The Wisdom of Inaction

Lines where sense outruns the words,

Image half revealed the mind fills in,

Beauty from imagination,

I'll bide my time.

Aftermath

The tides are easing

and the wind is dying down,

rolling toward a blaze of finishes,

but still the fading blue of night,

still the wash of water birds

and a thousand silent systems

teeming in a drop,

still the memory of memory

when all the rest has stopped.

Tonal

To the newly arrived,

the sky must seem a miracle.

the mind beneath,

expanding,

saturated in monochrome,

all there is of wilderness.

360

Enlarge for dog.

The yard brims with sunrise and mist.

How far must i travel

To awaken with this same joy

In the richness of living on earth?

The answer is three-sixty.

How wide the arc

To escape the bruises of getting?

The answer is three-sixty.

 I go nowhere for heaven.

Lying in a Hammock

  

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year's horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

—"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,"

by James Wright.

Detachment

The bee works

in the jewelweed.

Behind the hill, mist

lifts with the sun.

I would walk

the field all day

to understand,

a moving meditation.

To free yourself,

the poet said,

study nonbeing.

—after Wang Wei, circa 730 A.D.

Sonnet for the Travel-Weary, Ear to the Ground

On the surface of an alternate reality

  

With the right equipment

you can hear the primal fury

of an alternate reality

buried in the still earth

of a Neolithic village:

Swingtale baby in the heathen glow,

presto digi-station to the furbelows,

moto busker hillside ignoramus

grovel apples down the shadow curve,

keister elmwood rapper newly famous

check your inbox when the money goes,

priestess of the yeas without a gun —

midrash for your admiration, Baby,

nothing stays the same until we're done.

—necessitating the suspension of coherence.

The Feeling of Fall

Dog days are gone and suddenly

here is a cool, clean, elastic air.

We see birds at their leisure

having raised their families.

Great flocks of young redwings

lift off the fields and the trees.

The willows and poplars lighten.

The common gall is on the goldenrods.

And we gain the sense to do 

the duty that lies nearest to us.

—extracted from Thoreau's journals, late August, 1858 and 1860.

Magical Thinking

Please click to enlarge.

I've never forgotten what it was like,

that age of magical thinking,

very young and reading.

It all seemed so dull once i realized

nothing spectacular was

going to happen.

The birds would rise from the wire

to land on the wire

further down.

Any god we have is out there,

I'd hate to be certain

there was nothing.

The pursuit of oblivion, what is that?

I am weary of all the old

leftover assumptions,

But what else really

do we have

to go on?

—formed from an interview with Louise Erdrich, the Paris Review no. 195

Anaphylaxis

Sunset today was a bonus, nearly unseen, the glorious colors (i can tell you) of the EpiPen that allowed me to breathe after the sting of the wasp, after the poison spread through my veins, abrasive on its way as i drove to town with my four-ways kaplinking, after my tongue thickened and my lips expanded until i could barley speak my name standing at the reception desk in the ER, and the shock of it, seeing myself in the protective glass looking like a Kardashian woman with an itching in my palms that would madden a monk. They treated me with alacrity and competence, and sent me home in an hour or two with snap patches on my torso, and open airways, and told me i could run if i felt like it, and i did after a sleep, filling my lungs with the rumors of night, the ferment of overripe apples, the heat off raked hay, even the dust off the road, raised by human transport over crushed limestone, a dust of the pulverized bones of sea creatures –– i cherished it all, and i stopped to watch the sunset with the katydids all around me creaking in their old rockers, all of it now as if it were the first time.

From the Back Porch

First clouds of the day cross the valley,

the afternoon cools to evening,

and it is so peaceful i'm thinking

everyone in the township

must have fallen asleep,

and i join them without knowing it

until you awaken me,

i hear your voice behind me,

urging me on.

Swallows circle the willow.

Imagine, and it is so.

–for Kelly O'Brien, 1970-2008, who visits me in dreams.

Perseids

Acadia National Park, Maine. Photo by Jack Fusco.

  

Again last night, out of Perseus,

as we rode through the dust trail of a comet,

hacking away at the trivial knots

that lash us to the yoke of our lives,

so important in the universe of self

that spins around our hearts,

oh, fellow creature of no consequence

among the hundreds of billions of milky ways,

how, in the moment, what you said to me

meant everything.

Country in the Round

I stopped the bike to stand in sky,

a ring of horizon unbroken

except by the road that took me,

farmland since farms existed here,

since the forest was felled

and the stones were picked,

and farmland still and still

descendants living on the land

who raise a hand when i pass by,

a visitor for forty years.

Nightfall

    

Ending is beautiful

striving gone in mist

stretch out your arms

pale light upon your palms

face up to the rain

turns out

no one knew better

turns out

no one had a clue.

Business Sense

Rain in the western quadrant,

wind in black leather

over the darkening hills,

matching my mood.


Preoccupation.


May it be with such lines as i make,

not with making a living by getting,

and just maybe a line will last,

for money never will.


What of it?


I'll see you beyond the next ridge,

all of us naked and coinless,

or maybe we're nothing at all.

There is this. There is this.

—The ways by which you may get money all lead downward.

Thoreau, Aug. 7, 1853

Even Though

Candlelight on printed page,

the slow progress of reason,

a playing out of spirit and of nerve,

one word followed by the next

in a way they've never been arranged

before – there's the joy in writing

and in reading, even though

it's flaming wax and print,

superannuations, one symbol

followed by the next, even though

it's battered faith and bleeding.

Sooner

   

Woodland asters where they always are,

a little earlier perhaps, a little sooner than expected,

as is most everything these later days

when sooner seems so sensible.

Why not now, calmly and with reverence?

The Older Beams

Hewn from the woods cleared to fields,

the old poplar beams, the originals,

marked by the adze and the chalkline,

upstanding, native grown, strong

in their bearing yet weak in the storms

if it weren't for their braces, and thus

the diagonals of the past hold me up.

I may creak in the gusts,

but don't expect me to fall,

having stood this long in one place,

place my mortice and tenon of days.

Preservationists

  

Intensity of days

wrapped in the cello notes

of bullfrogs and thinking,

wandering the baked fields

open to disponibilité,

being available, open to chance,

freed from the confines of the predictable

'til fireflies launch neon from the weeds,

compelling us to our life's work:

description of the indescribable,

 attempts at the preservation

of ordinary stillness,

where it still exists.