Solidago Days

Dew-strung and crowned with dawn

no one could find us

in the goldenrod field

as we had wished,

listening to the bees

chanting as they worked,

our pantlegs tucked into our socks

sprayed with Permethrin

against the stark truths of the world.

The Mind Floats Free

Working at the keyboard

the mind floats free

through the kitchen door

and over the fields

 

where last she dreamed

she was picking blackberries

her fingers stained

and where we gave

her ashes to the wind.

Nepal

                    

Another thousand sunsets               

                    in my feed               

                    May the Earth survive               

                    our extinction               

 

Unsettled Time

                              It's been a long time

                              since time

                              driving backward from the capital

                              living in reverse

                              returning

                              to the shade of the woods

                              sibylline leaves tumbling

                              up to their branches

                              raptors overhead

                              northward tail-first drifting

                              September going clear

                              and blue again

                              our souls intact

                              at the edge of consequence.

—with two lines by Ocean Vuong

Old Friends in Late Summer

                                  Speak to me of change

                                   and I will listen,

                                   both of us

                                   steadying ourselves.

                                   No one else is coming.

The Volatility of Consciousness

jo'b   

Grass mowed,

I fell asleep

in a chair by the well

and awoke with the sky in my eyes,

realizing as if for the first time

I'd never see her again—

one moment we were discussing

Yeats and elderberries, and the next

I was alone on a dirt road

in a nest of modified illusions,

facing the savage god of the future—

but it was only the FedEx driver

pounding down the road,

raising yellow dust.

Too Much to Think About

jo'b   

It is needful

to have night

in one's body.

It is hurtful

to be right.

—Robinson Jeffers was right.

Reading Robert Lowell at Night

jo'b   

               Nights are troubled times—

               faint visitors unbidden,

               wraiths, the should-have-beens,

               await to meet me in my dreams.

               I am too much alone,

               too unforgiving of myself—

               soft music fills the void,

               and reading sometimes helps—

               Sometimes my mind's not right,

               as Robert Lowell confessed,

               but still I would not say

               that I myself am hell—

               Quickly yet how in the dark

               I'm back in my childhood bed,

               pillow wrapped around my head

               to keep the shouting out,

               the insults and the breaking glass,

               the one-man show at 3 a.m.

               In the great relief of sunrise,

               soundly in first light I sleep—

               late to bed, and late to rise

               keeps this man healthy—

               if not wealthy. if not wise.

Ever the Wind

jo'b    

The stumbled path you took

the tides and reversals

that left no footprints

the piers you built into deep water

wrecked by storms

blue time undoing everything

You thought... what is hope anyway

gulls crying in sunlight

the glittering swells of the sea

the thud and crash

of surf and vision

a walk on an empty beach?

In the Glistening

jo'b   

             In the glistening autumnal side of summer

             I am expecting better hours.

             I smell the cornfield.

             I hear the pear drop.

             I see bats in the dusk

             flying at the edge of the woods.

             The moon is my only companion.

             The cricket, the gurgling spring,

             the wind rising in the trees,

             all speak to me

             of the steady progress

             of the universe,

             and I am rewarded

             for mere expectation.

—Drawn from The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau over four Augusts, 1851-54.