Locus

No matter, here we are,

under the moon together.

-

Sun Worship

Click for migratory species.

Stepped away

In time to stand

On the hilltop

And watch the sun

Drop like an egg

Into the boiling universe.

We'll bob up

On the other side

Of the boat,

Me and my fierce

Silent paramour.

-

Mild

Not winter,

Not spring,

Fall piled up

In the ditches,

Seasonal limbo,

Neither fire nor ice,

When desire

Pivots in mud

Yearning

For extremes.

Floating in a Snowstorm

The day is seldom sharp and clear,

Most moments lack an edge,

Minutes blur, each into each,

Hours are a haze in both directions.


The vague provides us room to drift,

Discovering peace in the indistinct,

Imagination takes flight in the unexplained.

Stepping outside of our minds,

We expand to fill the world we accept.

-

Cold Front Desktop

Black birch in September

I have saved this

on my desktop

for such a night,

wind raging like surf,

snow flying

in the yard light like

spume over breakers,

so we can bask again

under the boughs,

sun-dappled, hidden,

nowhere else to be,

a island nation

of two.

-

Slower

Lichen on a living oak

Fungus on the fallen. Click to look closer.

Do not say

there is no color

to the woods

during the long wait

for violets and leaves.

Stop long enough,

look close enough.

At our feet a world exists

we know nothing about.

-

Revolution

How weak are my concerns,

the bluebirds have returned.

-

The End of Winter

By its cry a barn owl hunting

Awoke in me the glimmerdim,

And I felt the more alive

For its hunger and my own.

And come cold morning,

By the remnants of a rabbit,

I knew just where the owl had dined

Perched upon a locust limb.

What is the quality of life exactly?

To lie down in the comfort and the dream

Of a body against a body – yes,

Sensation is the satisfaction of an age.

I have heard a rabbit scream.

-

Sanctum Sanctorum

The woods advances over decades into the uncultivated field.

Shogun Ieyasu

       Planted sixteen thousand trees

              Around the temple


Then walked among them

       Congratulating himself

              On his sanctity.


On this mountaintop

    The woods does its own planting

              One seed at a time,


Praise to wind and birds

       To all free souls who have

              No need for shrines.

– with a bow to the "easeful learning and well-tuned orneriness" of Hayden Carruth.

           

Slouching Towards Prosperity

A mountaintop dissected.

Top of the mountain

where bears slept

where gods awoke

where hawks turned

in a widening gyre

over the loud river

where humans stood

for millenia

dizzy and bristling

with the long view

disappearing now

trucked away

to make room

for taller trains

and a new river

of commerce

which lawmakers

call stimulus

and I call myopic.

Casselman River gorge from a vantage point on the Pinkerton Horn, soon to vanish.

–with a nod to Yeats

Aubade

The world

converts its

ordinariness

to beauty

every moment.

Give us then

a vacant view

and empty time

to witness

our own

conversion.

-

February Simplistic

Click to enlarge.

Fog on the ice,

pools where the

rain jumped

yesterday,

and now sun 

on open green,

white clouds

on blue space,

you and me

with enough pain

to feel alive.

-

Thoughts While Boiling Chicken Scraps to Stock

Click to see more of less.

The longer I live the less I need

(or so I like to tell myself)

the more I appreciate subtlety

the joy of focus on the immediate

the surety of the close-at-hand

and the more I understand

the importance of less

having just that or trying to

more or less

expecting to discover

sometime soon

reduction

can be more indeed.

-

Walking the Marsh

Onoclea sensibilis.

Walking the marsh

 Slush in my shoes

The fertile fronds 

Of sensitive ferns

Hard and exact

Against wet snow

In this

Our own world

We make

Our own spring.

-

Widdershins

Please click to enlarge.

Our conclusions are wrong.

Take this storm, for instance, damp,

scaring us out of the northeast,

plastering the trunks, the wind

invading hollows we thought safe,

buzzing under the brass weather stripping,

lifting the vents, turning the sticky fan blades

backward in the kitchen.


Juncos congregate in the broken birch

where water hangs among the catkins,

the barn, the house, inverted in each drop,

birds as duochrome as February days,

their breasts the shade of wet snow,

their backs the shade of wet trees,

waiting, waiting, leaving us no choice.


Dissembling we

celebrate mortality.

-

Missing the Dead

The setting sun

finds a gap in

the clouds as it

so often does,

and the wind

in the wires

is a song

of farewell.

-

The Great Coincidence

Today's miracle: Blue sky,

All of us alive at once,

Unique in the universe

As far as we know.

-

Snow Birds

Hungry to be noticed.

Ten, fifty, twelve,

temp, speed, snow

birds at the door

on the seed can

at the window

hovering close

to our faces

desperate

to be noticed

just like us.




-

Overwintering

In snow-charged vivid noon

I dream of spring and what it does to cherry trees

when sleeping bees awaken on their combs

and fly to gather nectar in their mouths

as he to she, to drone among the blooms.

-

Union

First light, last light,

the day in between, and the night

with its fear in three acts,

descend, descend,

join me then when the hill is still blue,

your ordinary loneliness

I recognize, too, as my own.

–with a line by Jane Hirshfield

These are the Falling Years

Native hemlock, native rhododendron, native silence.

Briefcases of cash had been seen in the capital

and we were warned to trust no one elected.

And so it has come to pass, laws to protect

the world's richest industry, bowing to Plutus,

fees and royalties and paychecks the treacle of majorities.


Bulldoze the surface, there's profit lying deep,

pump your cased toxins through the sweet water,

strike the rich night with the drone of compressors,

drive quiet from the valleys and quickly, quickly,

take from the earth what belongs to no one,

waving your claims in the thickening air.


Welcome then, the immense vulgarities

of misapplied science, you in the immense cities,

incapable of free survival, insulated from the strong earth.

There is no escape, the circle is closed, and the net

is being hauled in. These things are Progress.


Here it is snowing just now, easy and windless,

native snow on native trees in native silence,

and the fields and the hills have been glitter-bombed.

– On the occasion of the passage of the Marcellus shale bill by the Pennsylvania legislature.
TItle and third stanza composed of lines by Robinson Jeffers.

Eskimos

I suppose it's true

the Inuit have 20 words for ice:

sea ice, pack ice, new ice, thin ice,

large expanses of ice in motion,

ice like a pearl hung under your nose –

like that, enough to fill a world;

And so as love

floats in and out

of our cold lives,

how convenient

it would be

and kind for us


To hold as many names

for good-bye.

-

Skin

Please click to enlarge

This play of the surface

All we need,

This play of the surface

All we have.

–Gloss of lines by Fiona Sampson.

A Prayer

Fern moss spore capsules, uncapped. Thuidium delicatulum

Bless

something small

but infinite

and quiet.

–Robert Creeley, 1966.

Combustion in an Anachronistic Spring

Please click for greater detail.

Virginia winter in Pennsylvania, rivers brimming and glossed,

limbs exotic in their nakedness, stadiums empty and haunted,

men tarring their roofs on the last day of January,

while up in the mountains

east of of the city, crocuses

are piercing the leafmat –

that slow, undeniable thrust

come two months too soon,

yet not soon enough;

we feel it, too, strong

with the urges of continuance,

mad to be remembered,

fueled by the essence of living.

-

Winter Warm and Wet

Rain above instead of snow

Dripping from the eaves

Silver rain against the woods

Rain in legs that walk the hill

Rain on faces lifted skyward

Rising early life from ground

Fields of sun above the clouds

Tempting rain, the rain below.

-