Accelerant

  

 Another sunset in a chain of sunsets,

One closer to our last.

Go easy on the earth fierce friend,

Our season's flashing past.

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Pastel

Soft footfall in receding snow

I see us walk between the slopes

Amid the music of what happens

Chalked with separateness and evening.

The end of art is peace.

The Long View

I could never live long in town,

Unhappy without a horizon,

Homesick for a dirt lane,

An open field with treeline,

A hill clean against the sky.

Yet this is no wilderness.

A paved road runs behind the knob.

When the wind blows from the south

I can hear the report of the climb,

The throttled rush of the straightaway,

Truck tires sticky on asphalt.

But the west wind prevails.

The thaw and a warm rain 

Will come soon to soften the field.

I'll hear the creek in the valley then

Rushing to measure the continent,

Mad for the gulf and the sea.

I'm waiting for that,

Trusting the long view,

Standing before it.

Frost on the Fallow

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Here again in the calm and clear

Windless touch of what visits

In a quiet cold to quicken us

Lest we crystalize and founder

Glazed over in a bright country.

Glimpses

To live amid masterworks

of physics and of weather

but partially marred

through societal necessity

is to suffer the knowledge

of what it could be.

Tributaries

Kings Mountain

Snow billowed down all night and all day,

The sky in the west as it so often does

Opened at sunset, and the stars were still there,

Five of the planets rose in a line before dawn,

The sun in its bristling arc turned everything gold

Including us as we moved beside a small run

Muscular under the ice which boomed as it broke

With the weight of the air or the splay of a deer

And we stopped in our tracks taking stock of our lives,

The lyric of water, the anthem of light,

So much to protect, so much to pass on to the next.

Moon Water

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Out of the range of men

Of the things they do

Alive in the silent woods

Known only by my tracks

Through the clean deep snow

Struggling in the lavender dusk

To find in the shadow of the earth

Those few glittering souls

Lost telling myself

Not yet

Nights

When the bone-white moon

Lifts out of the trees

And falls back again

Through the cabin window

To lie in the jar of water

Set out on the desk

And I drink again.

Walked by the Dog

Wrapped in thrift shop wool i left

big concepts in the house to walk

among the winter patterns of the field

the dog running ahead to sniff out voles

plunge her face into the snow up to the ears

then bound off with a snort

to the next wild scent

expecting joy as she insists i do

lifting my arm from the keyboard

with a toss of her warm head

looking me in the eye until i read

her mind such a fierce consciousness

so patient with a primitive

thatched now with snow-weighted weeds

while beyond encircling hills

history charges without us.

Before and Since

  

To be first in the fields,

Up with the groundmists and crows,

To be older and grateful,

Survivor of heartbreak,

Heaviness of being, lowlands of the mind.

The woods deep and still

Grow distinctly more strange

The longer i stand, in full possession

Of whatever kept between us,

To be turning as a ghost

For a new perspective across the pale valley

Turning toward the western sea of air

Where the extravagant passed once

Under full sail into the longed-for.

—With lines from a dozen Heaney poems,

written over two decades, bent to a purpose.

January Woods

Click to enlarge for dog and cabin.

Enclosed and safe and free to drift

The woods contains me

Even in empty-crowned winter

No place for act or pretense

The interweave above me

Arched toward heaven

No market of smiling connivance

With the penetrating wind

Snaking through the maples

Trunks popping with cold

Mind across shadows on snow

Flesh-and-blood twilit in glittering air

Needy for translation.

Out of the Blue

Anything can happen.

You know how in summer

Thunderheads must build

Before lightning strikes the ridge?

Well, once in July lightning

Shook the field in which he stood

From out of a clear blue sky.


Anything can happen.

You know how in summer

You can fall in foolish love and did

Seeing more than what was there?

Well, once in thunderstruck July

She loved him back tenfold

And the ground gave way.

—a riff on Seamus Heaney's "Anything Can Happen."

Humbled at the Pond

Slowly in quiet

The best we can do

And even then

Weak in the light of

What happens on its own.

Cold Mountain Dusk

I flee my devices,

Wheel through a web

Of towers and wires,

Piped down

In a turbine-driving wind

Across night-plated fields,

Waiting for the stars

To puncture a lacquered sky,

An act of optimism,

A lone consciousness

and its visible moan.

Reading at the Cabin

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I built the season's first long fire

and heard the geese above the roof,

heard them calling each to each

over the guttering flames,

looked through candlelight and glass

to watch them in their angle

cross the pewter sky

above a weave of limbs

and felt the passing of the day,

the season, year, a life.

Intersections

New Year's Day, Upper Turkeyfoot

We're buying it, beginning again,

Each revolution, reset, repeat,

Turn 'round, and be new,

Each of us the epicenter

Of our own separate universe,

Seven billion of those

Intersecting on a ball,

How's that for a restart?