Lords of the Landscape

Five farms i ride through most evenings,

miles from the main road, passing

a few farmers busy with farming,

exchanging salutes as i pedal by,

sunlight low across banded fields

and flush against red barns

and old-fashioned, two-story,

steep-roofed farm houses,

flooding their porches with gold,

bordered with dahlias, cats on their sides,

cows in the broad green pastures

after milking, lifting their heads

as I go, farms part of the hills,

abandoned or working still known

by the old names, mostly German

in these ancient rock-strewn mountains,

what had been ten now become five,

yet here is where they are still born and bred,

the men and women who save the country.

Long may they flourish, longer survive.

'Good Winter'

Click this line for "re:stacks"

What happens is from now,

and I'll be here

in the shadow

of the earth at sundown,

the path covered with snow

and trackless,

awaiting your return

as you lift away.

—when Bon Iver played on Pandora in the middle of the night

Orioles After Rain

click to expand

Orioles after rain in evening woods,

unseen in the drip and the vanishing gleam,

their brief songs as round and polished

as pearls in oil, a comfort in the dusk,

close by and staying, sharing together

the coming of night, close by and singing,

accepting my presence as i accept theirs,

but however we long to speak to each other

we can not know of each other's sorrow

except in the sense of all living things

guessed at in the dark and the parting.

June in the Country

The wind bundles itself into cloud

and wanders off.

Toby tree blossoms on the gone waters

and on the going.

Swifts flying sorties over the barn,

gorging  on air.

Weathered boards, green trees,

blue heaven.

More traffic on the disked fields

than the paved road.

No better time than the first week of summer

for a proper Thanksgiving.

—with two lines by Rihaku, 8th C., Ezra Pound translation.

Brood V

Ovipositing

Skewered, then, at seventeen

year intervals, young maples

of the sweetest kind, swarmed

by locusts with red eyes

and lance-like ovipositors,

awakened from long sleep

to raise the chorus of their destiny

and fly just well enough

to pierce the expectations

of the field's return to woods

with their procreation.

Just the sugars wounded

stand with broken limbs

but will survive with scarring.

I've seen it three times now,

and in between, and in between,

still growing with the scars.

Seventeen! Seventeen! And then,

to never know the like of it again.

Evening in the Longest Day

Mourning doves.

Their dirges.

This wilderness.

Peonies and Lightning

Heavy with beauty

from the world's other side,

peonies arched and moral

 in the majesty of June,

bowed to the ground

as the storm goes bragging,

the air charged and the sky dragging,

thunder pounding its chest,

red running through us as petals fall,

and in the midst of it all

the hylas are singing,

praising the rain and each other.

Everything we feel and see is us,

and anything is possible.

An Old Story

Dusk in Duck.

Perhaps we could have reached the coast,

against all odds.


The thing about standing close to fire is this:

you can become it.


I stayed behind like everybody else,

and i do burn.

Matutinal

Coffee and robe on the porch with the dog

watching the motion of trees and long grasses

making big plans for the day

hoping to spend it all in the sky

for whatever i see

reminds me of something within

and that which is farthest away

is a symbol of that which is deepest in me.

"As the sky appears to a man, so is his mind."

—Thoreau.

—with two lines adapted from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau.

Being Seven

milkweed

When I was old enough to know the words

shouted inside that small country house

I walked through the field

with its milkweed and briars

to play by myself in the woods

where I swung on the vines

and dammed up the rill

and was lost the whole day

and never went back.

17-Year Aubade

Scatter me then in June

when the locusts next trill

under blue-bottomed clouds

in the signaling sun

at the end of a dream in the air

over this rising field

with its spittle and daisies

pierced by a hundred small birds

and the grasses twitching with hoppers

walled on all sides by the woods

thick with the songs of its lives

all i wanted was to stay.

—after checking on arrangements for my own cremation.

Banished

By first light I shake off a dream

And go out barefoot in the dew

To watch the stars vanish,

Exile of quiet and awe.