Following Ancient Thought

Standing on one foot in the afterrain,

An ideal moment between yesterday and tomorrow,

I accept there is no escape from the dream i am living.


Hoping to find what is unique to today,

Observing the simple, i hope to become

Acquainted with the subtle.


I figure it's worth a try.

To be fully human is to know resignation.

I gather the seeds of next summer.

—with direction by Deng Ming-Dao.

Clarity

The fog lifts

 and i hear

robins passing.

I work to

replace myself

with a bit

of racket.

Blue does not

misjudge me.

Turns out

This is heaven.

Surveillant Frost

Please click to enlarge.

The yard and its escapes,

dew-soaked paths over the hill

and into the wind-stripped woods

spiked by the rising sun,

thorny thickets of the dying and the dead,

civilized by footfalls in fresh frost,

early morning's perturbation

of seeing where we've been.

And Slowly

Please click to do so.

To those

disappointed

in the fall

i say,

look closely.

Warp

OBX

How it was and how it fades

Speed it goes and yesterday

Another time become a life

Love it was become a grief

How it fades into today.

Footing

Each of us stands at the edge of a sea

Where there is no secure foothold.

Sharp birds of the tangible world

strut in a dreamscape of vapor and mist.

Sharp of beak and sharp of eye,

Sharp of call and quick to fly,

Reality gives way to dreams.


Where there is no secure foothold

Each of us stands at the edge of a sea.

Shipwreck

Sound under silence.

Wind on the surface.

Onyx waves shattering in moonlight.

Your body rising and falling.

Under you, nothing.

Time and change the same.

Endings are endless.


When afraid of the sea,

Cling to the hull.

The Near Future

Yes, i can see it, coming our way,

Rain in the distance, over the mainland.

No cause for alarm. Let us think

It will calm the agitated sound,

Let us believe it will fall

With a sigh on parched ground,

Addicted as we are to the ecstasies of hope,

Let it be a vision of our own nature.

Portal

Witch hazel

Witch hazel is losing its leaves

and blooming at the edge of the field

near the path where he enters the woods,

blooming at the end of its season

like the deluded poet is trying to do,

hours alone in surrounding limbs

figuring out how to make something

out of not knowing enough,

awaiting the surge, the dreams

that seem to compose half of his life,

understanding at the end his exhilirations

will be scattered here with him.

—A mashup of a few lines and impressions from the poems
of Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dogs.

A Little Weather

Sunrise, Duck, NC. Please click to enlarge.

Dark clouds and a little churn

keep me engaged in this life,

too risky to be dull,

too surprising to be sad,

for long.

Beyond the News

Bluefish, black drum, speckled trout, mullet,

dragged from the surf in a menthol wind,

men in the sun all day

beyond the news,

an entire continent

convulsing at their backs.

Death is the Mother of Beauty

Moon Jellyfish

Edge of the continent

seen through the lens

of death and decay,

the grinding down and the rot,

lifeblood of the living earth.

—Title from a poem by Wallace Stevens.

Span

Post-Gazette photo

Anyone could've written this,

but didn't.

The future is a place

where i don't exist.

I know. But i do not approve,

and i am not resigned.

—a mashup of lines and ideas from the poetry of Rae Armantrout.

Down

Joe Pye weed.

Even a

dying man

will remark

on the sunset.

Settle

your mind.

Next, the

bitten moon.

Nocturne

Today i saw the crystal rain strip color from the trees,

But i did not see your eyes.

Today i watched the blackbirds landing in the ash

Send spinning down the keys,

But i did not watch you move.

Today i saw the white clouds drag their skirts across the ridge,

And i heard migrating swans, trumpeting deep in the dusk

Low above the pumpkin farms, land on the lake with a hiss,

But i did not hear you breathe.

Jump

Your gray sky

scored by power lines


What once was

remains


My gray sky

unbroken


If when you

then i.

Direction

The man catching leaves

Pointed my way

With a stem.

—after Kobayashi Issa.

Union Made

Fulcrum, wheel,

strong limbs,

the simplest tools

give the most

satisfaction.

Come now,

fellow worker,

let us lean our

backs into it.

Push! Think! Feel!

Spell

The trees today became emotional,

high strung and florid, flushed with mortality,

their countless summer faces

wagging down to the roots of their making.


In moments when a distant saw has stopped,

and behind the wooded hill the highway empties,

and the last jet for a spell has passed into the interior,

I hear the leaves landing among their own.


What wells up inside is envy.

When Company Departs

Tapping on my hood in early twilight,

Pantlegs soaked and chilling,

I could frame another pretty picture

As mist weighs down the field,

But this is nearer to the truth

Of Sunday, easy rain, and age.

Heaven

Heaven is symmetric with respect to rotation.

It's beautiful when one thing changes

While another thing remains the same.

Leaves, for example, and their trees.

What i learned today about you,

And how i feel.

–With three lines by Rae Armantrout.

Advice for the Self-Absorbed

Find someone

to cherish.

If you're

lucky, they

will cherish you.


Time runs out.

Dream

Just when i needed you,

There you were, embers at midnight.

I will keep telling you these things

Until i wake up.

Common Dignity in Easy Rain

Click to find Blue.

We should have

known by now

on the water planet

what's high up will

lower down and

what's low down

will rise. All things

find one common

plane, one level

in the ground.

The Things We Say

Sunset first against the treeline

Like the hot stream of thought

Or the march of our conversation

In a gilded breeze that rattles

The imagined hurts against the real,

As if we knew the difference.

We're All Trying to Focus

Evidence of failure

shouldn't provide

consolation but

it always does.

—Kay Ryan on the attempts of William Bronk to find distant focus.

No Happiness Without Hope

Morning in Upper Turkeyfoot

Only once before

Did i feel the need

To invent a world

Beyond this world,

And that had a brutal end.

But what can one do

To restore the hope

Of tomorrow morning?

Sad

We lost.

The river is cold.

The night will be colder,

No one to greet you after the long drive home.

Inclination

I'll take the tilt.

What's a little lean

Among strangers

Wild to be loved?

We Timid Gather 'Round

Fire drawn and fire driven

We watch the sun's release

In the company of owls

Thinking perhaps this is the time,

And that one thinking perhaps this,

And the this and the that staying quiet

And so another evening passes into night

In the company of owls and sparks

And the fire they missed.

Disoriental Pleasures

Solace in small things,

In the minutia of the world,

the big no more grand

and clumsier; the small,

the infinitely smaller—

lean in and become lost,

lean in and fall.

Two hours

Walnuts dropping

On the shed's steel roof,

Taking their time about it,

Bang!

When finally the tree

Is ready to let go,

And the sun has

Passed its zenith,

Bang!

First the shock of it,

Then stunned silence.

Two hours on the phone

With little to say,

The empty tone

Of nothing left.

Head in the Sky at Dusk

Smell of dry leaves crushed by my stride

As night gathers in the woods,

Crawls on its belly into the field,

And climbs the backs of hardening stalks

In a throbbing chorus of insects.

I left doubt behind in the house.

Night doesn't fall. It rises.

Tangled Ivy

Stay back.

You want to, yes, and so do i,

Pleasure all the more alluring if forbidden,

Color all the more enticing if it's poison.

We've had the rash. We know the price.

But isn't it lovely, isn't the thought,

And wouldn't it be pretty in the dusk?