The Flow

The wind

turns its back

on the bar,

wanting

to be seen.

"Here,"

says the wind,

low in the dune grass,

everything moving,

everything shaken.

The wind

has me

well-rehearsed

in the ways

of the world.

—with lines from Seamus Heaney's "A Herbal."

Poet in Exile

  

all this writing

with so little written down

pixels effervescent in surf

pages up in smoke


you were wrong

when you said

it was only striking keys

look where it led


i've filled my pen

i'm making notes

acid free in a sewn book


indentured to the wave

even if there's no one left

to look.

Pale Angels

The winter woods i desire ever.

They are calm, they are clear.

Crowds of pale angels on their rounds

At every open crown.

—based on a 12th Century Irish poem

Back to the Ground

Laved by a thin rain,

Cured for the hour

By mosses and ferns,

By the low sky's reflection

On the woodland spring,

Breathing the blue air

On a carpet of welcoming hands

Spread over the stones—

This way back to the ground,

Walker in rain,

To the shut-eyed blank of underearth,

This way down.

How Glad I Am

Christmas morning, Upper Turkeyfoot, 2015.

How full of soft, pure light

The western sky is now,

Unless you watch you do not know

When the sun goes down,

It's like a candle extinguished

Without smoke.

How glad I am to hear an owl,

Rather than the most eloquent man of the age!

—HDT, December 25, 1858

On A Warm Christmas Eve

When light breaks over me

The way it did on the road to less,

And gold lamé shivered on the field

Between the house and the woods,

That day i'll be in step with what escaped me.

—adapted from Seamus Heaney's "Squarings"

Altitude

Home again and good to be

Grounded on the land

At this higher altitude

Among the solid landscapes

And the peacefulness of evenings

When the trucks stop running

Away from the noise and polish

Of the grinding sea and the coast

with its endless vanishments

I will yearn for in time.

Survivor Beach

The lights of Kitty Hawk

  

Walking the night beach

Ocean thunder

Existential dark

Given to summary

Weak when you should have done more

Foolish when you should have done less

To come to this.


A few times you did it just right.


Turn into the wind.

Sunrise at Low Tide

And so each span of consciousness begins

Massive, golden, heavy green, and roaring,

The cinematic hopefulness of youth

Re-entered from the other side of life,

Air and ocean, sand and light, flow on,

Flow on, the journey of the soul,

Everything flows on, stunned anew

In gilded solitude each morning with

Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

—with two lines by Seamus Heaney

Easy Alone

A privileged week,

saved for all year,

to drive all day

and park the truck,

and leave it sit until

you drive all day again,

to be

submerged in light,

in pouring froth,

in angled wings,

in curve, in wind,

the days between

so quickly end,

and you so filled

with emptiness—

precisely so,

off season.

To be filled, you first must be emptied.

—from the Tao te Ching

Given Wings

A ribbon of the Currituck Sound

  

Fierce companion

Of the never was,

Dusk is not too late

For flight.

The Shortest Days

Please expand.

With winter closing on the beach

I walked for miles and met no one

Though many passed.

The Freeze to Come

Praise the mountain's frost

that stings the fist,

the hillside's solid freeze

that clears the way

for growing after rest.

Go easy now,

renewal's at the crest.

Daybreak in Upper Turkeyfoot

Steadying

Finding calm in a chain of sunsets

Take to the hills

the sanity of silence

ravishing self banishment

the earth going hard underfoot

outside the opposite of hiding

to be among the things

that have stayed in position

steadied by root systems

standing their ground.

Second Saturday

Afield in gunfire

and frost in retreat

as the sun clears the woods,

breathing deep

the cold clean air

at the top of the hill

where she lies scattered

for the three-thousandth morning

circling in the nest

of cycles of light,

but the circle is broken.

As Though Impossible

It seems impossible

not just the thought of you

but the wind and the sea

as though memory were a mist

you could walk through

as though you could walk

through these lines of poetry

and coexist by contact.

—with an approach by Kay Ryan

Omega Ethic

  

Type to me,

Tell me the colors of dusk

Further out,

You were not wrong,

The sky spins,

I am here

For what remains,

And as close as i can come

Until then.

November Descriptive

A cackle in the rain-jeweled woods

and a rush of wings in the early dusk,

turkeys disturbed in their roosts,

deeper now into the valley,

hills bounding off in the mist,

and beside the shining road

the fresh hide of a deer,

ears heavenward,

filling with drizzle,

a bit of the soul of the beast,

clinging to its skin,

cools in the weakening light,

a barn owl by its cry

echoes between the ridges,

on cue.

Window at First Light

First light gathers at the glass

Undraped for early waking,

Red shadows in the room,

Morning without the sun

Which fails to rise,

But moves instead

Sideways through the trees,

Like a cell straining to split,

It must be as hard

To double as to die,

No longer imperiled by love,

Free now.

Behold the hill,

Forever formed by what it used to be.

—with a few lines by Kay Ryan

Two After Oliver Sacks

  

Prognosis

Say six months,

Your perspective

Sure to narrow,

Love, work, art,

The natural world,

A stopped world,

Say world peace

Begins within.

Filling in the Blanks

Said the doctor,

Metastasis, with a frown.

No time for global warming,

No time for the Middle East,

Though I still care,

They belong to the future,

I have my work

And those I love,

And I have gratitude

For having lived and thought

On a beautiful planet.

I am now face to face with dying,

but i am not finished with living.

—Oliver Sacks, 1933-2015

Turn and Return

  

Shining, colder days with weight,

Polished by a whiter light

Like pearls strung loosely,

The earth showing its true colors,

Its russets and siennas,

The leaves all down

Where we can get a closer look

At their classic lines and symmetry—

We should return to ground as gracefully.

Colder in the Hills

The township smells of woodsmoke

Were you planning to come back

Did we walk the woods at sunset

As the chainsaws' then the gunfire's

Final echoes faded in the valley

Did you love me then

Or do i have it wrong again

I can't be sure of anything

What follows is the stillness

Before winter settles in.

Easy Rain, Warm November

please click

As much beauty

In the common ground

As we are ready to receive

And not a drop more.

—paraphrased from the journal of Thoreau, Nov. 2, 1858

Cloud Cover

yesterday's ride, today's run

* * *

hurtling through space

wrapped in our sky,

scheming against ourselves,

barely seeing

as the days expire

* * *

tomorrow's perfect stillness

Soft Focus

tones in silence * the path * sun down

without intent * enough

to be fading * unfocused *

a walk through the completed field

uneventful * a beetle

in the grass * the way

to a deepening joy

Iconoclasts End Self-Imposed Exile

Sharp wind off the continent

Lifts the black water into blades.

We're crossing soon,

Abandoning the polished halls of leisure

To span the bridge to flight,

Returning to the tasered mainland,

Its sums and ossified systems

Dulling the sheen modestly won

Barefoot on sand, shirtless in wind,

Smoothed by a natural sway,

Sea music we'll hear

Until the bastards wear us down.

Stilled

When you have nothing more to say,

Just walk the beach

With the sun behind the dunes,

No one in sight for miles,

And the tide coming in,


This clean, rough music

You will hear

All the long drive home,

And hear it still

All the next night through


In your own bed,

And hear it still

In the bright quiet of the woods

Awaiting snow, and, still,

You will have nothing more to say.

Out of repose the truth springs. — Patrick Kavanaugh

The Ocean at Night

Night at the edge of the water,

with the wind in your face and the surf

spilling incandescence on your feet,

the middle ground is swept away

until all that remains

is the great and the small,

that which is closest to your heart—

there, the unbroken curve

of the globe in the dark,

and there, Orion leaping,

with the wind singing backup

for the empty sea, and there,

among the black silks

of the universe, the shivering stars,

and the shudder

of each wave's collapse,

and there, the wind

with no one there,

and then you are,

and nothing is resolved.

OBX Journal

East

A width of sand, a few hundred yards

where the wind is the thing,

a wind you can lean on,

muscular and with intent,

and the turning earth,

and the circling moon,

and the roar of it all,

the surf of your passing,

you at the edge still working,

gathering strength where the sun

rises and sets in salt water,

expecting the next system out of the tropics,

always the next storm

gathering beyond the curve of the globe,

and you're ready, even if this is the one

that unmoors you from the planet,

composing one more line and getting it down

in case someone cares to read it

at the bottom the sea.

West

The Weather, Turned

He'd been holed up with the wind

and grew accustomed to its chanting,

alto at the corners of the frame,

bowing out the windows

in two-toned gasps,

lament for the clotting sea

thick with jelly fish and twistoffs,

mylar balloons deflated at the tideline

proclaiming happy this and happy that,

he couldn't call it singing.

Long ago he'd lived with a woman

higher up in the hills

with different glimpses of the sea,

and it's good she wasn't there now,

holed up in the dark

behind the eroding dunes,

each tide scrubbing deeper than the last

and leaving less.

Palette

The gray-green sea,

And the gray-blue clouds,

And the gray-clear air in between,

Damp with the fears and weak dreams

Of ill-defined men straining for tint

And a hint at the colorless days,

Unless black is a hue and the shapes

Are not lost on the pulverized slopes

Of what once was thought solid and true.

Where's the red?

Where's the yellow with blue?

New York City

Anchorless,

Drifting,

Like rain at sea.


You were not supposed to die,

And neither am i.


A fog gathers over the water.


The places you took me,

Embroidered with foam,

Under gulls,

Among artists.


I am still learning.

The Ocean Inside

Before sunrise, the Atlantic side of Duck, NC

In the beat of the weather,

In the wash of the lyrical surf,

The world is still with us.

The peace we seek

Floats on an inner tide.

Coastal

Expand by clicking

Leeward rain

Seeing what we see

So few remain

And where are you?

First the Light

Currituck Sound

Out of the sea,

Over the bar,

Into the sound.

Something to count on.

The Moon

Because the wind outflanked us,

Or the rain filled our pockets,

Dissolving our notes,

Or we caught up on our reading,

A pound at a time,

Or the sea, as it crawled on its belly

Toward the dunes,

Shouted us down,

Or the casual pairs of young clerks,

Escaped from D.C. in Subarus,

Stripped to their pretty underwear

And, bounding into the wild, cold surf,

Whooped with sensation in the riptide,

Carried away,

Or Soutine, in Paris without freon,

Painted a carcass of beef which

He washed each day with a bucket of blood

Collected from the butcher by his girlfriend,

Reglistening,

Or a good woman is hard to find,

Or the moon,

I forgot to mention the moon.

—Title and ultimate line from a poem of the same name by David Berman.

Telemetry

Walking the beach

Early in a penetrating wind,

The surf blown to a frenzy

Like the pulse amplified,

And you hear it again,

The roar of her blood in her veins,

The next dark system off the continent

Overtaking the sea and its distance,

Closing you off like grief,

But you have the space of the day to move in,

And you will deal with the night when comes.

Sonnet of the Lunar Tide

We belong here,

Ancient mariners casting bones,

Apologizing for the eyes in our heads,

Stargazers, wierdos, prestidigitators

On private trips to the moon.

Let the truth have its way with us,

Let the brain stumble from its hiding place.

The end of what?

Shadows kneel in the dunes,

We lock our hearts into idle not sure

Of this world or the next.

Hear the sea coming,

Say it again – we are spared nothing,

We belong here.

–A pastiche from the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa

Dei Ex Machinis, East by Northeast

All the machines are on,

Gravity and the east wind,

The floating spheres

Of fire and reflection

Alternating fear and false hope.

In a few days will rise

The moon in full

Out of the curve of the earth,

Skull of the furled sea,

The dark parted lips

Of the soluble dead

Facing the mainland,

Showing white tongues

To what lives.

Tide follows tide follows tide,

The rise of a transient gleam,

The collapse and the shattering,

Work of the gods from machines.

We never had a chance.

Beached Men

  

Reading a black Irish poet

on a bar in the Atlantic

'though it's still October

and the water's sixty-five

no one else is beaded

with the sea.


Men in pants

are drinking whiskeyed beer

under a red umbrella

and making broad statements

about women and oh

life beats you down it does

and yes it's time

for another plunge

into the dark cold undertow.


Cue the sad fiddle.

From the Roof

Expand by clicking

October swept

from the cabin roof

it needed to be done

deeper with each year

the blanket laid for winter

each summer with less passion

each autumn with more fear

yet from the roof

closer to the sky

nests appear as leaves release

the crowns are full of blue

don't be so quick to go