Under the Crowns

Tulip poplar. Please enlarge.

Late light in the field returning to woods,

the young trees busy with regeneration,

taking their exotic forms,

keys and pods and flesh over seeds,

making a stationary show of continuance.

Be as still under their crowns.

What you seek there can be found.

The Company of Weeds

Fleabane. Click to enlarge.

Once thought to ward off fleas,

staunch bleeding, cure diabetes, reduce fevers,

dissolve kidney stones, shrink tumors, and reduce coughs,

now considered a common weed that could raise a rash,

it still makes me feel better, lining the road

like family and friends near the finish line,

cheering me on in my own little marathon.

Landscape

Enlargement encouraged.

Morning after rain as epic

Epic in the eyes of Luminists

Luminists to paint the very air

Epic as rain after morning.

Cold Night Before Summer

Then lay me down deep in the growing stems,

Let the long tender arcs reach over me as the birds

Crosshatch the benign sky going to their roosts,

Let the beetles and the lacewings post their eggs

On the undersides of leaves, and the season's last frost

Fledge the edges of my flesh, ground and weather

Accepting my return to the way of things

In a universe vastly empty of opinion.

Tenth Street Rising

Please enlarge.

You there

hurrying up Tenth Street

in light rain,

there are hills beyond

full of souls in dripping bowers

unequal to our own.

Keep going.

Those Left Behind

Plowed ground, a sacred place

and a delicate time, it seems to me,

being Irish, descendant of those

who fled the starving millions

when soil failed them.

The Fawn

Blue let him go when ordered,

Instinct overcome by will to please.

Bleating stopped, he thrashed to rise,

His mother snorting deep in leaves.

We left him to his fate and we to ours.

Gone when we returned,

Servants all to nature in the dusk.

The Comfort of Time

A level place on the mantel is all it needs,

wound daily three turns each, clock and chime,

as my great grandfather did each evening,

checking it against his pocket watch

in front of the fireplace in the dark room,

my fingers touching where his touched,

the sound of its steady working a comfort

and a presence of those faces in firelight

that still make me well up inside

here in my own steady and level place.

Debt to Beauty

These woods are not the works of men

And that is where the joy comes in.

–adapted from lines by Christian Wiman

44 Miles on the Passage

Near Garrett on the Great Allegheny Pasaage

Mountain day that never clears,

hilltops in clouds, horses in mist,

gathering rain spilling down rocks,

peacocks fanning in front of dark barns,

wheeling through the red-eyed trill,

rivers of birdsong leading me home.

–"Red-eyed trill" is a reference to 17-year locusts, now emerging east of Rockwood.

Suserrous

Please click to enlarge

Analyze, you say, but to what end?

Today i would spend with the languages of trees.

Do not ask what i believe.

What the leaves are saying, that is what i say.

–with a nod to William Stafford

Pitchfork

Pitchfork

Take 60 seconds.

Look inside.

(Static interaction)

Hammock

Against the clouds, raptors turn in a gyre,

Under my sway, a gartersnake swallows a finch.

Which is more exalted?

Found Stuff

Found the hat along a private road, likely lost

by one of the laborers who smiled the first time i jogged  by

making eye contact and speaking my English

and forming a joke they laughed at

whether or not they understood,

then greeted me thereafter with a wave and a phrase

whether or not i understood.

They worked hard. I like to think they'll be okay.

I started that way, working hard enough

to let me believe i'd be okay.

Still do. Call it a hypothesis.

I like the hat.

West Side Story

View from the east side of Big Savage Mountain..

Big Savage Tunnel on the Great Allegheny Passage.

Through Big Savage

and back again,

pelted with wind

on the west side

strong enough to end

coasting, pumping

downhill to the station,

meeting happy strangers

from D.C., astonished

that it's snowing in May.

Labyrinth

Exotic unfurling.

Step lightly.

So much is beyond us.

Thunderstorms Expected

Wind, rain

in the willow.

This world.

That world.

–after a Korean Zen poem.

At Our Feet

Bending low to the shadows of violets

Where guidance lies.

PNC Park, Pittsburgh.

Up

Evening

All the long evening

The wind chanted prayers.

It's Not Too Late

Wild asters rising in rain.

Never beg the wind for mercy.

Wild asters and such,

Tall goldenrod and such,

Once all your stems have snapped

Produce new shoots. It's not too late.

–Adapted Zen poem by Ko Un, translated by Allen Ginsberg.

Woodland Mists

Enlarge by clicking.

The woodland thickens when our backs are turned,

We look away and leaves appear, green flesh.

Among the trees the days are long

Yet seasons are so short among ourselves.

It seems just weeks ago we all were flesh together.

Now we are mist, so many

Who have not finished what we had to say.

–with lines adapted from Louise Glück.

Falling in Bluets

Focus instead

on the empty spaces

the teacher said

look deeper

beyond the show

to find the beauty

and the terror

of the unknowable.

Landlubber

Soundside

The wind tilts the ocean against the hard coast,

stirs up the surf to boil and rips,

empties the sound from the back of the bar,

and blows one man's heart back into the woods

where Maypoles are blooming in the shade of new leaves

in the southwestern mountains of green Pennsylvania.

Seeing What's There

Duck, NC, mid-bar.

Maritime forest, unique in the world,

Cleared to build units for rent by the beach.

 Easy to turn our backs on what's gone;

Loss is part of our landscape.

At the Edge

Christmas trees tied together to help the wind and water build a dune.

Alive alone at the edge of the sea

everything becomes a line of poetry,

sharp white birds in hovering flight

spearing flashes in the dark swells,

the surf like a mad dog testing

its chain, lunging and held back,

and you at the edge alone with memory,

away from a world driven by desire,

wanting nothing, not lonely, content.

You are. You are not.

You live by incantation.

The Fight Against Nothing

Removed from the distractions of the way we live now

One confronts the great mystery of existence,

The being and the ceasing to be, and one concludes

The only weapons we have against oblivion

Are human imagination, philosophy, religion, and art.


Get busy, then, one vows.

Fabulous Wreckage

Still life miles long at the tideline,

Fabulous wreckage.


Written well your memoir

might have such perspective


Before the next storm

scrubs the beach bare.