Seven Billion Astronauts

Our burning universe

Expanded as we slept

Traveling in bursts

Seven billion astronauts

Further and further apart

Dreaming of intersection.

Frozen Rain

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Warmth high up

melted the snow as it fell

to freeze on the field

a crystal encasement

of the wreckage of asters

and goldenrod bones

before wind tore the clouds

and the sun burned through

restoring sopping decay

as the way of the world.

But wasn't it gorgeous

for an hour—

the glittering finite intensity

pleasure magnified by brevity?

And we came to understand

with cold rain on our necks

that Stevens was right.

Death is the mother of beauty.

Let us praise it as we pass.

Leaning Out an Upstairs Window

Steady wind and wooded hill

Jeering in the dark,

Regions of the snowless ground

Colored by the lights

Soon taken down when I'm prepared

For night upon the porch,

The damper flopping in the flu,

Colder air and me

The same, I hear the front

Move in. The house exhales.

What is this emptiness we share

Which we can't name?

Relics

Hill and hollow and the road

between the two where deer

have sailed across my hood

and turkeys glide heavy

into the wet woods above

old tires and dumped

TVs sticking out

of the slope half buried

in leaves like forsaken moai

guarding Easter Island

where the living were turned

from their gods and old ways

and no one remembers

what it means or

how it all came to be.

After the Long Night

Sunslip low behind black trees

Chanting on the hill night's end—

The cowl of memory,

 the old dark fears—

Shake off what you can

and leave the rest

To flashing blades of wind and light,

To imagined whispers of a friend.

The Ocean Inside

The ocean inside

calming as we slow,

our surf and our tide

shining in sunrise.

We remember, you and I,

how beginning feels,

dreamers that we were

and dreamers still.

Nearing the Solstice

Peace enough

to hear your own thoughts

Snow enough

to soften the day

Night enough

to drift on the sea of renewal

Rabbits Under Snow

The sun behind the ridge

the field in its own shadow

going bluer when a rabbit

bursts from under snow

stretching and compressing in a dash

toward the woods and its deeper dens

leading me to shelter under buried ferns

to watch my flesh and bone

moving on the path

as still another thought

shelters in these words

to watch you read these lines

o kindred eyes

changing in the changing light

we are so many creatures.

Stasis

Snow before sunset

stopped and the first sunlight

of the day flashed farewell

in the calm and gathering

dusk that embraced us

at the back of the field

as we waited.

Out from Under

Out from under roofs

with the clean horizon in our eyes,

the wind cold on our faces,

and in our heads

 the quiet when it comes,

we fill the blue,

and gratitude returns.

The Promise

Not long before

The snows began

We promised we would stay,

A scattering of words

Across a final scattering,

One field as we remember it

When we become the hill.

December

Your month,

Snow on the oak leaves on the field

I see you run through in ripe grain,

Sunlight in your hair,

And why you are not there.

In Evening's Chill

In the here and in the now

A mackerel sky of change

Drifts above the barn

A hoot owl calls

In the wooded hollow

A kind of prayer

Rises as your breath

The soul in paraphrase

To save yourself

And then the rest.

Law and Order in Manila

Photo by Daniel Berehulak, New York Times, 12/7/16.

We need to figure out

What's going on. Until we do,

Protectors of the people, duly sworn,

Are murdering their addicts in Manila,

Hunting without license in the night,

The broken, sweaty streets

Slick with blood and rain,

The wails of women frightening the birds

To silence in the ravaged jungle,

A fetid, smoking swamp,

Drained to stabilize the capital,

The capitol, the capital,

Where business booms in certain zones

Merchandizing guns and caskets,

Death the easy answer

To the problems of existence,

Especially our own,

The final strict austerity.

Tell me if you learn

What's going on.

—Inspired by Daniel Berehulak's text and photographs in the New York Times' slideshow,

" 'They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animas,' " June 7, 2016.

(Click the line above to  experience the story.)

OBX Reverie

Forty years in the tides

and the storms and

no one to ask

how this became

the old days

how can this be

old if it is now

still sunrise under the pier

the ocean pooling for an instant

as it does when low tide turns

shell gravel rattling in the wash

the dead scattered on the beach

nothing escapes

the rise and fall

the rise and fall

the rise and the fall.

—with a line by W.S. Merwin

December Beach, 2016

Fly then from the wide black water,

turn your back to the blinding sky

and flee the mob frothing at the edge.


This time the ocean didn't do it.

Your ache traveled with you,

and loneliness, like whitecaps,

spread to the horizon.


So turn into the cold wind,

north to the frosted woods,

and fly toward the calm

of snow against tree trunks.

Head for the hills.

Salt

(Water and meditation are wedded together. —Melville)

Three-thirty and this gray day slips toward night,

The labored breathing of the tide,

The gray-blue sky, the gray-green sea,

The silver wind, the gray-white gulls,

And further out, black cormorants are diving,

Murdering their meals in swells,

The lift and fall of the gray-green sea,

Webbed claws, hooked beak,

Under the gray-blue sky.

The lift and fall, the failing light,

Sometimes you never recover.

Emigrants

  

Each day now the water is colder,

the fish further out under the birds

as the Gulf Stream swings toward Cork

where sons and daughters stand with the wind

on their faces looking out to sea,

children of my father's father's father and

me with the wind at my back on the far

side of the Atlantic wondering at the strength

of the blood to feel it still in spite of it all,

my ghost soon to drift on the river in the sea

toward home where we always have been

where we will convene again

for the division of the spirit

and again and again

as long as men last.

Mariner

  

Oh where have you been, my dark-eyed son?

I met a young woman

Whose body was burning,

Whose mind was a lightning storm

Over the sea.



And what did you hear, my dark-eyed son?

What did you hear, my darling young one?

The roar of a wave

that drowned the whole world,

her words were an opiate dream.



And what did you do, my dark-eyed son?

What do you now, my darling young one?

Lost in the flood

I learned what to fear:

That the dream was no less than it seemed.

—inspired by the Scottish border ballad, "Lord Randal" and by Bob
Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," based upon the same.

Black Friday Poem

Morning mist and mud,

Low sky and empty fields,

The dog eats grass.

What blood had kept at bay

Returns by afternoon,

And later, if it clears,

The asperities of the moon.

Thanksgiving Poem

Gone by afternoon,

Gone with brighter light,

With echoing crows,

Wind's southern turn,

Warmth of gathered kin,

Snow, doubt, ache,

Gone by afternoon.

Three Point One

Miles in a straight-across snow,

wind loud on each hill

roaring HER roaring WERE,

running in hooded seclusion,

the breath a cold burn in the chest—

how the blood steams in a kill.

We ran off the edge

and that changed it all

inside inside the norm;

each stride is a name,

the chest a poor shield,

running alone in a squall.

Empty Hills

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Empty hills,

no man in sight

but his path

tracing his pipeline

into the valley,

and his ruin.

—after Wang Wei's "Deer Park," 8th C.

As Snow Approaches

Ice on the pond

Growing in moonlight.

Firewood split and stacked.

Finger-cold,

Clad in sky.

There is no other life.

Each man's necessary path,

Though as obscure as a beetle's in the grass,

Is the way to the deepest joy.

—last stanza from the journal of Thoreau, Nov. 1, 1858.

What the Birds Say

the small gray birds that stay

flashed in the bare bleak trees

what was left of light

and said to me

no need to fear

the snows come every year

the feather on the ground

the wind sound

Standing in Surf

Teach me to be wise and tender.

Ankles braceleted with foam,

the cold surf eroding the sand

under my feet, sinking in

to the heaped grains

of rock and shell and bone,

I think of her.

She'll never know.

Why does it take so long

to learn to love?

—with a line by Gary Snyder.

Saviors

Duck, NC

What worries me most

in those who claim

to be our lesser gods

is when they see

a mountain or an ocean

and only think extraction.

Profit is no tribute.

Irreverence for the earth

is no salvation.

Devoted to Now

Skywatcher photo by Predrag Agatonovic.

No promises to keep today

except to ourselves,

no deadlines or appointments,

free to sit on the hilltop with the dog

if we want to, under the bronzed oaks,

awaiting Venus.

Or maybe we'll head to the ocean,

the season reversing itself a little

as we drive south, mountain music

in the cab, drool on the dash,

to stand on the sand

under hang gliding gulls

and watch Venus appear over the sea,

feeling the weight of the waves,

calmed by the chorus of tides,

keeping our vow,

holding our now.

The Way It Is

Down from the attic

as the rain ended,

pleased at first

to find no leaks

around the chimney flashing,

but too long stooped

among her crated things,

her books and wrapping paper,

her dolls and coffee cups,

the things that made a life,

I was overtaken

by the way it was.

I fled outside,

released myself

into the open sky,

and already in the west

it was the way it is:

The vividness was gone,

the day was pale and fading.

Stacked New Bales

The smell leads me

up draw-knifed rungs

into boyhood.

Electricity Optional

The tool shed stands alone,

the house torn down

on this abandoned farm

now farmed by former neighbors.

It seems just right for one to live

while he had his thoughts,

the spring nearby still cold and clear,

the fields still open to the sky,

the roof still sound, the walls still plumb,

 and still a music heard without a cord,

a small house in plain country,

the world still just as large.

Seasonal Marker

An emptier country

signaled by snowfence.

A quieter life

drifts through the mind.

Old Barn

How strange to be here

against this old sugar,

beside this old barn,

the loosed spirits

of beasts and men

behind rippled glass.

How strange to be anywhere.

Ars Poetica XXS

Art fools the eye,

a pattern on a membrane,

a scrim of knowing,

made and making,

the magic of small things,

this little poem,

the wind as you hear it,

throaty in the oaks.

Inlander

Please expand by clicking.

Windblown on the vivd bar

where stillness seems a risk,

surf gnashing at the dunes,

the wine-dark sea a threat

to swallow everything rooted or built,

your faith in engineering wanes,

and you're happy to hose off the salt

and drive back into your staid hills

far from the violent margins of renewal

toward the peace and relative comfort

of gradual endings,

better attuned, if you're lucky,

to your own slow fade.

Seeker

There is an ancient world

just beneath the surface

where pure art reigned

without our gloss

and will again.

Rip Tide

For those who remain,

lovers of the empty beach and the clean line

of the curve of the earth,

stunned to stillness by unhindered wind,

careening light, the mysteries of water

and the fears of night,

how easy to imagine

we have arrived where we began,

caught in the pull of continuous time,

freed from yesterday, this moment, tomorrow,

inland or coastal, each of us

drawn out to sea,

watching the moon rise

in our separate agonies,

our beautiful downward drift.

The Road

the road draws me on into the valley

into the breath of the river rising as cloud

into the valley of morning

where rain slips toward the sea

and me following and you following

on into the valley drawn like the rain

under the cloud under the cloud

of our breath toward the sea

the road draws us on into the valley

everything slips toward the sea

Far from the Slavering Mob

Reading what great poets read

at night on yellowed pages,

falling asleep with the bulb in my eyes

during the third re-reading--

too much news has harmed my brain--

my hand trained to hold,

and soon awake with elbow ache

i open the window and listen to rain

falling on porous Earth,

praising the reticent trees.

Gratitude

First frost has come and gone,

The log shed's full to the roof,

The flue is clear, the screens are out,

And the mice are coming in.


In wool i ride the rolling earth

In its turn toward the sun,

Moles nose up the falllow ground

Through bearded solidago,


My sleeves festooned with beggarticks,

My pantlegs wet with dew,

My fingers cold, my being warm,

Flush with gratitude.

Ripening

A cloud upon the field

the air soaked with sunset

crickets in harmony with evening

a man and a dog headed home

enjoying the strength of their legs

thriving in their humble scenery

wanting what they have

their solitude and rich poverty

in the slowing, ripening year.

Vertigo

Going slowly looking down

holding close each moment

looking up almost too much

as we spin through timeless space

each step a revelation.

Satori

Each day a magic hour

before and after sunset

gilding uncut corn,

the woods wall, and us,

wandering the fields,

awash with the miracle

of breathing in and breathing out.

Mantra for October

Please enlarge

Of all that i remember,

What was real?

Of all the gains and losses,

What remains?

In the end what led me here

Never changed.

In Forest Halls

Leaves tile the forest halls,

An easterly wind thins the ceiling,

All day in the woods my senses revive,

And the rain is a mansion of feeling.

Praising the World by Being in It

A free morning with nowhere to be

but afield where i am,

away from man's hate

with the geese wedging over

and the next generation of milkweed

turning to goldfish in their husks.

A walnut falls in the yard

with a rap on the ground as clean

as the crystaline calls of the jays,

and i will move through the day

with the sweet stain of the earth on my hands,

breathing its sweeter decay.

Reduction

The willow tree

against an anodized sky.


Birds and leaves falling

with no shadows.


A man no longer sure

what's important is more important

than what's not.

—with a line by Wislawa Szymborska

Transcendent in the Aster Field

Please magnify.

   

I'm afraid i'll die

with something to say

maybe on the floor

or maybe worse

drugged and bedded

in a stark beige room

where death is routine

unable to say i'm afraid

instead of with coffee

dropping my pen on the porch

or better yet in the aster field

brightening with dew

beaded with daybreak

birds flashing in the briars

or scattered there at least

as my daughter is scattered

windblown and atomic

climbing the ladders of sunrise

soluble and covalent

at the top of the watershed

moving toward the sea

she with her head start

merging with everything

all the great and small deaths

reduced to the elements

geologic and everlasting and mute

but fabulous in how we combine.