Machicolation

Tracks of a white-footed mouse

Machines overhead

shake the ground,

rattle the door in

its frame, force us

outside for a look,

lost to our fate but

wanting a glimpse

of what comes,

as the mouse

stops to look

at the hawk,

as the deer turns

to look at the gun.

Coming of Age

We are not as we were,

Each passage

A shattering.

This is how we pray:

Protect the sparrow

That sings in the ash,

Protect our grief

As memory.

We are not as we were.

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Tornado Warning

Sky wild with error and moaning on the wooded hills,

Vapors of the expiring earth dwarfing the acts of men

Stopped in the sucking mud of their stripped fields

Awed in the cannonades of wind that shake their bones

Exiled now from the sun and driven to their cellarholes

By blasts of ice and the black roar that builds behind the ridge,

Reduced to fear and faith in the strength of their minds.

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Receiver

Snow again

As I stood

By the nest.

The day became

Something else

And I listened

For the words

Long enough

To be filled.

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Helps Us to Focus

Solidago in ruin

Fulvous and exposed

In this snow-starved winter

The field is ten acres of art

Waiting to be framed,

Our small interference

Revealing the genius

Of line texture and tone

(There all along)

If we know when to stop.

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The Examined Life

Click to expand horizon.

The trees and I stood on the hill

With the even wind from the west,

Still enough and here enough

To be taken as landscape

By the resident crows in the snag,

Gurgling calmly pinnacled.

Sheaves of sunlight leaned

Against heaven over the valley.

The dogs slept on their sides

In the flattened grasses.

Nothing else happened.

I'd call it a lucrative day.

The Wanderings

Wind against water, realms in collision,

Yours against mine, ours against theirs.


Give us the world if Thou wilt,

But grant us an asylum for our affections.

–Last stanza based on the epigraph of Yeats' "The Wanderings of Oisin"

And Again. And Again.

Click to enmesh.

Glossed and brilliant in the short-lived sun

We bow to each other, a tangle of our kind

Daring to be what we are

In our season and time.

–  Listening to Nick Drake's "Saturday Sun"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXLWH2IAEN0

The Things We Live Among

You may click to enlarge.

In the abstract we

were always wrong

you about me

me about you

guilty and blameless

feeling too much

though the things

we live among

are right

and to see them

is to know.

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Anew

And so it can be said, we are falling in love with the world

Anew, with the ice on the pane and the fire in our minds,

With the scent of the mist and the taste of the past,

With the strength of our hands and the weight of tomorrow,

And so it can be said, all the way to heaven is heaven.

–Final clause by Catherine of Sienna, in a state of ecstasy, circa 1370.

Feeling is Living

Please enlarge by clicking.

Our most vivid sensations

Lie in extremes.

Be blown on by all winds.

–Exhortation by Thoreau.

Beyond Description

Wheelbarrow, firewood,

Water, sky -- there is no

Language of the holy.

The sacred lies in the ordinary.


The work we do,

The love we make –

There is no image more divine

Than unity and grace.

–built on the scaffolding of Deng Ming-Dao

Old Ideas

One-room school.

Captive under a closed and curdled sky, we gather up our hearts

and go to test the open fields and the bare dark woods,

Searching for the old ideas of what affection means,

Living long enough to accept our ultimate defeat,

Each of us a brief elaboration of desire,

Writing anthems of forgiving,

Almost complete.

Click to enlarge.

–In anticipation of a Leonard Cohen album not yet released.

Life on Earth

Good Grey Poet's

Splendid silent sun

A deluge of light

Flooding the hill

Nerves on end

Nothing so fine

In fire and ice

As human skin

To human skin.

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Wraith, an Abstract

A presence so strong

its absence leaves

everything tilted

and quaking and

dappled with desire.

Departure and Return

Joy is the nature of things, look closely––

Where is this fleeting consequence

You've tangled your life in?

–lines from Tu Fu, circa 755

The Storm Knows What It Wants

Click for a closer look.

The storm knows

what it wants, it wants

to fill the woods,

the wind knows

what it wants, it moans

on the hill like a loud lover,

the ice knows

what it wants, it traces

the scars on the pane

with its crystal tongue,

the trees waving their legs in the air,

the air an instrument of the tongue,

the tongue an instrument of the body,

the body an instrument of the spirit,

the spirit a being of the air.

–with four climactic lines by Robert Pinsky

Waiting on a Brittle Silence

Wool under waxed cotton, April clothes in March mud.

This would be the January thaw, except there's been no freeze,

No deep hardening of ground, no solid capping of the ponds,

While on the road to town, unseen beyond the hill,

Traffic rips and tears, no time to waste, no slowing down.

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Spring in January

Look closely by clicking.

Each day now without snow

Becomes a day of spring,

Each night without

Low racing clouds becomes

A night of verdant mind,

Pleased and pleasing on this

 Crosshatched hemisphere.

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Hieroglyphs

s

Read me our story

Told under the bark

By beetles and worms.

Why wouldn't they know?

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When the Engines Shut Down

When the engines shut down, the wind was there

In the field with its seeds held high

and me

Searching

for the last

flowers

Gray survivors curling back on themselves

Living as I do,

in the otherwise.

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Pastureland

Please enlarge by clicking.

Old guardian of pastures and beasts,

I would lie down on winter's flattened grasses

Content at the fence corner to wait for your shade,

And for those who would join me,

Lured by the shielded hollows and paths,

My brothers and sisters awakening with me

To be drawn up, sweetened by your roots,

To stand together two centuries old,

Our 10,000 faces turned to the sky.

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Warmed by the Flow

Like grasses that grow

Where the spring 

Feeds the pond,

Our lives are the richest

Where subtle change flows

Warm under ice;

Meditation and water

Wedded together forever.

Sunset on the Youghiogheny River

–Last two lines are Herman Melville's. 

Lake Effect

Snow thick and fine straight down

Envelopes us in stillness.

Silence is the deepest sound.

-

One-Take Demo

Manipulation from liner notes

No need to get it right the first time,

Just stay busy so you don't think of thinking,

Just make sure you get it down this one time,

Body and soul our one sure chance at singing.

-inspired by a "one-take demo" of "Wake Up Alone" by Amy Winehouse (1984-2011)

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Seductive Nature

Rainwater in a ditch along a dirt road

Beauty everywhere

When we stop

To look, the world

Showing off for us,

Seductive Nature

An exhibitionist

At heart.






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