New June

  

Did you get what you want

at last, convinced all that

was fiction at best,

madness perhaps, at least

a selective contagion, virulent

to the maimed and the quick,

fatal to the rocket-propelled?

Blessed be the bi-polar,

their heaven is upon us.

Do you pretend you are

not molten at the core?

Drinking from the Spring

19th century water source

  

To drink from the spring they

drank from when their walls

were stacked trunks to die

in winter with snow blowing

through the broken window

to stop the blood of flowers

to untangle harmony

to look back, to look back

to clear the field and plow

to the edge of the forest

to write in a pure language

of stone and ash and silt

to read in candlelight

to lie down in wild asters

to drink shadows.

—with lines and form after Tomaz Salamun

Dark Iris

worth a click

Enchant me then

dark iris

I dare to touch

 disturb the rain

the order of your cells

the swivel of the universe.

Feels Like Summer in the Country

  

Country people raked their gardens,

pleased to be doing so at nine p.m.,

and that the rain had held off,

'though they could hear the train whistle

in the valley and see the maple leaves

turning over in the easy, weighted breeze,

sweet with locust blooms, and many

said they'd seldom seen the like, and

knew that rain was coming in the night,

and thought the best of their neighbors.

   

Eden

water iris

   

We disconnect

and the yard becomes

an enchanted place

free of distraction

in full immersion

swept up by the power

of cycles of fire

the attraction of bodies

the spinning air

the flashing light

the water that falls

on everything we see and feel.

Fingers and toes deep

in the living earth we

take nothing for granted.

The Tribes

  

What could be more primitive

than family 'round the fire

listening to owls and

wondering at stars?

What could be more true

to who we are and just how far

we've come, which isn't far?

Amphibious Artisans

click to enlarge.

In two worlds

not so different

from our own

feet in mud

coming up

for air

golden eyed pro

creators bellowing

the dreamsongs

of existence.

At the Edge

    

of the forest

in the doved morning

his shadow floated long over the frost

his breath unfurled before him

he listened to the crows slamming in the valley shade

he felt the certainty of distance and of time

birds webbed the rising air

and beyond the silent jets somewhereing

the sky blued deep.

Close to Sundown

Close to sundown

the rain easing

i gather strength

at the bottom

of the hillside

shorten my stride

and keep going

because i know

that's all there is

and up to me

close to sundown.

Memorial

Please click to expand

Back to wool today

in softer, stranger weather,

back to overwhelming love

for which we have no better word

except to call it intellect,

accept it and its danger.

Cohabitation

Please enlarge by clicking.

Long wardens of the iris beds,

scaled mothers of the stable ends,

patrolling the log pile and the cellarway,

tasting the air with tempered tongues,

i greet you good morning,

my round-eyed, tolerant yardmates,

handsomely striped and gleaming in the sun,

this field and woods and open sky

all the world we need.

Should Be a Holiday

Black birch, Upper Turkeyfoot, 5/9/2015

"Most trees are beautiful when leafing out, especially the birch. After a storm at this season, the sun comes out and lights up the tender expanding leaves, and all nature is full of light and fragrance, and the birds sing without ceasing, and the earth is a fairyland."

—Thoreau, 5/17/1852

Next year, when it happens, let us take more notice.

Overnight

Like a warp in the sheet of the universe,

poppies erupted in the night, solar flares

in the deep darkness that surrounds us,

irradiating the yard and charging the air

and everything in it including me

joyful in a cleansing rain.

Swimming Parallel

No dread, on out where passion went,

but a thrill like the pull of the undertow

saying "Come to me! Come to me!" until

it died somewhere on out beyond the breaks

and left me kicking here,

stretching for the bottom, still alive.

Ancient Bond

Enlarge with a click.

In the company of keener senses

i better know the day.

—evidence suggests the domesticated dog

existed 135,000 years ago

Conscientious Objection

For more on Stafford, click his name, below.

Each day he wrote before dawn,

a quiet presence in the landscape

bearing witness to the holiness

of the plain, the small, the treasure

of the heart's affections

never in doubt.

—a tribute to William Stafford (1914-1993), rediscovered.

Saying Yea

The pause to listen and to drink

in the effervescence of a brightening breeze

through new leaves extends,

toxins of the spirit rising

to burst in a toast of release.

Surely in May we are the envy

of coastal dwellers whose peace

remains just the blessed surf.

I envy leaves, their touch: miles

by the million, tongues everywhere

saying yea, for the forest,

and in the night, for us.

–William Stafford, 1914-1993

Intelligence in the Universe from the Hammock

The woods closes over me

The field grows up around me

Under the swaying sky

Patterns of the planet

Sharpen to genius.

Spring Fever

Please expand by clicking.

Writers, it's true, write to one person.

I'm doing that now, imagining you,

as i always do. It's obsessive, really,

except it's not you, it's somebody else.

You may think it's to you, but it's not,

unless you happen to be somebody else.

This is going nowhere, which is where

we would be if you thought it's to you

and weren't somebody else. Are you?

How should I know? Good Christ, what a day!

The wind in the leaves and the light in the lilacs!

That's all I care about, truly. I'm in love

with the day and with you, I care about you,

assuming, you know, you're somebody else.

In a Perfect World

Hummingbird clearwing moth

Attraction

creates life,

beauty

self-sustaining,

 perpetual, when

we let it happen.

Hammers for Instance

No beauty but in things

the healer-poet said

catching doyens by surprise


hammers for instance

immortal in their cold function

by comparison


but what about a poem

what's a poem's purpose—

consolation, could it be?


everyone is dying yes

a sad and angry consolation

that'd be my guess


that's beautiful

once more

a sad and angry consolation


and consolation's no

small comfort barefoot

on this woodland path.

A Few Is All It Takes

An old Spitzenburg, Jefferson's favorite, survives at the treeline.

Sole survivor of a hundred-year-old orchard

blooming with a flourish at the woodland's edge

gives me daily pleasure and a faith in work

for i have watched it make its art for 40 years,


Damaged by late frosts and early snows

hollow at its core and home for mice

yet always does its job without reward—

hear the droning of its muses in its blooms.


At fall's first freeze the deer will come at dusk

to stand in the briars and eat the apples on the ground,

it takes only a few for it all to make sense;

what makes us what we are is what we do.

What Time Is

Findwindmills with a click.

All of that was so dizzying when it happened,

We look back and shiver.

Now if there's any light at all it knows

How to rest on the faces of friends.

And any people you don't like,

You just turn the page a little more

And wait while they find out what time is

And begin to bend lower; or

You can just turn away and let them

Drop off the edge of the world.

—from "Ways to Live," by William Stafford.

Big Day

Nowhere going today,

no visions expected.

In the sun at 10 a.m. i can sleep

if i like and i do.


No heeding calls today,

no first-hand observationing.

I in the sun at 2 p.m. i can sleep

if i like and i do, i don't, i do,

Oil Train along the Casselman

Casselman River near Pinkerton. Click to expand.

Music of the river and the music of the train

one score rolling to you on the bridge

purling wail and thumping rail

the tumble and erode of energy to burn

going for broke and tankered black

no proud name lest the river

flash to flame lest the land explode

lest the echo of consumption

turn the mist to smoke.

Even Though

Please enlarge with a click.

   

The nascent woods has its pointillist splendor.

Here a silence could me made, a place

where i could ask to be left alone, even

though i wished for the company of a brighter sun.

A Nearly Perfect Poem

Look.

The moon.

Unhindered Moon

    

Unhindered moon,

Numbness registered the shock.

Why do we think adding means increase?

To me it means dilution.

Our assumptions we think truest

Warp tight-stuck like doors,

More a style our lives bring with them,

Habit for a while. Then suddenly

They harden into all we've got.

—condensed from Larkin's "Dockery and Son"

Argument

Please enlarge by clicking.

Days in early May it little matters

How many disappointments

Friendship proffers.

The pear tree blooms.

I hear the bees.

That's all i offer.

Mantra at an Angle

   

Going out to meet the day sideways,

its ghosts and fates running in the field,

childlike with their tresses sunlit in the breaks

between the organizing clouds, instructing me.

Words could be a way to keep yourself unbroken,

poetry the only way to keep an angle to the world.

I say them then to the wind that smells of rain,

More me here now alive.

More me here now alive.

Bean Counting

This is life beyond the wire,

the deep reality of things that matter most,

or at all, when consciousness is summed

and the accountants of joy have made their report:

the willow pitching its chartreuse tent

over the underground spring,

the vivified flies strafing in harmony,

the drum circle of pileates claiming their territory,

the sarvis berry blooming when you weren't looking,

distracted by nothing of substance — say income,

say achievement, say recognition — small beans

at the end, under a comfort of cumulus.

Sarvis