The Flow

The wind

turns its back

on the bar,

wanting

to be seen.

"Here,"

says the wind,

low in the dune grass,

everything moving,

everything shaken.

The wind

has me

well-rehearsed

in the ways

of the world.

—with lines from Seamus Heaney's "A Herbal."

Poet in Exile

  

all this writing

with so little written down

pixels effervescent in surf

pages up in smoke


you were wrong

when you said

it was only striking keys

look where it led


i've filled my pen

i'm making notes

acid free in a sewn book


indentured to the wave

even if there's no one left

to look.

Pale Angels

The winter woods i desire ever.

They are calm, they are clear.

Crowds of pale angels on their rounds

At every open crown.

—based on a 12th Century Irish poem

Back to the Ground

Laved by a thin rain,

Cured for the hour

By mosses and ferns,

By the low sky's reflection

On the woodland spring,

Breathing the blue air

On a carpet of welcoming hands

Spread over the stones—

This way back to the ground,

Walker in rain,

To the shut-eyed blank of underearth,

This way down.

How Glad I Am

Christmas morning, Upper Turkeyfoot, 2015.

How full of soft, pure light

The western sky is now,

Unless you watch you do not know

When the sun goes down,

It's like a candle extinguished

Without smoke.

How glad I am to hear an owl,

Rather than the most eloquent man of the age!

—HDT, December 25, 1858

On A Warm Christmas Eve

When light breaks over me

The way it did on the road to less,

And gold lamé shivered on the field

Between the house and the woods,

That day i'll be in step with what escaped me.

—adapted from Seamus Heaney's "Squarings"

Altitude

Home again and good to be

Grounded on the land

At this higher altitude

Among the solid landscapes

And the peacefulness of evenings

When the trucks stop running

Away from the noise and polish

Of the grinding sea and the coast

with its endless vanishments

I will yearn for in time.

Survivor Beach

The lights of Kitty Hawk

  

Walking the night beach

Ocean thunder

Existential dark

Given to summary

Weak when you should have done more

Foolish when you should have done less

To come to this.


A few times you did it just right.


Turn into the wind.

Sunrise at Low Tide

And so each span of consciousness begins

Massive, golden, heavy green, and roaring,

The cinematic hopefulness of youth

Re-entered from the other side of life,

Air and ocean, sand and light, flow on,

Flow on, the journey of the soul,

Everything flows on, stunned anew

In gilded solitude each morning with

Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

—with two lines by Seamus Heaney

Easy Alone

A privileged week,

saved for all year,

to drive all day

and park the truck,

and leave it sit until

you drive all day again,

to be

submerged in light,

in pouring froth,

in angled wings,

in curve, in wind,

the days between

so quickly end,

and you so filled

with emptiness—

precisely so,

off season.

To be filled, you first must be emptied.

—from the Tao te Ching

Given Wings

A ribbon of the Currituck Sound

  

Fierce companion

Of the never was,

Dusk is not too late

For flight.

The Shortest Days

Please expand.

With winter closing on the beach

I walked for miles and met no one

Though many passed.

The Freeze to Come

Praise the mountain's frost

that stings the fist,

the hillside's solid freeze

that clears the way

for growing after rest.

Go easy now,

renewal's at the crest.

Daybreak in Upper Turkeyfoot

Steadying

Finding calm in a chain of sunsets

Take to the hills

the sanity of silence

ravishing self banishment

the earth going hard underfoot

outside the opposite of hiding

to be among the things

that have stayed in position

steadied by root systems

standing their ground.

Second Saturday

Afield in gunfire

and frost in retreat

as the sun clears the woods,

breathing deep

the cold clean air

at the top of the hill

where she lies scattered

for the three-thousandth morning

circling in the nest

of cycles of light,

but the circle is broken.

As Though Impossible

It seems impossible

not just the thought of you

but the wind and the sea

as though memory were a mist

you could walk through

as though you could walk

through these lines of poetry

and coexist by contact.

—with an approach by Kay Ryan