Between the Rains

Sleeper in the woods

awake the wind

that bends the crowns

speaks in the hollows

of your face

arise and come

i too seek

eventual peace.

Chicory

click to magnify

Thriving in

the ground

it's given,

sturdy for

the next bloom,

one work

at a time,

artist of the

waste places,

proof of what

is possible.

Happenstance

  

Swum here

through universal night

to find ourselves face to face

alike and now

considering the coincidence

in all of time and space

how could we not?


I like your hat.

The Challenge of Beauty

Please expand by clicking

Easy beauty

The perception

of beauty

is a moral test.

—Thoreau, June 21, 1852.

More challenging, and more rewarding

Stranger in a Strange Land

Fritillaries

find the blooms

before i do

i am always

late to know

tomorrow

comes by itself.

—title by Heinlein

Paying Attention

Elderberry

When the broadest days

aren't broad enough,

i try to slow them down,

to take a closer look,

to listen longer to the owls,

bend closer to the berry bloom,

to rise with the light and

in the evening sail,

though never leave the dooryard.

Ancient

Click for the moon.

The  power of solstice opened the sky

as if it were scripted. The moon was there,

Jupiter and Venus together were there,

and there was the rush of yesterday's rain

deep in the valley flooded with shades,

and there at my back was the wind like a surf

that poured through the oaks in a tide,

fireflies in waves rose and fell,

fireflies in swells on the sea of the field,

fireflies like sparks in the trees,

and there in the night were the people before me,

standing in awe of the world,

what i knew in my bones was the sum of their lives,

there in the power of solstice.

NorthernTropic

  

The rain would stop for awhile now,

the cardinals were telling us,

and we were glad

to know something for sure,

other than here was another summer

closer to our last, when it felt like

we  were just getting started.

More than Enough

Primary evening in farm country,

red barn, blue sky, yellow grain,

sun-washed day winding down,

every other farm a working farm, hanging on,

every other farm abandoned to storage and grazing.

A family walks the road with their old dogs,

a peaceful outing under crossing birds after supper,

clover and timothy growing to the edge of the pavement,

the macadam quiet and warm without traffic,

milkweed ready to bloom, full of promise,

clouds going pink on an unbroken horizon.

May the young ones return

when they've saved it.

May they live long and prosper.

Expansive

American Chestnut

  

A leaf is the forest,

a raindrop the sea,

the space between us,

infinity.

Virtual Dark

Don't call me back.

Into the well,

whirlpool of everything

 else but this.

I like it.

Unless you mean also

to spiral down.

Perne in a gyre,

Alice.

—with a line by Yeats 

Taking to Open Water

Kennebunkport, ME

  

We've never built a boat,

but, here, hold this sail.


Let's learn the difference

between making and discovering.

Rain World

  

Between rains

in a self-enclosed universe

among the beaded tiers

i am graced by caring souls

who quickly must return

to their own green lives

and leave me grasping

once again

for that which is visible

everywhere in general

and nowhere in particular,

wraiths rising from the valley.

The Recognition

Something's almost here

but never comes,

dry thunder

with no rain,

air flooding down the hill

cool and hissing in the ashes,

a devotion and a kindness

known before,

but not this time,

this time recognition

of a soft and distant pulse,

lightning below the horizon,

memory, this time.

Marking Time

  

Pause in your flight,

turn yourself into the wind,

dragonfly on a metronone,

daybreak, nightfall, daybreak, nightfall.


Fly in the dark

with the lanterns strung over the fields

pulsing, you're not alone.


Lovers of night

mark time in the light of the sun,

eyes closed in the rattle of wings.

Rolled Under

  

Each moment

brims with truth.

The days are long.

I climbed the hill

to watch the sun go down,

regain my footing.

The sun set red,

a sign of heat.

You first.

The WInd Excites

Today i'll be well-travelled

in this hill and hollow,

the high wind raising goose bumps,

the sound of it combing the leaves,

the hemlocks at their height of beauty.

Let us celebrate fresh growth,

be it trees or beasts like you and me.

Red Close

Peony

Too close 

and your eyes

lose focus.

Too deep,

and your balance

unhinges.

Too far

and you'll never

get back.

Through My Country

  

Six miles and no traffic,

just you and your bliss

filling your lungs

with the perfume of clover,

saying hello to the yearlings

that come to the fence as you pass,

to the groundhog that lives

near the bend by the barn,

making escape, a squeezebox of fur,

to a doe and her fawn barely dry

doubling back into the trees,

to the mink in tall grass by the spring

where the house used to be,

its dooryard still blooming,

a fresh hatch of grasshoppers

launching themselves off warm macadam,

and on top of the hill the headstones

stand smoothing against the broad sky

bearing the names that remain on the farms

not slowly enough disappearing.

Fragments of Spring

  

Buttercups draw the light

against them

in an overcast June,

kettle gray clouds

with little rain.


In nascent May

they faced each other,

she, weaver of crowns

with violets in her lap,

he, in mixolydian mode.

They promised to move no stones.


All honor to the moon,

to the night trains

longing in the valley,

to the sanctity of solitude,

to quiet minds

in the shortening dark.


The morning comes on golden sandals.

—With a nod to Thoreau and a bow to Sappho.

In the Rain on Fern HIll

  

Over the road to the third,

spider lines over my face as

the day expires

in crows and doves.

This is the gunshot hour.

Buttercups and blisters,

fires warm the home-schooled,

knives with horn handles and Jeeps

and none of that in the end, waste

of an afternoon, so a walk in

a greasy wind, a squirrel in

the clutch of a hawk,

red on red.

Four-wheelers run where

the barbed wire's been snipped,

following the line back to Texas,

when the dog coming back

reeks of 'cat, do you follow?

Give it up. Things must not

be clear, in love with the

off-kilter, must not be clear.

Delogify, invade language,

awkwardness is the thing.

Do not follow. Flow.

Gleaming black jacket

in the rain on fern hill,

pores so small in the skin of a horse

its hide is right for the road,

the road to the third, you recall.

I remember the moths

battering themselves

against the bulb,

dusting us with

scale until we shone,

and the whole timeless

summer wept for

joy behind glass.

— a bricolage in the method of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun,

by "snipping off lengths of consciousness,"
as in the poetry of John Ashbery.

Compensation of the Present

Balance of the Near and Far

unsteadies you,

fulcrum of the Now

at center in your chest,

and when the Far recedes in Mist

and even the next ridge

seems out of reach, be still,

liquid finds its planes,

be the bubble in the tube,

be the Spirit Level,

feel the Distance moving in

 as on the other end

you go deeper in the Peony

upon your desk, a Gift,

to wander perfumed canyons,

to lose yourself in This.