indifference,
Winks at me,
Reflecting shards of light
Off the million
Mirrors of
Being,

Nods to me
With wind-bowed treetops,
Quivers in anticipation
And waves madly
With waxen Spring leaves.

Lest i think it is all for me,
i see the
All saluting
the All

From within
The hermitage
Of a self --

We are waving to each other,
You and i
And all,
From high windows
That face each other
Across an abyss --

All that moves
Salutes you;
All that is still
Accompanies you.

Only utter loneliness
Reveals this
Constant,
Loving
Companionship.

--Mr. Gobley

In Praise of Fingernails

This morning i awoke
to find that a screwdriver
had grown
on the end of each finger.

O wonderful world,
where the body grows
the means of procurement
and repair!

What awaits?
What calls to us?
We are made to build
and to mend --
our fingertips
attest to this.

i am my own set of tools,
gone off into the world
in search of all
that needs
fixing.

Procrastination and Fear

Procrastination
Prophesies defeat

Sees the future as sealed
Guarantees what it fears

i fear
Darkness
Blind corners
Apathy

Procrastination
Delivers all of these

And yet:
What other creature
Can procrastinate?

Who else
Among God's creatures
Can name their fear of failure?

i bow
To the great gray emptiness
Of my inertia --

And to my ability
To name it
And draw it near.

Perhaps, later,
i will leap tall buildings
In a single bound . . .

--Mr. Gobley

The hard work of meditation

It never ends.

The creaking bones
The sigh of the highway
The semaphore of my avian neighbors

The slow arising and falling away
Of breath
And everything else:

None of it ends --
It only begins.

The mind is subdued
Like a frightened mare,
Slowly and with loving reassurance.

Soon, what arises
Bows to me,
i bow to the arising

And then all is enfolded
In the bow of Being
Toward All That Is.

In this way,
i mark the passage of essence
Through the vestibule of
Being human,
Toward the great hall
Of
Simply
Being.

--Mr. Gobley

In Praise of a Splinter

There:

In a dry river bed
Carving the canyon
Of one finger print:

A shaft.

The finger must be held up
Against a dark background . . .
Behold:
A translucent projectile
From some angry angel.

And yet:
Each time you brush against it,
An alarm goes through
Your entire
Being.

It is the thrill
Of the threading of nerves,
Ideas,
Experience --
And in it, too:
Fear,
A premontion
Of
The End
That comes with each
Sensation.

How, you might ask,
Can something so small
Pervade your consciousness,
Arrest your day,
Force its way
To the front?

The splinter says:
Pay attention.

It says:
You are one
And many.

How finely woven you are,
And how attuned
To the missives
And missiles

That remind you
To pay attention.

The splinter is gone,
But not the spirit that sent it.

The splinter found its mark,
Made its wound:
A world poured in behind it.

Thank it.

--Mr. Gobley

Nothing

When nothing beckons --

When the striving
And the gasping,
The wrenching,
The breaking-down;

When the struggle to
Be
In the face of the
Relentless rush
Of non-Being
Seems too much--

Remember that
Nothing
Is not the absence
Of everything.

No-thingness
Lives in its own
Dark universe,
Twinned with ours;

It is the sieve that strains
Our Being.

We all pass through it;
We all live on in a sacred
Renewal,
A revivifying recombination
Of the atoms of our
Tiny selves.

The pain we feel
In holding ourselves together
Is the exquisite throbbing
Of the nerve-end
Of
Life itself.

Grasp that holy agony
And you will begin
To understand
All that is possible,

Beginning with this:
Thing
And no-thing
Are
Not two,
Not one.

We traverse the solitary seam
Of Life
On the balance beam
Of Being.

We must dance,
No matter the risk.

--Mr. Gobley

In Praise of Waiting

Beneath the crust of the frozen earth,
Spring has already been formed.

Just so,
Within your skin, your All
Waits--

Not with bated breath,
But with silent assurance,

The exalted inhalations
Of promise.

We fear that we may
Never fulfill that promise,
And so we live in a flaccid fury,

Enraged at all that holds us back.

In fact, what holds us back
Is precisely where blessing resides:
This is the fulcrum of promise,
Not the ministrations of the malevolent
Or sheer bad luck.

Know this:

Your promise never will be fulfilled.
Instead, it will expand for eons --
A universe of potential
Unleashed by you,
Echoed from you,
Emanating from you.

What you never will be
Is the space to be filled
By those who loved you,
Who lived in your universe,

Breathed your promise;
Their exhalations of memory
Contain

And disperse,
To the winds,
The molecules,
The miracle

Of your abiding
Eternity.

--Mr. Gobley

In praise of my depression

Every now and then
The gray eagle
Lands on my shoulder.

The talons
A dull ache
A shadow

A weight
That presses
And does not relent

The world:
Merely
An anvil
On which blood's rhythm
Is hammered
Ceaselessly
Out.

The Sun:
The dreaded cataract
Of conscience.

The sky:
A sharp-edged sheet
Of flattened brass
That does not forgive.

Only night
Offers dimension and color;
Only the dark has depth
And holds out a shard
Of cold compassion.

i slide
Down the soul's sine curve
And praise the purgatory
Of my shame.
i think:

"Oh, to be truly alone:
To be without
A Self."

After which
A spark of self-loathing
Ignites the smoldering,
Clears the thistled ground
For new growth:

A small bud
Opens its petals
Toward
All
Being. . .

--Mr. Gobley

Un-Seeing

The detritus of past lives
Clatters behind me --
The chains of
Marley's ghost.

Ingots, idols,
Knick-knacks,
Brick-a-brack;

Mementos from a time
That begs to be forgotten.

There is much --
Even here, in my inner sanctum --
That i have trained myself not to see.

Having become adept at not-seeing,
i learn to un-see in every facet of my life.

The more i un-see,
The closer i am
To
Coma.

My soul says to my mind:
Save me.

My mind says to my soul:
Save me.

i say to you,
As i fade to gray:

Save yourself.

--Mr. Gobley

The Library

Now the shelves are on tracks
And for days -- who knows? -- weeks,
Whole rows are entombed
Between other rows.

As you pass each row, a light sensor
Flashes
The fluorescents shudder and blink,
And there it is:
The crypt of the intellect.

If you want a book from a row, you turn a massive handle
On one end;
The shelves press against each other,
Groaning like old bones,
And an opening appears:

The books stretch and exhale
Their breath of dust and erudition;
The authors, cold in their graves,
Sigh,
Just a little:
Their name,
Their work,
Is briefly lit,
Quickly glanced at,
Perhaps even thumbed
By the living.

Back outside,
You are still haunted:
Knowledge obscuring knowledge,
The weight of the world's work,
Alphabetized, digitized, catalogued,
Encrypted.
Wisdom collapses in on itself;
A black hole of anti-thought
Formed from the gravity
Of our desire to know.

Darkness comes on
Like a silent movie locomotive
From behind our flat screens.
It passes.
We are gone.

If we vanish,
It will be because
We were too busy with our knowing
To truly learn.

--Mr. Gobley

Still

Tonight as i lay in bed
i heard life going by

ghost train of memories
panes of light in parallax
in the mind's shuttered eye

lost love
the arc of a home run
in a softball game

fumbling for car keys
on a winter night

smells:
the Adirondacks
barbecue
the diaper pail

and suddenly:
the heaviness

pinned to the earth
as the comet of memory
whispered by

i saw that we exist
for the briefest
of eternities

and are gone
in a flash
that does not end

-- Mr. Gobley

In Praise of Fingers

Lord of Reaching:

Thank you for the
Tendrils
The jointed
The knuckled and nailed
The ridged and rounded
Antennae
Through which we discover
You.

Thank you for sensation,
A miracle beyond all explanation.

Thank you for all ten,
Each with its own
Peculiarities
Personality
Predilections.

Thank you for
Their individuality within
Their Unity.

They tell us everything about
You:
Many,
One,
Opposable,
Prehensile,
Grasping,
Feeling:

Alive.

-- Mr. Gobley

The Annual Review

i sit across the desk from my employee.
The review forms are fanned out
Beneath my folded hands,
Like a model of an auditorium,
Where my knuckles are the footlights.

My job is not to judge him,
But to know him.
However much I might disavow my power,
Power is what i have.

That power obstructs knowing--
Occludes my sight.
My tiny fiefdom wavers in the harsh winds of commerce:
How, i wonder, did medieval kings review their lords and vassals,
Remain standing in the maelstrom of mutiny and calumny
That daily greeted them?

No matter:
i tell my employee what i know
Ask him to tell me what he knows;
Together we search for agreement
On a way forward;
We smile and laugh;
The way begins.

He has taught me a lot in an hour:
While being reviewed,
He has reviewed me.

Every religious calendar has an annual review:
A moment of introspection,
The divine as silent employer,
The penitent under assessment.

And yet,
Do we not review, as well,
The sacred center of our yearning?

We are all employed
In the service of
Something Great.
It's very possible
That we all know our
Employer
At least as well
As our Employer
Knows
Us . . .

(For Karen)

Mr. Gobley

Dark Morning

My earache and i
Wait for light and heat,

For the brow of the morning to lift
And for a bird to sing the Sun
Out of its crypt.

The leaves -- those that haven't fallen --
Are crisp and folded,
Oregamis of Autumn;
The garden is picked clean,
Gone to seed:
One dented tomato
Embalmed by frost
Onto its fatal vine.

Then,
As if parachuted in,
A pair of heels hits the floor
In the upstairs bedroom,
And the backyard fence
Rises;
Reminds me

That it rises
Along with me
Toward that
Un-becoming
We call
Daybreak.

-- Mr. Gobley

Balance Sheet

Today, numbers --
Brave soldiers, ranked and ordered,
Aligned and at attention
In a phalanx of
Rows and columns--
Await my orders.

Sometimes at night,
As i lie in bed,
i can feel them,
From miles away on my desk,
Standing at attention:
They exist merely to inform,
They hold a place
That represents an idea
That has a value.
Their purpose is their meaning.

They do not waver.
They do not sigh
Slouch
Sulk
Beweep their outcast state.

They wait for an ordering presence
To mobilize the meaning
They merely symbolize.

Sometimes, on my commute,
My sight pulls back,
My mind's eye rises,
And i see myself
As i see them:

Held within a cell,
Waiting to motivate a higher mind
Toward action.

Naught but my soul at attention,
Only the meaning i represent
Held forth,
A dagger or
Dandelion.

Within the confines
Of row and column,
Worlds explode into strenuous
Life.

i do my part:

i stand still in my cell
And dance.


--Mr. Gobley

Late Summer

Today the clouds scudded by like glass-bottomed boats.

This afternoon, a few dozen raindrops
The size of grapes
Ended their brief lives, only
To enter a new one
As a stain
Or a pilgrim
In a puddle.

Tonight, the crickets sing
Over the condenser unit

And fans blow away
The house's introspective heat.

August:

There can never be a sweeter moment,
Whose cool evenings
And humid days
Promise death,
Then life everlasting:

The palimpsest of repose,
The Garden of Eden
Whose gates go unguarded:

The angels with fiery swords
Have tickets to the game,
And afterwards,
A party
On the swankiest
Ring of Saturn.

--Mr. Gobley