Again

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

No Separation

Elm

Apart

From the structure and order

Of the natural world

I fail.

Red Clover

A bloom of red clover

found deep in the field

falling at the end of a phase

(meaning is so easy) does it

ache for the pollen-bright thighs

of the bee that just left and

late as it is won't be back?

Careful how you read.

Binocular

Apple orchard, Upper Turkeyfoot

You know when you find

one who sees what you see

you gain depth

and move through the world

behind the same eyes.

Recitation

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Let the year wind down.

Let color fade.


The base of beauty in this world

is the press of light

and the touch of space

on form and line

mine on yours

yours on mine.


What the wind says in the field

that is what i say.

Listen to Me

You must listen to me.

For a long time

my asylum was myself.

Give up your search

your muse will appear.

Feel like a young Neruda

the erotic lash of the poetic line.

— with a phrase by Fanny Howe

November Impressionist

morning squall, Upper Turkeyfoot, 11/7/14

Embraced by the wind

we learn what to make

of a diminished thing.

Indago Felix

 Two mornings

Over mountain

Over sea

One joy

Upper Turkeyfoot and the Outer Banks. Click either to enlarge both.

Necromancy

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There's a corner of the field that holds its color still

shielded from the wind by woods

with open sun and pooling rain

where plants grow tall and strong

where goldenrod and asters higher than our heads

slow to bloom and late to die

are pressed to beds by deer

it seems a world unto itself another latitude

i would meet you there.

The Era of Common Sense is Over

Outer Banks photo by Daniel Pullen from the back of a jet ski.

Happy to be home at milkweed flight

the clear cold nights and needled frost

just right for what could be 

yet there's a wave in me

that's breaking still

it builds from ridge to ridge

and rolls with thunder through the valley

it shakes the posts sets off a buzzing

 in the beams and brings me to my senses yes

all of them alive and sparking

in this ocean in my sky

a lighting bolt is five miles long

and i see nothing common in that.

The Winnowing

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Seed on the wind through the clattering oaks

flown from the sparrow-colored field

November is a winnowing month

more space for wild imaginings

the gray birds who never leave

joined by the darker grays from further north

do they imagine flamingos and parrots

just look at us accepting the impossible

given room for runaway minds of a feather.

Words for Standard Time

Settle in with the fire

nodding to the wind in the flue

and to the snow on the stones

and the early night

braided with language

some folded and passed

palm to palm

some spoken so low

it sounds like the yeses of flame.

After 12 Atlantic Sunrises

In this quiet sobbing

inland morning

nobody sings to me

under the swing tree

but there is the tree

and there is singing.

—stolen and adapted from Maureen N. McLane