Art in Low Sun

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Quarryman of the dusty hours

desperate to etch on the slate of the age

with hammer and point a bit of myself

i'd do well to stand still in the sun

as my shadow swings 'round my boots

stretches across the arc of the hill

and goes.

—click here for reading music, "The Vampire of Time and Money," Queens of the Stone Age

Far from Atlanta

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No need to go

Anywhere else

But on foot

Over the hill

Happy to be here

Simply alive.

Paradise

Green Bowl Beach, Bali

As real as a memory, as if we'd been there,

For memories are mostly imagined.


As real as a lover who smiles in the dark,

For lovers are mostly imagined.

The Sting of Sunrise

Day comes pouring at you over the hill.

Hold fast to the trunks like the night

Or the light will sweep you away,

The force of it, blinding, merciless,

Cold as the judgement of peers.

Passengers

Bird in a squal with invisible wings

Carry these lines to the wake of the wind

So she knows our mistake was pure flight.

Arctic Jungle

Warm-blooded creatures on the ice shelf,

driven by extremes, search the frozen flow

for heat, their blood on fire to compensate.

Opening a space in the grey-pink dusk

for experiment and thrill in a jungle they create

with oil and flame and human touch,

shivering at the edge of the clearing they make,

they hesitate,

life shrieking vivid in the understory.

Subnivean

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We under the snow

Whisper dark

A place to breathe

Safe with the rabbits and voles

Closer to spring

Steam beings

Vented in sunrise.

Castaway

Unsteady between the sting of new snow

and habits of thought i hesitate

like a castaway standing in wreckage

stripped on the beach of a new land,

perilous and glittering.

The Fallow FIeld

Once i believed in balance,

that if i left the world alone

all things would find their level,

nature would be fair, i thought,

and then the empty chair.

I should have known,

i  won't forget,

But nature doesn't care.

Front-Runner

Regal in her reticence

Steady and strong in her fur

Queen of the high hills

Ruling by image and silence

By need and desire most basic

Direct, honest, hungry, and true.

Aquamarine

Why not joy, why not heat,

why not the blue with the green,

praise for the runaway mind

afloat in the then and the now,

why not solitude shared,

why not adoring, adored?

Sailing

Why so much sky? the critic asks.

Why so much sea? the poet answers,

Question with a question as poets do,

Because everywhere else

I see so much man.

The Space Between

Strapping on snowshoes

setting off across the

untracked field i feel

again how far away

each thing is from

every other thing,

—you there —i here,

each with our separate

ideas of infinity,

but with just

the door ajar.

—with an allusion to a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Told On the Wind In the Woods

Fame is nothing.

What is a book without a reader?

What is a guitar without hands?

Practice, and go deeper inside.

The sunset must be seen to be beautiful.

Understanding

 The dog and i understand

Each other to a point,

We read each other's moods,

We guess at causes—

Hungry, thirsty, lonely—

Conditions at the core

Of living with a body and a heart,

Aches we've always known.

The humans around me

I understand no better;

How depressing to realize

The limits of language.

Without a word from the dog

I know when she wants out.

Before Daybreak

photograph by Carlos Bueno

Today will engulf me

With a thousand realities.

I shall try not to add to confusion.

Ice Dogs

Single-digit swimmer

Bred for the North Atlantic

Icebreaker strong in the pond

Looking for nets and white surf

Rolls in the snow to dry off

Keeps me outside often and longer

Shows me more day

Than i would have seen with my kind.

Sliders

As you like it

a world unto yourself

retouched straightened saturated enhanced

your own personal dreamscape

your peaceable kingdom

your moveable feast

captured time that never was

six billion fantasies

more alike than anyone would guess.

Common

American beech.

Tree trunk, shadow, sunlight, sky—

This is no language for the holy.

The sacred dwells in the ordinary.

—with a bow to Deng Ming-Dao

Herbicide, the Writing

Nightshade tangled in the multiflora rose,

Damaged ground where beauty grows,

Poison berry, noxious weed,

Take heart, dark soul, and let it bleed.

Of the Pale Tide When the Moon Has Set

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No need for bling and boom,

Still and dun hold mystery enough,

Each passing year

Needing less to make a day

And less again,

Withering to truth.

—Title and thought from Yeats.

Skater In The Change

Surfaces jagged and perilous,

Skate in your polished depths.

The Gift

We start so close to origins and innocence,

Born with knowledge of another realm

Which with each footfall we destroy.

Step lightly.

Her

click to enlarge

And then we learn

how easily we fall in love

as if we needed proof.


The future is old news.

Vapor

Please click to enlarge.

The woods are free of scorn.

Walk with me

In the sublimating day.

I Heard the Sound of Coming Spring

When first i had stepped out into the cold

Quiet of the afternoon i stood alone for a moment

In the perfect stillness of the universe until an echo

In the white-floored woods reminded me of where i was

Here on this hill again listening to the pileates

Testing out their drumming trees calling in their mates 

 A rapping tapping call to spring

To hungry chicks in hollow trunks

To broad-winged dipping flight

To always at the end the painted paradise.  

—with an image from Ezra Pound and a fleeting sensation from Louise Glück.

January Expansive

Mental things alone are real

The master said

Their reverberations fill the valley.


Then the valley, too, is real,

 and with its creek a mental thing.

The eye envies the mind.

—with assists from Chuang Tzu and William Blake.

Powerless in the Polar Vortex

Kerosene in the kitchen.

Six below at sunset as i fixed the fire.

Wind crosschecked the house.

Tenons creaked in mortices.

Tongues of cold lashed between the boards.

Exalted by the blessings of electricity

I packed the foam around the door

Wrapped heat tape around the pipes,

And then the house shut down.

Dark and quiet with the wind.

The dog was born for this, while i

Awaited intervention by the minor gods.

All praise the Rural Linemen.

Rewrite

Click to make the big dog bigger.

Just when i was sure she'd never leave

She charged off through the woods.

Tail high. No looking back.

I called and called into the wail.

Just when i was sure i was alone

She charged back

Slobbering happy.

New to me.

Briars in WInter

Wild to be beside me, fierce and raging.

Dying to be loved like that again.

Dying takes such a very long time.

—based in the Helen of Troy myth -- alpha and omega.

What Was There

Please click to enlarge.

Too long near the stove feeding my heart on fantasy

I went outside to see what was really there

The hill weatherswept was there larger for the cold

And i was there larger for my solitude

Scarf frozen at my mouth the sky a long way off

The clouds pouring in from the north were there

And you were there if you only knew it.

Let

Wind has yet to rise

so let it gale

Snow is not yet deep

so let it weigh

I am here where i prefer

alone with my abstractions

Quiet and still in the darkness

I call recovery.

Spectacle

The sky is a spectacle, but i am looking down

Down to snow made creamy by the sun

The sun that warmed the stalks that melted holes

Holes for the breathing mice and the voles

And the moles and the creatures i think little about

 Little about their lives under snow, looking down

Looking down, me with my head in the sky.



The thousand tiny rapid hearts, do they ache?

First Day

photo by Erin Schlicher

Let's call it another beginning

A new world of elevated expectation

Risking stronger disappointment

But powerfully living

In the round amazement

Of consciousness on Earth.