Find a Place

Sugar Camp

   

Where the air is fresh

Slip into serenity

The point is to live

Grief

New York City, April 2008

This was the city

Magnolias fell on concrete

This was the farewell

When Long Enough in October Woods

The mind comes running

Like a wild thing and lies down

On a bed of leaves

—with lines by Mary Oliver

Dig

I opened the earth

And breathed a thousand secrets

So sweet a perfume

As Evening Takes Hold

Less difference now

Between the shadow in me

And all the shadows

Succumbing to the Spectacle

click to enlarge

A season passes

Shrouded in crimson and dew

A season arrives

The Coming Winter of Our Relative Content

Woolly Bear

Wiseworm of the snows

Forecasts a warm November.

Celebrate the light.

We Heard an Owl

Unsteady afoot

In fall's woodland mosaic,

Disoriented.

It's not that we're lost,

Just quiet, nothing to say.

The owl spoke for us.

Equinox

I have travelled far,

Isolated in a field,

Goldenrod, and time.

 

Silent Majority

We were about to

Say something like a windrush,

And then we didn't.

Trying not to be

Afraid explains everything.

Call out to someone.

—a cento with lines from the collected poems (1975-1997) of James Galvin

Drought Abstract

In greener times

 

  

  This hot summer Rain

  Is the tallest girl I know

  And I miss her laugh

Aged Summer

 

The field wants for rain

In an absence of Monarchs

A presence of pain