No Time for Chalmers

My Aunt Maria asked me to read the life

of Dr. Chalmers, which I did not promise to do.

Yesterday, Sunday, she was heard

 through the partition shouting

to my Aunt Jane, who is deaf,

"Think of it! He stood half an hour

to-day to hear the frogs speak,

and wouldn't read the life of Chalmers."

—Thoreau's Journal, March 28, 1853.

Fell Asleep Reading Milosz

it's my duty as a poet to admit

i don't understand anything

time stretching backward forever

the immensity of death

in the dream everything was fine

until we crossed the border

on this side hills and trees

and a nappy blue sky

on the other side nothing

i awoke to write it down

the dog sighs in her sleep

a beetle crawls across the keyboard

the wind roars in moonlight

Blur

A.M. in the U.T.

   

living in the round

ever under the sun

or rolling to it

existence carnival

help me you

who also search

the in-between

you help me

slow it down

Hope

Broaden with a click.

You're wrong

about that.


Bend closer

to the earth.

Cold Front

Near Ocracoke

    

The temperature dropped and the front

galloped in from the east across wide water

a stampede of wind and vapor that brought

the weekenders out of their cottages to hold up

their smartphones and render the present the past

and something to look at and to generate likes

while they waited for the game to come on

time until monday a measure of meanwhile

as the front closed over them and should have

reminded them that the future is fast and forever.

The Zen of Dogs

  

What pleasing fur-swirled geometric

compels us to be near

the grace of line and form of dogs

appealing even in their sleep?

What even greater wonder lies

in that which makes us beautiful

in their mascaraed eyes.

Climate Change

snow fell blameless

a leaf appeared

from the wind

dismounted

warming

take my arm

something

is about to happen.

Rescue

Barker, her papers read,

fence-jumper, and yet

how quietly she stands

looking out the door.

I wonder what she's seen,

why gunfire makes her flee,

what happened to her babies

born to her so young?

Stay here beside me, sweet

good girl, we'll be company.

I've seen a little, too.

Uneasy Spring

   

Wake up, little soul, wake up,

the one you're waiting for is rising from the ground

wrapped in loam and soon will turn bright green,

and the breezes will be light as babies' breath.

Wake up before the creatures of the dark are gone

and everything goes blank as sleep,

you whose days are gone, who drifts like smoke,

tell me what is there, tell me what no one remembers,

tell me something, tell me anything.

A weave of wind and lines from two poems by Mark Strand.

Terminal Winter

Cumberland, MD

      

Slinks off through the gap

recalcitrant and gray as it goes

over the hill on its wet belly

creeping toward the weakening sanctuary

of the sickened gasping North.


One day we will dream sentimental dreams

of its stark whiteness its ringing crystal purity,

regale the little ones with tales from our youth,

how we built forts of it and giants with magic hats,

but not yet not yet not by a blasted february yet.

Equinox Levitation

i would lie on the thatch as the sun uncovers

and be lifted from the loam by the rising spears

of jonquils and daffs toward sparrows in flight

tracing in timelapse the shimmering surface of song.

At the Top of the Field

  

The wind at dusk shakes the tree.

Dark enough for the lights

to come on at the top of the hill

where her ashes have nourished the stems.

Pulsing all night at a distance,

as she does, and she always will.

The Roar of March

Ohiopyle Falls.

  

A soft moist air and a raw wind

fells the stone wall in the thaw

in this muscular reign of water this flood

of emotion this torrent of growth and hope

when the birds are wiping their beaks in the buds

and the Bucs are certain to win their division

and the river shatters itself in the valley

and the beauty you love loves you back.

Welcoming the Dark

The great wing

of night spreads

over the fields,

and its breath

is upon me.


The sky turns

in its sleep

and shows me

the dream, and

the woods sigh.

"...and everyone dreams of floating like angels." — still Mark Strand

As It Is

Melting snow

upon the fields

manure-stained,

evening-limned.

I think of John

Clare's cesspools

glittering in the sun.

The world

rhymes harsh

with gorgeous.

Lines in Fog

  

Feeling, they say, or mood, or the sound

the mountain makes in the March thaw.

But i'm not fooled. It's all a reflection.

Too deep in the fog to be read, but you're there,

too deep in the fog to be heard, but i'm here,

presenting the words one after the next,

erasing the world until all that is left

are invisible lines connecting our absences.

—after "Itself Now," by Mark Strand.

Subtext

he should have kissed her

when he had the chance

don't kid yourself

he was responsible for his own misery

most of us are

too accepting of irony

which is everywhere

these days

The Weather Within

Neither winter nor spring

in a limbo of glare and wind

ice softening to mud the air

still cold the earth not yet

awake enough to overgrow

the shabby leavings of men,

the thaw we have long awaited

too easily running to ruins

the found too easily lost

in the desolate night not our own.

Woodland

She follows his sign as he followed hers,

crossing the run in the woodland between them,

Rain sings its roundelays under the snow,

the higher sun warming them under its arc,

Her fate and his guided toward spring,

their restlessness joined at the fire.

Hilltop and swale are one mountain,

Her search and his one desire.

Back to White

Snowshoe angel with poles

  

Back to my native beach my crystal air

my clean horizon my pearly sky

rain to snow as it should be

March at the start as it should be

sharp wind uncovering the full moon

and the cold creeping in under the door

to keep me company in the land of my birth.

Alone with the Sea

   

We are the few who cross the low dunes

after the sun has set in the gulf

to applause and to thanks and raised glasses,

we are the few who sit on warm sand

after the others have gone to their cars,

alone with with the sea that keeps to itself,

alone with our losses in the deepening night,

staring into the starlanes, the endless tunnels

of nothing – it begins with only one star,

when only one star is all that we wanted.

—with a phrase by Mark Strand.

Even Now

You who have each other,

when the moon and stars

have drifted off together,

light fills the sky,

it shines on the water.

Even as you lean

toward this screen,

late and alone, it shines,

even now in the moment

before it disappears.

—with lines by Mark Strand