What Alights

Be

still

and

adopt

the

gifts

of

being

-

The Great Allegheny Passage

Most everyone you pass

has a smile and a kind word,

motorless through dappled shade,

sometimes high over quick rivers,

up in the wind with soaring birds,

sometimes low against the water,

parting the cool pools of evening,

true hearts keeping pace.

-

Extinction

Monarch in flight

in the bee-loud glade,

ignoring our presence,

short-term visitors,

intrusive to be sure,

but soon enough gone

and quickly forgotten

by the oblivious universe 

when our fires die out.

-

Advice from the Masters

Frame the world

To your own liking,

Trust your own aesthetic,


Celebrate the irregular,

For you are that;

Yes, you fall short,


But only the dissatisfied

Keep working, and work

Is the only satisfaction.

-

Haunted Life

with a a few words by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Thorns

in the dew

draw blood,

sun through

the mist

like a stab.

Morning --

which mystery

is this?


The invisible

world lies

around us

like a

shadow.

-

Tiger Swallowtail

click to enlarge

Passes so close

you hear the

powdered thrust

nectar-driven

puddle-drugged

sweet prince

to her senses

compounded.

-

Flowers for Amy

Thank you to the founder

of People Who Read in Bed Club

for making her secretary,

Thank you, Shangra-las,

thank you, Ronettes,

for the hair and the makeup,

This is for everyone

who falls every day.

She cheated herself

like she knew she would,

She only said

good bye with words,

She died a hundred times,

and she goes back to,

She goes back to

black.

-

Birdlife

Days and nights

in the gray tones,

blurred at the edges,

thrilled, even so,

by flights of mind,

the winged eruptions,

open to startlement.







-

Cling to the Coolness of Night

Rise and move

into the sunrise mist

holding close the fruit

of unconsciousness,

translation of experience

and all that precedes you

throughout the withering day.

-

Saving of the Self

Heavy

the strength

that bears a

body down,

random

winds,

senseless

waves,

learning

to live

with it.

-

There Is Earth Inside Me

Nothing I counted mine, out of my life,

is mine to take:


not my daughter's terrible eyes,

not the elaborate stone flower

of grief, not the day of the storm,

nor the trial of the visiting hour,


not the dear coolness of her hands,

not the magnolia trees' agitated shade,

not the thin cricket-sound

of consolation's parting word.

–adapted from Anna Akhmatova's "Requiem"

Not Everyone Writes With a Computer

Pay no attention to origins,

The next phase is upon us,

Instead, start making sense.


Some things have never been poetry,

Some things shall always be,

Obsolence has become obsolete.


This, you think, is progress.

-

And the Money

Go outside

while you can,

a friend says,

overwhelmed

with worry

and angry

about fracking

and the money

and the money.

I go, I watch

sparrows

catching millers,

I see no one,

yet all I hear

are engines,

and I wonder,

can I stay?

-

Persuasion

Flesh warming

In the sun.

Maturity, fruition.

Let us feast

Before the withering.

We were made for this.





-

Tranquility

The value of quiet is intuitive,

Appreciated instantly by the young,

As when you turn off the TV at last,

And the house rings with silence,

And the soul expands, an awakening,

Or when you step into the woods,

Insular and dark in the afternoon,

To float on the rising tide of your mind.

-

Sheer Physical

Spray of rain and wind on your bare chest,

Lightening buzzes in the stone beneath your feet,

Pulses of July enter your flesh,

Celebrate the physical, one storm closer

To your last, ozone in your lungs.

-

Left Slope

Left Bank, Right Bank,

Pense, despense,

The French say,

Think versus spend;

So, too, here

On the Left Slope of

The Allegheny Front.

-

Burning Bryte

What can I tell you

Except that the blur

That surrounds me

Is startling in its beauty

When I lean into it?


What more can I ask

Except that you do the same?

-

Aestivare

Sun from wooded ridge to wooded ridge,

Long shadows growing short and lengthening again,

The quivering field of afternoon is flanked by soaking dews.


Apace with the lope of summer, I am reluctant to leave,

Putting off another day the trip to town, out of almost everything

But time. Staying in one place, I have time.

-

Expansion

click to enlarge

Form of depth and line

Deeper form of air

With its fabulous suspensions

Deepest formless space

Which will always hold us

Which we hold now

 In the forms of our depths.

-

With Accompaniment by the Nairobi Trio

 Permit me, please

my life-long sense

of the absurd,

honed by Kovacs,

Allen, Caeser,

the brothers Marx

and  Señor Wences;

then praise the elves

for secret generosity

in the ghosted dark.

-

Fallow

The fallow field is a busy place

on the first of July, milkweed opening

its delicious traps, birds plucking

seeds from tall grasses, shadows

moving through the green colonies.


Let us be still amid continuance,

all of our senses under assault,

disengaged with getting and spending,

thoroughly engaged with the world.

-