Day with Clouds and Trees

The day towers over me,

downwardly mobile and peaceful,

threatened only, as far as I know,

by a weak chance of lightning

later this evening, free for now

to stand on the hill like the trees,

lenghtening my shadow,

making a slight noise.

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Colloquial

Philaenus spumarius' self-made bubbles

When I engage with the world,

Inspiration surrounds me.

When I study the close-at-hand,

The familiar becomes strange,

And the common day brims with surprise.

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Clean Cornfield

Engineered seed

designed to grow

in treated ground

does just that,

and we are pleased

with our dominion

over the earth,

fooling ourselves.

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Pollenators

Some are meant to be hexagonal,

Shoulder-to-shoulder

In the galactic spiral,

Some are meant to probe

Eruptions at the edge,

Knee-deep in volatile creation,

Seed-makers, risk-takers,

hungry, lusty, and in peril.

Tilling the Ground We're Given

A line of work is a line of sweat

Sweet and with no substitution.


A line of verse is a line of blood

Sweet and with no resolution.

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Overlooking the Texas Eastern Transmission natural gas pipeline through Upper Turkeyfoot.

I try not to think far into the future.

I take good care of each day.

–Kohei Itami, 77, survivor of the 2011 Japan tsunami.

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In the Perfume of Blackberry Blooms

Looking east at sunset,

Birdsong, frogchime, cloudshine,

Sky enough to be as we really are:

Magicians, wizards, adventurers, travelers

Without leaving the field;

We are the current final version,

Wanting to be air, wanting to be ashes

Upon ashes, our last chemistry

Deepening as roots into ourselves,

Rising as flowers and thorns,

Anguishing no more forever.

Upon Hearing the News of What Is to Come

First the lease, then the stakes, then the screaming saws,

And the woods will fall in ten thousand groans,

Then the drill and the trucks and the slapping chains...

Too much, too much, and only the beginning.

Look away.

Beauty is irrelevant to profit.


The wild God of the world is intemperate and savage,

You do not know him, you communal people,

Or you have forgotten him; beautiful and wild,

The hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

At night they shall remember quiet and fly in a dream,

And the dawns will ruin it.







                              –second stanza composed of lines from Robinson Jeffers' "Hurt Hawks."

Answer

You who read and consider,

You who pause under the trees

Long enough to feel their sway

And marry it with your own,

Moving as the great limbs move

In the rising wind as the rain nears,

Poets to come, answer what I am for,

I but advance a moment only to wheel

And hurry back into the darkness.

–with three lines by the Good Grey Poet

Contours

Shaped by the forces of the universe,

Your path conforms to the contours of the earth.

You live your life as if it's real.






–with a line by Leonard Cohen.

Blue to Black

Rananculus acris

Skyweeds reaching for the sun

Close their cups against the dark,


Country dwellers looking up,

Outside from dawn to Jupiter,


Build their fires and gather 'round,

Reaching for eternity.

Afield as the Fog Lifts

Wandering where I wandered yesterday,

Thought and silence woven together,

I think the heart finds its beauty in adoration.

Among the shivering spheres, I adore this world,

All things wandering away at this brimming moment,

And what has this to do with past or future?

–with lines by Hsieh Ling-yün

There are things better left untouched

By the blunt instruments of words.

–after a journal entry by Anna Kamienska

Expand the Day

Treat the days like separate lives

The teacher said two thousand years ago,

So I walked in the woods

In the rain and the dusk.

 The birds called from their roosts

And I saw the sky in pieces on the leaves

And yes it was a separate life.

Fishing Hole

Laurel Hill Creek

Unchanged in forty years

Except for who's not there.

Faith in the unseen,

Confidence in the unheard.

Silence is harder

But more eloquent.

Waiting for a Name

Wind she wrote

       having lost her pen

       somewhere on the slope.

Lips she wrote

        with an aster stem

        dipped in the earth

        mixed with her saliva.

Mist she wrote

        as sunset spread

        its red-gold thighs

        and 20 doves flew up

        from the valley on their pins.

Beauty Without Us

Surrounded by the graceful plumes

and seed fountains of the wild grasses,

how foreign and contrived the pansies.

Open-Ended

Quiet and still long enough

for the sun to rise over you,

feeling the strength from the ground,

you bloom to the chances of sky.

Asking for the Dark

In the early evening

The dark comes in like a heavy tide...

Ask for a poem

if you love the night

and the thought of the ringing void

my darling.

–first stanza from Thomas McGrath's "Reading by Mechanic Light"

Exclusion

From midnight on –

Trying to pick the stony lock of sleep...

We cannot see them

But even behind clouds

The moon has friends.

–adapted from lines by Thomas McGrath

All Men and All Women are Different

Birds called through the dripping woods

young green.

I tended to my wounds the real

and the imagined.

Perhaps I slept. When I awoke

the sky had changed.

Questions circled in my head

like planets.

I found the rain complex and the dark

a comfort.

Undertow

photo by Kelsey O'Brien

Water hammock, web of tides

hung between the walnut and the pear

rocking in the swells of evening,

swung to sleep in the lap of the sea.

Occupied

So much left unsaid

traveling as we all are

inside ourselves

unrecognizable.

Reminder

Robin that flew from the wild rose

to stand in the ash tut-tutting

lifted my hope for the day

to find the force of this world

packaged in sky and light.

How small my work.

Untouchable

You've made your name now

spoken with the made names

among the millions heaped

at the edge and slipping

but something's been lost

in this name you don't recognize

as the flesh begins to loosen

and the mind burns brighter

fashion be damned 

deeper and deeper now

in your tattered clothes

cast off by soldiers and you

spaced enough to work again

freed by the embracing enigmas

–weak tribute to an artist

Balm

Loosed into summer

on our backs under the oak

watching it's leaves open

catching light

time's rope unraveling

stunned by consciousness

almost happy.

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Observations at Sunset

I felt like a cloud in no wind

and looked down at sunset

into the valley that is my life

and into the dark ahead of me

and i knew i was older

the same but older

it seemed to have happened

while I was somewhere else

and I saw how the others

were growing old around me

and i just wanted to say

that I loved the world.

–under the sway of W.S. Merwin

Where the Past Lies

I know of several barns

where i thought

the past might lie.

– E. B. White

–Marking 60  years of  'Charlotte's Web."