Upwards

Screams high up.

A redtail

strafed by two crows.

I know someone

who is alive somewhere.

I saw many comments on the screen

but none of them were hers.

Sometimes you have to stand out in the field

and look upwards, and then you must pretend

the stones at your feet are not objects of interest

when they are.

Feathers spiral downward.

–with lines by Mary Ruefle.

Recordar

Counting the days in the summer remaining,

counting the summers as years,

recordar the Spanish "to remember"

from the Latin cor for "heart,"

ah, yes, "to pass once more through the heart,"

I found what I had written then

of one whose heart I passed through,

as they still pass through mine, those few,

that one, that other one,

this one, too.

. . .

Full Summer

Solidago juncea (early goldenrod), Vernonia noveboracensis (ironweed)

Crickets in the shadows thumbing combs,

Katydids ratcheting the dark,

Corn in tassle, and we can smell it,

Shoulders gleaming in the hot breath of the south.

Pay attention, I tell myself, to this alone.

. . .

Climate Change

Woodland asters

a month too soon,

carrion beetles

too far north

on blackberries

in early rot,

and all around

the assault

of men,

rancorous,

internecine.

Searching for Rodriguez

NYT photo by Nicole Bengiveno

Give us a story of humble triumph,

Of talent rediscovered after 40 years,

The artist found working construction,

Getting by in the Detroit trades,

Unaware of his fame on another continent,

Stunned by his late and sudden notice,

Giving hope to all who create in obscurity,

Leaving us moved by a soul well-expressed

In the songs so human and timeless,

Songs so basic to our common lives,

How we yearn for the songs left unwritten.

–Let the links be your guide, and thanks for your time.

. . .

Second Take

Fritillaries in a Killing Frost
(From the Towers)

They rock as they fall

some do

some revolve

turning on their spines

like leaves

slipping on the horizontal air.


Keep singing.

Nittany

AP photo by John Beale

The best of poetry defined

By what is left unsaid,

The best of images defined

By what is left unseen.

. . .

Sailing

When time becomes our own,

The days are long and deep,

And the night is a ship.

. . .

1860 Crossing

King's Bridge over Laurel Hill Creek

Wagonrumble in the valley,

Neighbors coming,

Planks of oak slapping on their beams,

Mists and echoes brimming rim to rim

Through hemlock-darkened hills.

Choice

The day is what we make it,

Selfish as we have become,

Protective of quiet,

Of hours free from interruption

Where we will find anew

Our age of wonder.

. . .

As the French

Click to exchange gazes.

We think we see

Construction

In the void;

We know, at least,

Parallels exist;

Come, dear heart,

Drip cold water

In my absinthe,

Rimbaud be damned,

We shall write

Our own louche lines,

Praising the scaffold

Of our crossing.

One of the Few

Under an American chestnut

One of the few

Looking up

Thunder shaking its copper sheets

Deep in the haze

Mumbling oaths

I want to say something

Beautiful

To bring you back here again

The years have passed through my hands

Like rosary beads

They were not wasted

They were not wasted

Still

Nothing is new

And what

Is more beautiful than that?

–with two lines by Mary Ruefle.

Poets of the T'ang

Please click to move closer

Slow down and see,


Worlds exist within your reach


Of which you understand little;


The dramas of being surround you.


Shall you not seek out peace and pleasure?


Do you think you will live forever?

. . .

Prophet

Water creatures on this water planet,

Intent on poisoning the ground forever

For monetary gain, blinded by commas,

Expect salvation in wealth.


Consider the camel

And the eye of the needle.

. . .

Recitation

Because for 20 years I worked the evening shift,

Sunset over my own land will always be a treat,

Neighbors home from work and the road empty,

Me at the top of the field with songbirds flying over

Headed for their roots as the light disappears behind the last ridge,

Fireflies rising out of the deep weeds,

The stars showing themselves in their places,

The veil of day lifting from infinity,

Witness to the recitation of silence.

. . .

Opening the Mail

October, 1974.

The pictures fell out of the envelope,

Time stopped again, and nothing had changed,

Again she was three, and her weight I felt in my arms,

And again she was gone, and nothing had changed.



"Thought you'd want these," my brother had written,

And I do, though it's happened again, the ambush of grief,

Years since her dying, and nothing has changed,

The world has moved on,

The earth has circled and circled the sun,

Everything's different, and nothing has changed.



I no longer know how to say it,

Keats' "true voice of feeling," what is it?

What can be written, what phrases co-joined?

This is only a man's common sorrow

Here in the world of all of us,

The place where, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all.


. . .

–upon reading Larkin, with analytical comment by Christopher Ricks.

Alien and Unattainable

The alien Daucus carota

We study and we try,

Doing and redoing,

Decades of practice and polishing,

We strive until we bleed

Our full productive years,

Yet the best that we can make

Fails even to come close

To the easy elegance of weeds.

. . .

Engineers

Silk from a spider's abdomen

Stronger for its vital purpose

(and less temporal)

Than the riveted bridge,

Built to carry one train at a time,

And never as a home.

On the Verge

On the verge of being overrun

And loving it, pictures of a simple life:

The garden hose,

Coiled on its rack against the shed;

The idle truck,

Burdock growing through its rusting struts;

A mutual respect:

I do as litte damage as I can,

and nature keeps her distance.

Honest Work

Rooftop

The maple snapped by the microburst,

Suffering for the opulence of its crown,

To lie across the cabin roof

Will warm me once again

When snow piles up against the pane.

. . .

Suspension

please click to enlarge

High summer, a photograph, a poem –

All capable of suspension:

The power goes off in a storm

As I read, and when it comes back on,

I know the clock to be slow, as if literal proof 

I had been suspended for awhile,

A spectacular thing, and the dream of poetry,

To cut a hole in time.

–with two lines adapted from an essay by Mary Ruefle

Independence

Poem for the Fourth

Praise the Common Earth

An ordinary day of unfamiliar heat,

A common blue dragonfly where we expect to see it,

Patrolling the air above the pond,

Thick with the usual cattails and lilly pads,

The customary tadpoles fleeing from the shallows

To the safety of the turgid depths at our approach,

And a ripple there of something we can only feel,

All of it routine, and as far as we can tell,

Existing nowhere else in the ordinary universe.

. . .

Origin

Trees over water,

Dreams cooling in the temperate shade,

Coalescence of the barely visible,

Something of value shimmers

On the surface of the deep.