The Image that Bursts from Your Heart

Amitayus Mandala., paint on wood, Tibetan, 19th C.  Click to expand.

sun shadow east

sun set set sun

moon shadow west

centering lost and lost centering

following words and words following

mandala writing writing mandala

Parhelion

Morning sundog

Dawn is your miracle to witness

your omen of prophecy

your enlightenment

your directive your comfort

and blessing enough.

—from the teaching of Deng Ming-Dao

Evening Song

Only here. Only this.

Only on the earth does life exist

as best we can tell in all the endless universe.

What a grand coincidence it is then

that we share the sunset

with language to turn thought into sound

i hear your mind in this hour of evening

standing in the sky with infinity inside. 

Click here for Philip Glass' Evening Song

Even in the Darkest Days

Snapped them off as i passed

reaching out the window of the truck

concerned about scratches to the door.

Filled with water from the well

an old bottle from the yard,

sat it on the sill above the sink,

and forgot about it, hey,

you never know what can happen

with even the least attention

and a little warmth undisturbed.

Such Things as Revealed by Winter

Function done

it seems but

showing only now

our core

in harsher weather

fiber stem and pore

our truest selves

freed to lean against

each other for

this is who we are

and so proclaim

the right to be

beautiful together.

Angle of View

Please click to see.

You who see what i see here

I know you feel what i feel too

so far to travel in this field

so much to share and days so few?

Early Winter Morning

When i heard at the close of day

how the totals were higher than expected

everyone was pleased but still

it was not a happy night for me that followed,

and else when my plans were accomplished,

still i was not happy,

but when i rose at dawn refreshed

and breathed the morning cool in my lungs,

when i saw the frost sparkling in the moss,

when i heard the crows celebrating light

and heard the rapping of a pileate

calling for a mate on a drumming tree,

when i felt the sun warm upon my face,

i thought of one who thought of me

and knew my friend was coming back,

that night I was happy.

—with a bow to the Good Gray Poet.

Continuum

Leaf florets of wild asters

Spring begins under the wreckage,

next year's promise formed and waiting

as it will be even under the deepest snows.

It's like we've often whispered to each other,

nature has the most to teach.

Christmas Night

Upper Turkeyfoot on a colder, more traditional, Christmas.

"Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle

 played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and

another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in

the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the

parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and

Death, and then another in which she said her heart

was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed

again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my

bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the

unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in

the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear

the music rising from them up the long, steady falling

night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some

words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."

—last lines in the Dylan Thomas classic,

"A Child's Christmas in Wales," 1952.

Hunting Dogs

Romey may not hear as well

as she once did, and neither do i,

but how happy she is to hunt

by sight and scent, her pretty tail

swinging as she buries her head

in the frosted thatch of the winter morning

field where secrets live hiding.


Reading is hunting for me, and when i read

i feel a secret just inside my skin

always on the brink of bursting out.

For Romey, the secret is on the outside,

and she is hunting it, as am i.

—with four lines by Tony Hoagland.

The In-Between

For those alive and dead no longer here,

not much has changed.

The sun still climbs out of the trees, still sets

behind Sugar Loaf when winter starts,

still begins another year by moving up the valley,

one click closer to true west each evening now.

The wind still rushes through the pines

still standing where they stood, like me,

so tall now they break the ridge line in the south,

and i'm okay.

If life's a string of heartbreak still

we had some stretches in-between

when we were fine.

I know you never liked The Eagles much

but still i think it wasn't wasted time.

Biophilia

Where the paths diverge she makes her choice

and waits for confirmation, easily persuaded

with a wave of my hand, then takes the lead

out front where she prefers to be,

a friend's dog come to visit for the holidays,

quiet gentle patient with the less-attuned

 as i begin to understand her needs

and she fulfills my own instinctively,

a gift that helps me be.

Romey cleans ice from her paws.

Companionship

I heard at night the snow beads falling

as i walked the quiet house awake again

and just as well to follow my own thought

where it led me to this place of stationary

calm, and here i make my stand.

We must learn at last

to be our own best company.

Practicing Serenity

In the elegant spareness of winter

let worry go dormant

let wind and careening light

purify the moment

believe in the depth of hushed night

you did what you could and you will

everything to be all right.

Courting the Present

Because we live too fast and coarsely

I darkened the screen, dressed in wool,

and walked in the wind to the cabin,

courting the present in a dusting of snow

somewhere between water and ice,

keeping the time, as Thoreau advised,

a divine leisure some would call idleness,

observing the hours of the universe

i knew to be more fruitful than work.

Closer to Our Little Solstice

Consider the miracles

of water and spheres

in the texture of infinity

upon which our greatest exertions

will leave not a trace.

New Beginnings

Abandoned wagon road

Centered by fog

impassive and serene

letting go of attachment

mysterious water says

simplify simplify

this time I listen.

The Way Back

Swan Beach daybreak. Click to see wild horses.

Every sunrise, sometimes strangers' eyes.

Not necessarily dolphins, even gulls,

even pelicans in a line above the swells,

the heron staring in the drainage ditch,

every road which led me back.

Every red light on the detour,

every carol buzzing in the dash,

even some by Brenda Lee,

every burlapped tree roof-racked.

I sense the sense of two.


The place where the spring runs out of the hill,

when will i see you there again?

Stacks of books, every page, every song,

even when there isn't one.

Did you see the meteor shower?

Every thistle, shell, and cloud,

every sneeze and breaking wave.

Every mile, each roadside stand,

every apple, pear, and plum,

I come undone, undone.

—adaption of a poem by Dean Young, with lines by DY in italics.

Going

Pane of sea

slipping off the bar

Band of day

sinking in the sky

North before the solstice

everything I think of is not here.

Searchers

Earphones blocking the sound of the surf

he swings his dish in the dusk at the tide line

waiting for the music of metal sweet to his want

for the thrill of the dig the pocketed coin

hunting hoping so much has been lost

seven billion searchers on the earth

you'd think we'd find each other

sooner or at all.

After a Storm on the Banks

The disabling tide has receded at last

days of gruel with water at merciful end

left in its wake beautiful decays of barnacles

foaming rainbows shivering in a dropping wind

and a prideful self-sufficient man happy again

to be roughing it alone past where the road ends

with a replenished supply of almond milk

a fresh bouquet of organic kale

and a systemic ache he blames on a virus

that no amount of ginger tea or ibuprofen will alleve.

The drifting parting departing clouds

where have they gone?

Swan Beach Courtesy

Over the dune and under the sea

where the road goes in the gale

nature acting natural

reminding us.

Coastal Flooding

Swan Beach, NC

All night and day the wind

whips the sea to foam

and blows the sand to smoke.

The dunes move south

grain by roaring grain.

I walk the beach alone

leaning on the gusts

not so far from home.

Not by Minutes

When our season comes

we shall live by moons

and we'll be free.

Running at Night

A little grain a little blur

a little strain to see what's there

stimulate the engine of the mind

better than the crisp the well-defined.


Clarity is over-rated.

Swan Beach Lament

Swan Beach, NC

You won't see many postcards with

a northeaster slinging sand in your face

but elemental desolation clears the head.

When the state road is the beach you attune

to the moon and the tides and the wind

to the surf and the storms at sea and love it

while you can for plans are being drawn

the developers have come and you wonder

how to kiss another open beach goodbye.

Barn With No Animals

Broken glass on trampled earth

hammered iron rusting under rotting burlap

leather reins still wrapped around the harrow handle

the ghosts of animals in their empty stalls

their honest scents still rich in the beams and timbers

and not much else

all that's left after so much work to make a life

eight successive generations

no one pretending they were something else

they were farmers and they farmed

so little outlasts flesh and bone

here the barn and here the fields

and here the house with wind in its attic

its mud room fallen into the cellar hole

its roof leaking and standing not much longer,

it seems a holy place in need of preservation

a way of life most have forgotten

look back far enough and find

all of us were farmers once.

The Wind Does Its Work

The wind does its work

Over the field wet with melted snow.

Change follows change follows change,

Living as we do in acceleration 

The years grow shorter, yet

We can make the days grow longer.

Why not let things carry our hearts away?

Are we not at the beginning of a golden age?

The events of the broad world may be beyond us

But we can turn this morning into forever.

Again

please click to expand

Sweet repetition,

Day and night and morning light,

Sweet, sweet repetition.

The Continuous Life

You don't really know. Say that each of you tries

To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear

The careless breathing of earth and feel its available

Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending

Small tremors of love through your brief,

Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

—Mark Strand, 1934-2014

Quieted: A Cubist Past Tense

Little Sandy Run, Upper Turkeyfoot

Muffled laureled slope a small meandered stream exposed

like a vein in clotted snow fell from saplings bent

i passed as if a spun molecular a wandered thaw

fired inside me microwaved the way

opened by defeated swallowed fricatives

interned heat again soon afterward

returned to civilized lacerated ice

i listened to it hiss.

—Some people, it seems, talk too much.

Retrospective in Wet Snow

So everything you heaved up into the air

with all your might came crashing down.

What did you expect? It's foolish to follow your heart.

Look at me. I still don't know what to say

and i keep saying it.

—with lines adapted from Dean Young

Hope

Upper Turkeyfoot, 11/25/14

Shadow of night in the day

shadow of then in the now

what we were leached by the rains

sewing the seeds of will be.

Grounded

We all feel suspended

over the pit

and ready to drop.

How joyful then

to wake up at sunrise

put our feet

on the boards

and then

on the ground.

We will never

get enough of that.

Zazen on King's Mountain

Back by request. Click to expand.

The geese have vanished from the sky.


Now the last clouds drain away.


We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

—after Li Po, c. 750

Bike Ride with Painted Stallion

We galloped until dark.

I rode under geese high and loud over the sheared fields

at right angles to my speed and the sunset

over the winding macadam and into the wind

a piebald horse fierce with youth and confinement

raced across the meadow to gallop beside me

and we gloried in the going the ground

shaking on the other side of the wire

his thick mane blowing and his forelock tossing

and his bright hooves pounding

and his big eye rolling and my tires singing

both of us turned out for a run

both of us wild with the wind in our mouths

determined to make the most of the sun on our backs

the colt free for a day from its paddock

me free for a day from the present

and we paced each other as long as we could

i felt the burn in my thighs and tears blew across my temples

until the woods held him back and the road turned up the hill

and i stopped at the top breathing hard and i went back.

Landscape

Please look closer by clicking.

Pay no attention to the surface

if you must look look deeply

into the valley brimming with fog

into the hills bristling with woods

into the eyes of a lover gleaming with desire

for there is the future given the strength.

Aboriginals

At morning i followed the tracks

of coyotes that followed my paths

through the field rich with rabbits and mice.


At evening i ran down the lane

toward a bear that ran through the woods

toward the house heaped with dreaming and books.


What floats on the air on a recurve of wings

what stands on the ground be it rooted or legged

all native all deep in the sweetness of living

and where we belong, all of us home.

A Novel in Nine Lines

Please click to expand.

We dressed in layers

stepped outside

and gave our bodies to the wind


The wind turned as we watched

west to west south west to south

and we untied our scarves


Removed our gloves and without words

we promised tenderness each to each

even as darkness overswept the hills.

Not Staying This Time, But Sure to Return

Winter at the door like a poor relation

 a glittering cold with no red in it

a day down on its luck

seeking out a little human warmth.

Feed it from your meager stores and

slide another split of oak into the stove.

Good to see you cuz but time to go.

Single digit air and double digit wind

We do what we can you know?

Shifting in Fog

Walking in the scarves of fog

the hill moving underfoot

each rise and slope a new shift

to the delicate balance of life

and the world or whatever we call

that which we are and feel

and isn't it an astonishing thing?

— in the company of Shelley

How Do We Go On

rust and rustle in the fields

then a cold rain in the dark

and the weather turns

to white and how do we go on

in the long and longer night


a new tower in the south

all night the light blinks north

the hilltop hates its flashing

but i can't see it from the shadow

of the pines that block the wind

i imagine how but i can't see it

That Astonishing Thing Ringing in the Enamored Air

Fall ends.

Ice and isolation.

Just like that.

Summer's missteps

mourned less

than chances missed.

Forget?

Never. As it is

memory goes

before legs.

Just like that.

— Title from Shelley

Optics

Moonless snowfall, Upper Turkeyfoot, 11/13/14

Almost nothing.

Almost everything.

The mind fills the heart.

A Finer Mesh

Is to strive without moving

to gain subtlety standing on the hill

as the earth rolls back from the sun,

Is to float on the surface of existence

to catch the finer things in life

things for which we need no names,

Things found only in serenity.

While It Lasts

please click to expand

On the last warm afternoon for awhile

i pulled the sheet off the thumper*

slipped into the battered leather jacket

and took a long slow ride over the ridges

and into the shaded valleys more a drift really 

past old farms and across cold runs

feeling the terrain absorbing geography

once following a trail of shelled corn

that began at the sheared fields beside

the steepled church at the top of the hill

and led all the way down the mountain

to the beaten lane of a working farm

that lifted my spirits —

men hard at work in daylight.

I like to think of them as guardians.

* — a four-stroke, single-cylinder motorcycle

Kingwood, PA