Isolative

By ice

isolated.

Limit leads

to discovery

in poetry

as in music.

Beauty in

all things

is brevity.

-

In Solution

farm dissolving in snowfall,

crystals in drifts where slats

slow the wind, land

in drifts ridge to ridge,

yearning in drifts under gables,

man dissolving in snowfall.

-

wet snow in the doldrums

eight on eight on eight

bowed in the raveling night

a strong spine it takes

to keep the head up

at January's bleak finish

-

January Oak

Last graspers,

survivors of zero,

clutched hands

of the slow dusks,

riddled pennants

of the vanished

golden fleet,

palimpsests to

the damp feasts

in the loud dark,

to the swarm

of procreation,

the old watching

the blind young

buds come of age,

imagining their sheen

in sunlight, not

without longing.

–

Sub-Zero Wind

strops the plowline,

rattling the weedbones;

kneedeep in rivershade,

keep moving, keep moving,

strive for a hold in the treeline



or lose your grip

on this tilting world and

float free of the glittering earth,

crystal mote in the void.

–

Snowshoeing the GAP

The Great
Allegheny
Passage



Rhythmic flex of muscle and brain,

pulse of leg and lung, heartsong,

with our breath before us, sunstung,

lightslapped, wanting more,

burning in a land of ice,

riverflash, windrush, armed

with desire, faith in this once.

–as always, click to enlarge.

Hawk

Nothing at the feeder all morning.

On the path I learn why,

A brilliance under overcast,

And though I never saw it strike,

I felt the curve and the piercing,

The lethal silent speed

Of the wobbling Earth,

Left to its own devices,

Finding its balance.

-

Sabbath

Winter is the sabbath of the year. Let us slow our pace, give up the contest, put aside our worry over sums, cease our struggle for approval, and let the weaker light fill us with an easy warmth, insulated by peace. What we find then in the heart is true, an introduction to ourselves.

-

Reprieve

An hour's sun softens the ice,

Wet snow fills my shoes,

Transformations surround me,

Great forces of the universe

At work under these very eaves;

What binds the spinning galaxies

Shapes the drop of melt,

The pine inverted there as it falls,

Lens of a deeper realm.

-

Ghosted

Again awake,

feeling the lack,

mute insistence

of what stirs not,

souls in the trees,

looking back.

–

Commodity

Slope of woods and fields free from motive,

Runoff clean and filtered by clean earth,

Spring emerging from stacked stones


Flows clear under the dirt road,

Loves its way through the woods

Of abandoned farms all the way


To the creek where black-backed

Trout hover in formation,

Waiting on a blessing from above.

–

Commemoration

A moment of silence is never enough.

Give me an hour, a day, a life,

Let me risk to be alone with my own thoughts,

Motionless on a hilltop with my head in the sky,

Removed from the clash of enterprise,

Expansive, cherishing quiet, sailing,

The wind in my heart, and in my ears

A rush of words from those who loved me.

–

Dead of Winter

Even in the dead

of winter we

needn't look far

to find reason

to celebrate, yes

the morning is sharp

our fingers are cold

but let us not turn

our backs to the fire

the fire in the blood

the fire in the blood.

Turning Point

The township truck

when it came

with slapping chains

thundering bed

and marigold plow,

lifted the blade

as it passed

my driveway.

I accept it as a sign

of the new civility.

–

Conversation

I was no help.
I was fading fast myself.

Did you get what you wanted from your life,
even so?
And what
did you want?

To call myself beloved.
To feel myself beloved
on the earth.

–with lines from Raymond Carver's "Late Fragment"

Storm of Choice

Near zero in the small hours, Orion leaping out of the trees in the crackling dark, then warming all morning, the air growing heavier, wood smoke from the chimney trailing southwest, train loud in the valley, closer, first a fine shower of ice, then flakes, then rafts, filing our footsteps.

We want this. We want deep drifts, closing the roads, slowing us. We want the wires down and the dish buried, no choice but to tend to necessities, to stand still as the snow piles up on our shoulders, looking deep into the sky to watch it come, heeding the call of quiet.

–

One Sunset

Just once a day

rolling back from the sun,

deepening earthshade,

nothing like it before,

nothing like it again,

and the days few.

–

The Living Have No Idea

The living have no idea

How old everything is,

Sunset of two days ago

Already ancient,

Buried in us who were there

Like the path through the field

Under a foot of new snow,

Like the memories of those lost ––

The sounds they made

They are making in us still,

Inspiring and bewildering

As we go forth together

Swinging our legs through the drifts.

Pointillisme

Look up from the Monitor

the Ground white again

the Air filled again

the Woods interpreted again

Brushtips of Gravity and Cloud

Building in Memory

the Moment's Monument.

Young Moon When We See It

Young moon when we see it

Calls us back to the hill,

Honed edge of what we are

And hint of what we could be

Going down in glimmerdim.

We could have been great.

Frost glitters in starlight.

–as always, click to enlarge.

The Rest of the Story Is Dreaming

It may be a mercy the dark closes round us


So broodingly soon in every direction.


And how much longer a story has science


Before she must put out the light on the children


And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?


"You children may dream it and tell it tomorrow."




Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.


What set us on fire and what set us revolving,


'Twas something we knew all about to begin with


And needn't have fared into space to discover,


To find 'twas the effort, the essay of love.

–lines from Robert Frost's "Too Anxious for Rivers."

Anew

Ice in the ditches,

Fire in the veins,

So we begin.

–