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.