Song Almost

To give pleasure, a poem is best experienced slowly and without expectation.

It should be read and reread without concern for meaning.

"You can't tie a poem to a chair and beat the meaning out of it with a rubber hose," Billy Collins famously said. Clarity and meaning, you see, are not the same thing.

A poem does have meaning, of course, but what it means to the poet and what it means to you can be wildly different, and often are. To the reading experience, we bring our own histories. That it stirs something in us is its only purpose -- that's what makes it art. There will be no quiz later.

With that, I offer a poem, still steaming from creation like a pie fresh from the oven.

Already I've said too much.



Songwriter's Prayer

Engines burning overhead,

               drowned in clouds,

Engines burning on the road,

               drowned in hills,

Heavy, sinking conveyance,

               how does it go?

Blackbirds burning in the trees,

               drowned in leaves near their red deaths,

Desire perverse where the lyric hides,

Let there be one long pull toward the sound,

Let there be tides.



copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Woods Walk

Let's walk in the woods.

We've heard much about lowered expectations because of the drought, but we know the woods is never less than spectacular, regardless of the season.

We enter here at the back of the overgrown field to the shriek of jays. Then silence envelops us. Our spirits lift.

Breathe deep the perfume of cycles, the delicious scent of decay.

Each step quickens the pulse as we follow the path we took yesterday into the hollow and up the other side toward the cabin.

We pause for a moment in the mosaic of change.

Beauty surrounds us; it's everywhere we look when we are still enough to see it.

Under the cloud cover, some would call this a dreary day. Listening to the wind above us in the thinning, shifting crowns, we would not.

Close to the cabin now, we see it through the boughs. But we are in no hurry.

Our time is our own. This is freedom.

Alone with our thoughts, we find ourselves good company.

This is our Lourdes.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Hill Against the Sky

Hill against the clouds,

a line we know as well

as the faces of our children –

we've seen them running there

through red clover and wind,

sunstruck beings of the sky,

gilded moments we see still

in our place wisdom.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Last Game Home

We will the miss the game, the green.

Not by accident is the ballyard called a park, a bit of the country in the city, a bit of the natural in the manmade.

The sun has crossed the equator, the season nears its end. When again the sun draws near, we will have our game again, its clean lines and lovely trajectories, its beautiful physics, its order and its rhythms, so attuned to our own, and so right for each other's company (if the scoreboard would pipe down) -- no small magic in the systems of threes.

We shall build our fires and huddle around them in the dark. The clashes of winter will sustain us as we wait for the bluebirds to arrive and the pitchers and catchers to report, blessing the cycles of the earth.

When we have hope, we have everything.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Nuts and Rocks

A lot of air today.

The wind gives the field a face, and the trees give the wind a voice.

In the yard, the walnut trees also give the wind a beat -- nuts dropping in their inky husks onto the calcinated earth so often it sometimes sounds like corn popping.

Ankle turners, these. Quick to blacken and soften. Alive, when we shovel them into the wheelbarrow, with the small, writhing maggots of the walnut husk fly. But this is no biology lesson. Here we concern ourselves less with nomenclature and more with universal truths. Colon, close parenthesis.

Back the road, too, the nuts are falling.

We stop by the pignut hickory that marks one mile from the house.

The squirrels have been busy.

So have the men.

As Thoreau said: It's not enough to be busy; but what are we busy about?

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien

all rights reserved

The Cloths of Heaven

Espresso and book in hand, we walk to the hilltop to watch the sun touch the mountain rim behind the Equinox Pine, and to feel the balance.

The shadow of the earth rolls up behind us, covering these hills with the dome of night. Katydids sing.

The round moon with its tranquil sea floats out of the woods at our backs and floods the fields with half-light.

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,
Of night and light and the half-light.

That's Yeats, wishing for the "cloths of heaven" to spread under his lover's feet.

We have them here.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Soar

A hot morning wind thins the big ash. In wetter times, it takes the first frost to loosen its leaves. The first frost seems a long way off -- not because it isn't time -- yet how they fly.

By afternoon the wind picks up, leaves fill the air as high as we can see with our glasses, flying ahead of the cloud edge.

Leaves and hawks in migration, riding the southwest wind to soar along the mountain ridges.

Feet firmly on the cracked ground, we look deep into the sky and feel the lift.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien

Sync

 The asters have erupted in the field. Three weeks later than normal, we think they had been waiting for rain.

Gone for a day and a night, it takes us most of the afternoon to attune ourselves once more with the roll of the earth.

By evening, we move with the shadows.

The equinox and the full moon are coming, arm in arm.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Engulfed by Morning

It doesn't last long.

As the sun tops the woods, the fog lifts from the field, and the morning loses some of its mystery.

Water is strung in the brachiations where the spiders have been busy in the night. We see the hill inverted in each globe.

A moment ago we stood entranced by the sunlight expanding through the treetops.  Now its golden warmth engulfs us, and we are stunned by the close-at-hand.

Click on the top photograph, then click again. The near can be more astonishing than the far, when we are still enough to know it.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Dark and Shining

Three inches of rain have softened the ground, and us with it.

In the woods, the earth is once again dark.

Everything shines. Shining and dark. Despair is like that.

We speak of it rarely.

Each of us knows it, or will, mourning in silence.

Grief is a stone.

Yet there is a kind of pleasure to know we will never love less, never be consoled, as Donald Barthes wrote, that we will remember more and more.

"Death is the mother of beauty."

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

System

The sun goes down in a swirl of mare's tails, those wisps that signal change. Rain coming, we hope.

In the night we step outside and look up into the stars, our disappointment overpowered by infinity.

But come first light, rain spots the walk stones. We go out to be in it.

The day we will spend with our feet on the ground under the clouds. In these fields and woods we likely will see no other human being, immersed as we will be in the great system of the earth, living the idyl of the rain.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Yellow

The earth is yellowing in the September sun.

It brings out the grain of the hills.

Evening lengthens. We sit at the top of the field after sunset, the half-moon still in the woods, and listen to the continuous loop of the crickets.

Decay is beautiful. We would end as the leaves, our best at the last.

The dogs lead us home in moonlight.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Late Summer

Monarchs fly south in a hot southwest wind,
headed for Mexico, against all odds.

The field bristles, our season nearing its end with so much left undone. We ache to create, against all odds.

Yet here we are, alive in wind and streaming leaves under a blue heaven, against all odds.

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

Basics

The city has its allures, to be sure. Fells Point in Baltimore's Inner Harbor certainly does.

It's distractions are, indeed, charming.

But it does not stop us from considering the basic elements of existence and our relationship to them and to each other -- the curse of deep thinking.

Good, then, to return home and sit outside in the dark, to stare into the fire together, the owls calling their roundelays under the constellations.

copyright J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Fields

The night was perfect for baseball. Everybody said so. Even the saxophone player on the Clemente Bridge with his case open for tips as he thanked us for nothing.

But we couldn't stop thinking about our walk that morning through our own yard and field, walnuts dropping on the hard ground as the sun rose, goldenrod shoulder-high, tossing in the wind that hissed like surf in the surrounding trees.

The game we will forget. The field we will not.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Immersed in Green

The woods we find as mysterious as water, and thus this old farmhouse is flanked by the pond and the trees.

Beneath the lily pads, a world exists as a fantasy. The surface moves, and we can only guess.

But sitting in our great grandmother's oak rocker on the cabin porch, we feel sumberged in our own element.

We hear the wind move through the undulating crowns with the sound of the sea. We hear birdsong and insect trill.

The longer we are still, the more this living planet reveals itself, and the more amazing its intracies.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien
all rights reserved

Mazeroski's Knee

When Bill Mazeroski hit one over the 408' mark at Forbes Field to beat the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, it sent  Greater Pittsburgh into a paroxysm of glee that spins in us still.

For Pirate fans it became one of those indelible moments in life --we will always remember where we were and what we were doing when it happened -- except in this case, it was due to the shock of incredible
happiness, and that is rare, indeed.

A statue to that moment was unveiled in Pittsburgh Sunday between the Allegheny River and PNC Park, an immediate destination for those who wish to once more celebrate joy, posing at the knee at our beloved Maz, immortalized rounding third waving his helmet, the youngest kid on the team, a local boy who succeeded here and stayed here, a ten-time all-star who never negotiated his salary, always claiming he just felt privileged to be paid for working at what he loved, and who still walks among us with humility, brought to tears by this statue and the affection of the community, and a reminder that it's not about how much we can accumulate, but about the quality of the day.

Why should that ever get old?

copyright 2010 J. O"Brien, all rights reserved

Holiday

The dogs barked at the rain, it had been that long.

The arched edge of the distant hurricane cleared by sunset, and we took comfort in our meal, prepared with local ingredients and consumed slowly beside the fire in the gathering dusk.

We prop our feet close to the flames, listen to them sighing like wind. Crickets sing all around us. The night quivers with sound.

We finish our wine. We have no appointments to keep. Our time is our own. We watch a bat feed against the velvet sky.

Our plan was to have no plans, are we are sticking to it. We ate when we were hungry. We will sleep when we are sleepy.

When we cap the fire at last, it's light extinguished, the night expands, and we see deep into the galaxy, Sagittarius there in the south.

Nothing need be said.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Poem Driving

turnpike



clouds cover me in layers

concentric spheres at slower speeds

matters of altitudes and densities

          your life is as difficult as mine


passing a truck on the pennsylvania turnpike

channeled between jersey barriers and

shrieking hubs two hands on the wheel

          her warmth returns against my chest


nothing feels so good to skin

as skin the touch of generations

the consolations of continuance

          i may have missed my exit

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

The First of September

The wood is split and stacked.

We have worked in the high heat of afternoon and finished the job. We take satisfaction in that.

We reward ourselves with a fluid ride across the ridges and into the shaded valleys, leaning left and leaning right over winding macadam, the wind in our clothes, and beneath us the easy thumping of the engine.

The country flows around us, sometimes flanked by corn in silk, sometimes by trees, sometimes pastures; cows move away from the fence as we pass, calves ducking back under the wire.

We stop by the covered bridge to check the level of the creek. The drought is severe.

Yesterday, burning boxes, we watched the grass catch fire, red flame in green blades. It is that dry.

Today the creek is shallow pools dimpled with water striders, the shining surface wobbling with the flex of a trout.

We think of the hurricane nearing the coast, and how many hope for a turn toward the sea, not yet desperate for rain.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Pokeweed

We let the pokeweed flourish in the yard even though we know it to be toxic.

We wait for September to sit in its shade on the baked ground and look up through its broad leaves, feeling empurpled.

We quote Thoreau from this same time of the year in 1858:

"A man shall rush by and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist...yet if he ever favorably attend to them, he may be overcome by their beauty.

"Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

"Heaven, or paradise, might be defined as the place which men avoid."

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved