Flying Shoes

Shall we stand to cast a shadow

Before the light dies,

Pin our poems to trees

In the ancient tradition,

Sky coming down again,

Shall we sing

This same old song

Watching a winter's day

Turn the green water

To white and blue

Tying on our flying shoes?

–with a bow to Townes Van Zandt

Air So Close to Water

air so close to water we hear tires on the hard road

ripping through melt a mile away

frozen rain turned soft on the packed paths

pokeberries thawing in slush

the sun we'd been promised all day

showing at last through a slot near the ridge

a strip of turquoise and peach

bleeding now across the low waves

of the afternoon's pewter dome

stand under it and feel the joys of change

Joy in the Work

A week past the solstice,

Each sunset a click

Away from Sugar Loaf,

A click deeper into the year,

Into our body of work,

Our creation of day

Through softening snows,

Constellations in place,

Avoiding naysayers,

Driven to add to the stride,

To the thrust of propulsion,

To what could outlive us

If only for a moment,

If only with just one

Tasting where we've been.

Annum

Forehead ache

Eartip fire,

Booming wind

Careening light,

Yet even now

The longer day,

The sanguine tints

Of sunset thrown

Upon the drifts,

Ground and sky

In fierce harmony,

The dying embers

Of our orbit,

The icy burn

Of an awakening.

copyright 2010, J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Return to an Empty House as Snow Falls on Snow

The room is quiet except for the pendulum tock,

the ratcheted flow of existence I've heard all my life

from the same mantle clock that worked on the shelf

over the fire in the house of my great-grandfather,

the faces of those dear country people lit by the fire,

their black eyes shining upon me, the notes of their voices

and the creak of the old man's rocker

music in me still as the year turns;

nothing so sweet as being alone

with those who couldn't help caring.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Love in the Small Days

Smoke from the fireplace twists down from the stack,

Heavy air out of the east pushes it under the porch roof

Where it smells of apples and cinnamon and whiskey,

The flavored oils of our bodies and their taking,

Ice hard in the cavities of the derelict woods,

The long dark coming in the maganesium shifts of twilight.

This late in the cycle of allure to bliss our urges

Uncommon we think in the season of dormancy,

Our twin fires in the shorter wavelengths,

Our fused paths in dazzling actinic light,

Our flint and steel in the tinder of intellect,

Our ropes and masks against the abysses within us.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Catches the Horse

Catches the Horse



Then drag in the old grubbers

with dirt under their thumbnails,

characters, if you wish, who know a job of work,

who can grab the cow by her nostrils and force

the bottle neck between her big bare teeth,

or in spite of the low-set cut of him

catch the horse and slip an arm

around the neck and slip the blinders on

in a single move,


As when an age ago

you drove out west to County Clare

where wind and light played off each other,

on one side, the ocean, wild with foam and glitter,

and on the other, inland among stones, the slate-gray lake,

lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white,

and found yourself neither here nor there,

a hurry through which known and strange things passed

as big soft buffetings came at the car sideways

and caught your heart offguard and blew it open.

A tribute to the work of Seamus Heaney, offered

as a reaction to criticism of his latest poems.

People

The only human beings I had seen all week were the UPS driver, the mailman, and the snow plow operator. And them I would have missed had the dogs not announced their approach. Such is life on a dirt road in Upper Turkeyfoot. Such is tranquility.

The storm ended. The sun appeared. I built myself a neighbor for amusement.

Small wonder, then, that a venture from the mountain to the mall on the weekend before Christmas left me stunned. Too many people on the planet, I thought.

Then I spent the evening in the easy company of folks who had been friends for decades, through the making of careers and the raising of children, surprising each other now with the rising numbers of grandchildren. Ah, the happy comfort of shared histories. For the moment, I changed my mind.

Not enough like these, I thought.

Days with a Grain

the night's exhalations

have feathered the pane

a fine windless snow

alights from the east

train in the valley

six miles away

where the river is rising

and brimming with ice

tracks of the rabbit

lead under the shed

tracks of the man

lead into the woods

days of one digit

days with a grain.

The Near and the Far

Strength of muscle and joint,

every inch the indigen,

shoveling snow, hauling wood,

efficiency of the human frame

occupied with the simplest

of tasks, with necessity,

with fire with food

with space for the mind to travel

as we work in one place,

walking our paths,

some would say absentmindedly,

but far from it, reveling

in the continuance of possibility.

Byzantium

No beauty without transience,

no grace without brevity,

a storm, a sunset,

a day, a life;

what is past, passing,

or to come, all that is

begotten, born, and dies,

lovely because it does not last,

and us in its midst,

temporal and raging,

driven mad by splendor.

–with 14 words from Yeats.

Sentencings

A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

Find the gleam again or try:
the moment in which moments lived.

What can be said at all?
each of us have our own dead.

A rock can be rinsed, coated with varnish:
in the face of elusive experience,

Some so evaporative it can only be lived:
listen in the right spirit to those warm voices.

Too much longing:
it separates us
like scent from bread,
like rust from iron.

The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

The thoughts, comments, and lines of Jane Hirshfield.

Early Evening

February in December

Virga trailing eastbound clouds

Cornfields empty blue with snow

Quiet farms idle tractors

Silos half full opalescent

Red barns steaming breath

Valley of the sleeping trees

Sleeping people sleeping ground.

all rights reserved

What We Miss

Unnoticed before snow,

 filled now with dendrites

and capped with vapor

from the great lake

made marvelous by cold,

the nests and warrens,

the dark, close places

of safety and comfort.


The storm reveals

what we've missed,

unchallenged.

Auge in the Ham

Having driven in one day from sandcastles to snowmen, a little "Ancient Music" from Ezra Pound (with slight alteration) seems temporarily appropriate:




Winter is icummen in.

Lhude sing Goddamm.

Snoweth drop and staineth slop,

And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,

An ague hath my ham.

Freezeth river,  turneth liver,

Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Golden Egg

ancient forms of natural beauty

gnash of wind and water

mutable theaters of light

airsong seasong birdsong


overbuilt piledriven plotplanned

maritime forest uprooted

cashed in all of it waiting

for the next named storm


an ancient form

of restoration

thirty dash

Wanchese

No inevitable postcard this

this is an honest place

a place where work is done

work done and a living made

a living made of capture

capture and rust and struggle

struggle against the inevitable.

...and Time

Our best days are spent

beside the broad water

busy with our tasks

of little consequence

walking the tideline

for relics and amulets

casting over breakers

without expectation

content to be still

our senses engaged

we have world enough...

The Great and the Small

Some facts of this existence are difficult to grasp.

Perhaps it is because I have been living for a few days on a long sand bar,  seeking regeneration, an outcast by choice, and lack physical contact with the mainland.

Take today, for example. Today I learned there are probably three times as many stars in the universe than anyone knew.

I study a picture of galaxies from the Hubble telescope. Surely, in all of that, there exists something else like me and you, an intelligence, just as awed, stunned by wonder.

But in the ceaseless crashing of water and the whipping wind,  I can't hold it in my mind.

Better to focus on the close at hand. Today at a year-round Christmas shop, I discovered there exists such a thing as a Betty Boop Christmas tree.

Since the sublime is too much, I consider the ridiculous. It leaves me no less puzzled.

Pristine

Give us a scene unconstructed

The long view free of frames

A horizon long enough

We can see the curve of the earth

Feel the weight of our sphere

And thrill at the speed of our flight.

Jockey's Ridge

A great storm, it is believed,

lifted shoals and dropped them here,

hundred-foot dunes

drifting ever since

in steady winds,

southwest in winter,

northeast in summer,

saved from the developer

by one determined woman,

strong before the blade,

that men forever after

may stand atop the ridge

with sand in their hair,

between the sighing sea

and the growling continent,

drawn toward them both,

knowing it would be easy to stay,

leaning northeast in winter,

leaning southwest in summer,

floating always in one place.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Outer Banks

The wind from the east

carries the chill of the Atlantic

as it piles up the sea on the beach.

No collapsing breakers.

Only the relentless effervescence

of the charging surf.

The waning moon rises

out of black water

and paves its silver road.

Snow left
on the ground at home

and ice on the pond.

The wind will turn soon.

Nothing lasts.

Shifts

Margins and edges

Grinding and shifting

Give life its grain

The sea at the land

The day at the night

The summer at winter

The balance of beaches

Of dusks of equinoxes

A crystal existence

Privileged by endings.

Cooling

The ground cools, the pond

Cools – undiminished,

The mystery of

Water, window on

A fourth dimension

To close one morning

Soon, and in the ice

Another wonder.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Numerous

A wall of cloud in the east

flanked the enterprise of men

all afternoon, the comings

and goings, the north and south

of motors and the burning

of fuel to get fuel, endless

until it ends, until we end,

mining the ground and the air,

the water and the light,

getting and spending until

we have no place to stand.



We have grown too big,

we are too many,

too much for the earth

and for each other.



We cannot say why we see

the wall of cloud as a plea

to guard the earth

except that we must.

Avatar

As if we

needed

proof that

life is

stranger

than

fiction;

the past is

prologue.