Shale Play Sunrise Tanka

Tympanic assault

of engines beyond the hill,

the beeping reverse,

are only temporary,

the doves assure me, mourning.

Blue Cohosh

    

In the slow, slow unwinding

of the year's slowest month,

alone in the dripping woods

with the blue cohosh rising,

how do i sing you

the phases of the moon?


Does tomorrow exist

as the rain down the glass?

Can the fire in the grate

absolve us of the future?


The dog sleeps on the bed.

I  listen for hours trying to learn

the language of water and flame,

the chant of her breathing.


Cast beyond the verge,

it's all we can do to cry out

to one another in the dark

like bats hunting moths

in windowlight after a storm,

the universe hung in the trees.

Landscape

He scattered the ash of his daughter

who died astonished it would end,

and astonished it would end he took

to the land where he watched the sun set

and the moon rise behind the old barn,

and the days seemed to pass only to return

like a dream in which one thinks

i've already dreamt that.

—an adaption of Raymond Carver's

"The Lightning Speed of the Past"

to circumstance.

Flood

You know Christina's World

Wyeth's paraplegic couchant in a open field

In windswept sunstruck coastal Maine

Leaning toward a weathered house and barn,

Well, this is mine, this constellated yard.

Something mysterious and important

Is happening out there,

I can't say what as yet,

But i have freed myself from meaning

And an ocean of sensation rushes in.

Grass is Overrated

Valued in the East, poisoned in the West.

There you are

my pollen-headed friends,

just when april was getting me down,

bold and beautiful and smart enough

to flourish close to the ground,

 for to stand above the others

 is to be cut down.

Meditation

the consequence of evening

settles on the pond

so too our days

reflected at their end

On the River of a Dream

Galaxies colliding

On the river of a dream

beneath a drapery of limbs

i felt the strength of current

just before the falls


The banks were thick with flowers

sirens smiling from the shores

on the river of a dream

just before the falls


Architecture on the hills

a city shining in the sun

i'd seen it all before

on the river of a dream


The air all roar and mist

i felt the strength of current

just before the falls

on the river of a dream.


—Hubble Telescope photo by NASA and the European Space Agency. This collision of two galaxies is a preview of what might happen, NASA says, when our Milky Way collides with the approaching Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.

Schott Perfecto 618 American Gothic

How i love to hear the high wind howl

and the bare trees cry out against each other

as the sky runs dark across a horizon of barking dogs.

This is my weather i was made by this

i wear toughened skins of animals blackened and abraded

where the road rose up to meet me not a blessing


At speed i've been down hard more than once

and i'm going down hard again and so are you

so let's stop kidding ourselves.


In the tangle of night you'll know me by my red shirt

an explosion of red in black leather red

because i may have given up on pretty endings


But i haven't forgotten the bursts of beauty along

the way and because blood is the color of life

and black is the color of heaven.

—The Schott Perfecto 618 is the classic American motorcycle jacket

as worn by Brando in "The Wild One."

It's Been, Will Be

Spicebush. Please click to look closer.

Too long,

too long, too long, too long.

A closer look.

Still there.

Not long,

not long, not long, not long.

Getting Through April

At my back.

All through the day

it followed  me

like a poor night's sleep,

a cold wind at my back,

'til i turned full frontally

and looked it in the eye.

It's a struggle now with

an uncertain outcome, 

but I'll tell you this:

you and me and all of us

alive, we've survived.

The World We Call Local

Please click for depth.

The world we call local

is the sun coming up

through the cloud on the ground,

is the air we call breath

rich with feathers and light,

soft with mosses and mist

is the ground we call home.

Pleasures of Sameness

please click to enlarge

I walk the path

i walked yesterday,

sweet, sweet repetition,

rain in the birches

where it hung yesterday,

sweet, sweet repetition,

first the light

then the dark,

pupae of fireflies

pulse in the thatch,

sweet, sweet repetition,

peepers shrill fifing,

playing the song

they played yesterday,

i walk the path,

sweet, sweet repetition.

"If you want to see something new, walk the same path you walked yesterday." —HDT

I Want to Sleep Awhile

click for detail

I want to sleep the dream of Mayapples

to withdraw from the moon

that works before dawn

with a serpent's mouth

I want to sleep until Venus

rises in the trees

but you must know that i

am the porous friend

of the West wind for

I want to sleep the dream of Mayapples

and be cleansed by the earth.

—after Lorca

Song in a Cruel Month

Please click to expand.

Good people

 are losing their minds

pressed between

ribbed skies.

I crouch

with the Hyla

on an isthmus

of night.


Sing

alleluia.

Linked to Again and Again

The rain's in the trees, the sun's

in the grass, the sea's in the clouds

in my blood and my breathing.

The rain in the trees the suns

in the grass are the clouds of the seas

of my blood and my breathing.

—structured on "Roundel," a poem by Maureen N. McLane.

Statue

Rumor.

Though nothing remains but rumor.

Scent.

Though nothing remains but scent.

But tear out of me memory

and the color of the red-gold hours.

Sorrow.

Facing the magical quick sorrow.

Struggle.

The genuine, the hourly struggle.

But rid me of the invisible people

who forever move about in my house.

—an adaption of Frederico Garcia Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Man and Dog and Storm

at the cabin in the woods in a storm

  

Reading poetry aloud in a thunderstorm

to calm the dog, warm against my thigh

and quaking, muscle, frame, the very ground,


And when the rain stops running down

the panes, we'll jog home in shining,

strong in sweet regarding,


Breathing deep the petrichor,

the old light in our eyes

turned feral.

—with a phrase by Maureen N. McLane

In the Dark of the Day

an easy run in a cold rain is like walking at night,

no one about, the mind going off

in its own directions, the cloud

dragging the hem of its skirt

over the ridge, blessing us locals.

Walking Under Birches

Walking under birches after morning rain,

a delicate balance in a softening fog

and saturating ground, but a balance,

nonetheless, glossed by the touch of kindness.

Pleasure makes its crooked way

to the heart, even in Pennsylvania.

Where It Will Go

Windward lyric of ten thousand rains,

answers to a question no one asks,

sets our minds to wandering. 

—with a nod to Paul McCartney

The Unseen Eclipse

Dale Brandt photo

Through the branches of the catkinned birch

I saw two dark sparrows.

The one was the sun

and the other the moon.

Little companions, i said to them,

where is tomorrow?

In my wing, said the sun,

in my beak, said the moon.

And i who was walking

with the earth in my pocket

saw two crows of onyx

and a woman on a chestnut log.

The one was the other

and the woman no one.

Little doves, i said to them,

where is tomorrow?

In my wing, said the sun,

in my beak, said the moon.

Through the branches of birch

I saw two naked sparrows.

The one was the other

and both were no one.

—Lorca in Upper Turkeyfoot.

Vast

Pea Island, NC, Dale Brandt photo.

continent at your back,

ocean before you a black heaving expanse,

and overhead, a ringing immensity –– no,

you do not feel insignificant, you feel huge,

a sensory giant, a colossus of abstract thought,

almost as enormous

as solitude itself.

Jonquils at Seventy

worth a click to enlarge

In a shower high-blown to smithereens,

Another first in a life of firsts,

Blooming in time to a life of lasts,

How wise to savor as if it were that,

Made precious because it can rarely be known:

The last of the firsts or the in-betweens?

Sensual Rain

lilac      

                           

The rain that drives the frost out of the ground

Awakes the gnats and sets the frogs to crooning,

The limbs are more alive, they sense our passing,

And wind in sheets as warm as tropic seas

Streams across our skin.

A Day Divided

       

  

A day divided against itself,

warm light, cold wind,

a day to measure the distance between

what we know and what we reveal,

how grass springs from the rot,

a credible witness to the saving power of cycles.