Flow

Afield in twilight,

Wanting less and less,

Only to end in peace.

Carefully

Himself tender as he goes,

The day is soft, the sky gray silk,

And the woods are full of infants.

Brief Travelers

We make our meek adjustments

Content with such random consolations

As the rain and wind deposit,

A glaze of ancient perspective

The close-at-hand provides —

A seeing shared in silence

With one along for the ride.

—with lines by Hart Crane

Passing Over

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Last Sunday in April, a motorless local,

No farming on Sunday, too early for church,

Bluets are giants of silence,

As tall as white turbines

Guarding the ridge without wind,

So bright the quiet,

I hear a hawk's wingtips

Carving the air as she passes

Over the trees black as memory,

Still leafless and reaching.

Fog in Moonlight

A ring of shades

danced in the field.

I threw among them

a name seldom spoken.

Everything spread into nothing

and left me alone

with only the mist of a song.

—after Mandlestam

Returnest

Closer to the earth

On Earth Day,

And on the next day

Closer still,

The nights so far away.

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A Life in One Place

The pasture grew up

with sarvis and cherry

once the horses were gone.

New Light

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New yard light at the neighbor's on the hill,

Hi-tech LED, low wattage, more focused,

Which is to say more down, and now

They are happy in their dusk-lit yard,

And I am happy in my deeper dark,

From horizon to horizon i have stars,

Half a universe to light the path.

—with a phrase from a Jim Harrison/Ted Kooser collaboration.

Upper Turkeyfoot News

Come evening, wild turkeys strolled

out of the woods into the pasture,

flipping cow pies, looking for bugs.

Liquid Dark

Down here i listen to the night,

Stars reflecting on the pond,

The past within my reach,

And there is Mars, the red on black,

Water purling down the pipe,

I hear her laugh, a girl

From forty years ago.

Down here i listen to the night.

Radical Chic

A river of sky above the black woods,

I want it to mean something. I want it

To be an omen, a portent, a charm

That lifts me out of this malaise,

As lovely as it is with its grass and its birdsong

And its absence of connivers desperate for legacy,

Just me and the dog, lying on freshly-mowed yard,

Watching the drifting river of sky and waiting,

Believing in each other, me thinking perhaps

A Powerball ticket is not so foolish maybe,

I mean by comparison, it's only another test

Of irrational optimism, like wagging, like

Marriage. Yet sometimes

I still expect kindness.

The Druid Spells

The day is bright as metal and the sun

is a blade through the wind. From the top

of the field I'm watching clouds coming fast

over Laurel Mountain. Everything's specific

in this light – the violet shoulder of Sugarloaf

in the southern horizon, the silver roofs of barns

folded into the hills, the hard-edged shadow

of my knuckles on the page. And I'm listening

to the long sorceries of sound, the noises

of afternoon - the dog yipping and whining

at a knot of garter snakes newly-emerged

and flat-headed with fright, the rattle and thump

of the UPS van raising yellow dust, and as always

the occasional gunfire.


The wind shifts at the back of my neck,

a peeper peeps in the glittering pond,

a thick twist of pine smoke from a neighbor's fire

changes course and crosses the road. I think I hear

a woman sighing. These are the Druid spells –

just for one day, to forget everything.

The snakes lick the light and taste dog.

A man in his garage opens with his thumbnail

boxes stuffed with packets of air from China.

I'm telling you, it's a strange world.

Chiarascuro

 Space shuttle leaving earth seen from a space shuttle
training aircraft about six miles above the Earth.

Value the flight,

The fiery flash

Of wing and leaf,

Of light on spheres,

Projectiles that we are

Rocketing through the dark,

Children of explosion

Hoping our contrails

Outlast our burn

Into the infinite night.

Cold Quarter

An April snow lies rich upon the fields,

I wait for something i don't know,

The night is better than the day,

More private i could say, the air

Empty of all i am not looking for.


The snow is better than the rain,

More useful i could say, the mud

Road hardens in the dark, Orion

Drums his way out of the trees,

Hunts the snow-rich April breeze.

— an adaption from "Five for the Grace of Man,"

by Winfield Townley Scott (1910-1968).

The Air Around Us

The air around us cold and cleaving

From across the far ridge blue with miles

Parted at my face and closed behind us,

Me as still as a stone in the valley,

You like creekwater on all sides flowing,

Smoothed by your passing which never ends.

What the Wind Said

Snow burst upon me in the night

And for most of the morning the field

Was a white paradise of loneliness

As i'm told the sky used to be.

The wind came at me sideways

A confusion leaning in close

To confess I don't know I don't know.

A crow rode the gusts asking why.

What the wind said, that is what i say.

—with a phrase from Seamus Deane

and  a concept from William Sttafford

The Future is Ponderous

I wonder what

happens next.

—interpretation of a short poem by G. Kreiger.

Wet Evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

—Patrick Kavanagh, 1904-1967.