Snow After Rain

Rain before snow

the creek fast in the valley

under its own breath

on a wooded ridge between streams

we hear the train 

calling behind us and we know

a muffling snow

soon will calm our hungering souls

convinced we can see

Pegasus flying in the white wings of mist

a flight of ideas

for the mind is a wind in the sky

and we can glide

over the valley we know so well

and see a kingdom

we were right about the snow

which falls on us now

like an amnesty in a land of the quick

fires in our heads

hearts pumping wild unto breaking

all of it never enough.

Conscious

one more

shortest day

in this short life

one day shorter

tomorrow

more sun

"We must remind ourselves each day that we die." — Thoreau

Two Pi r

unidentified

and flying

no object

The Madness of Tides

All gristle and gape

a hundred dogfish lie dead on the  beach

gulls dragging them seaward

where the boats fished all night

lifted their outriggers

and emptied their nets

tossing the trashfish over the side

in moonlight



The edge of the sea

is no place for the past

in the present's mad churn

in the thunder of renewal

death and life have the same smell

dogfish washed up in the dark

The Geminids slashing above them

the Dipper on its handle over Cornwall

or some other cliff-shored land

on the far side of the sea

where the stars rise out of Eurasia

and people stand in wonder

near the end of their night

trapped with their grief in their sanity.

In a Country of the Mind

if we can

the sun and wind

if we must

the cold and ice

imagination delusion

in the close quarters

of the mind

we hold true north

shoulder to the wheel

working without cease

to make sense of the

irreconcilable

—gleaned from the introduction to "Robert Lowell: 

Setting the River on Fire," by Kay Redfield Jamison

Double Solitude

quiet companion

one thing more

than we can expect

each of us alone

together

They, Too, Were Birds

Duck, NC, 12/17. Please expand with a click.

always first into the wind

gray-blue gray-green

a solid thing

 spume and rain and pelicans

that sweeps the beaches clean

from Duck to Hatteras

a steady wind that drew men here

convinced they too were birds

and you because the sea is vast

the sea is vast and sky and wind

a man can lean on

wind and surf to fill the footprints

of the ghosts who crossed the dunes

and smooth your ragged margins

purged by wind and walking north

to turn at last toward the south

wind and the past at your back

erosion and renewal

forgiveness and ruin

to help you home.

Fall of the Super Moon

best at the end

descent into dune grass

with no exclamation

in night's last partition

when the blaze nears the rim

and you want to try once again

No Beauty But In Things

so let the days and nights condense

reduction to a core

surrounding us with wonder

at the beauty of the things

we find ourselves among

in the healing emptiness

of an expanding universe

—title by William Carlos Williams

Before the Snows

In that bare space before the snows

crickets in their winter quarters

under stones a chance

to make the most of our regrets

i wouldn't call it barren

Daybreak

  

We've been waiting in the dark

since the crescent went down brass

for signs of our return

answers we don't want to know

welcoming another roll

in the light of our illusions

Unsuccessful Hunters

  

Unsuccessful hunters

fire at nothing with a finger left of daylight

between the bristled sun and solid earth

he does not seek affection

as day goes down into the weeds

not because he has no feeling

but because he has so much

shots echo in the valley brimming night

—with a quote from Marianne Moore

Rain Before Dawn

so many of us

in that dark hour

when the lost find us again

tapping on the pane

one by one by one

until all we hear is rain

and the creek in the valley

roaring off into the deep mist

November Solidago

Silver and sepia

brittle and delicate goldenrod

hoary with age and experience

all the more ravaged

for standing its ground

with ultimate grace

soft singing in wind

reciting its poems

for those who will listen

about what it was to have lived.

Fishing at Daybreak

Please click to expand.

One more pass

as the world rolls under us

as the day crawls toward us

over the indigo rim


Once more with our nets out

rising and falling on swells

as the sea and the sky become two

or is it just you

Incessance

Unsteadied by a recognition

of endings thrown off my stride

by the wreckage that surrounds me

a few oaks still holding leaves

a few daisies still neon under thatch

a few souls the way they were

still living in my sleep

the leafless sound of the wind

no longer the sound of summer

living incessantly in change

offering my silence as my proof.

Radiants

Dozing in the splendid silent sun

When those i've lost come back to me

One by one by one

Song of a Displaced Inlander

photo of Ocracoke Island by Jim Ogden

I went to live beside the sea

to watch the storms that churned in me

lift the waves and stir the sky

and heard the gulls and petrols cry

and stood in wind and stinging rain

'til i regained my inland calm

of mountain morning woods and then

I drove home and built a fire

and watched the frost grow in first light

and knew these fields and wooded hills 

were where I'll ever find my peace

until my time and times are done

in silver shadows of the moon

in golden shadows of the sun.

—After Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus"

Thoreau in Love

She was the morning light to me

but of another system

and the more we met

the more rapid our divergence

so a star of the first magnitude

pales in the heavens

because progress in its own system

puts a greater distance between

The cold numbs my fingers

and the robins fly in flocks

to think it could be otherwise

disturbs the settled spheres.

—formed with interpretation from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, Oct. 27, 1851

Barrier Island Twilight

This is the light i remember

atlantic dusk and easterly wind

warm wash stealing the beach

from under my feet my hands

cold in my pockets and my hood up

the sun long set behind the dunes

and the sea oats bending to nation

voices of those i believed

stripped to vowels above whitecaps

as if lost futures were gales over water

piers in the distance defining my limits

narrowing to vanishing points

at both ends of this bar

A Rustle in the Leaf Fall

The long way home is best

When crowns are mostly sky

The path strewn with the past

Where souls you've missed

Still walk but leave no sign

Thought stirs the leaves

The long way home.

The First Inch of Day

The air flows over us without meaning

Cool with the breath of the deep

The day settles and thickens

Blue-bold on its pedestal

Another sunlight

To make another world.

—with lines from the poems of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) published posthumously

Beyond the Dunes

Thudding wind in the dune shade,

On the other side under the sun a nation

Enraged with itself.  At my back,

The massed male voices of galloping surf

And a sea so vast and various it is more

Of an idea than a thing. Like freedom.

Under the Porch Roof

Under the cabin porch roof

Softening at the drip edge,

Under the alliterations of rain

Through the loosening leaves,

I am still and accepting

What the present offers,

Knowing what I have built in this life

I shall not build again,

And it is good that those things

Accompany me in our mutual decay.


Hear the syllables of crows

Exclaimiing as they go.

Gaia Theory in a Dangerous Time

On the Arizona-Utah border, by Marc Torso, AncientSkys.com
The sign  carved into the rock points to water.

The ground without us

The sea and the sky empty of men

Murderous and many

Born with The Bomb


May the earth recover

And the young survive

Thriving in a new theology

Careful not to leave a sign.

Harmonium

Please expand.

What color there is lies where it fell

In the gossamered woodland in a subtle fall

Where subtlety reigns as a welcome state of mind

Beneath the vocal passages of geese

And chalking jets a man and a dog on a porch

In the company of trees and their friendship

At peace with a slower pace of change

Moored to a planet of which they are a part.

First Light to Last

Bending closer to the ground

Frost on the briars

At the back of the field

The dog in the aster thatch bounds

Beggar ticks stuck to my sleeve

Our breathing lifts white

With the breath of the frost

Steaming in a ramp of sunlight

Against the comfort of  trees

Crows glossed in the stubble

Midges backlit and dancing

A wavering river in a clean sky


Twenty blackbirds wide

Rim to rim across sunset

Grinnies clucking at dusk


Crickets slowing in moonlight

Things we can count on

Close to the earth.

Another Sunset

Another sunset in a life of those

Days of what i should have done

Nights a trampled ground.

Savages

  

Evenings of a big red sun

Being still you feel it

Rolling back into the dark

Everything a metaphor

When so little changes,

Mornings in a mist.

  

Change

Among the last images of Saturn from Cassini, Sept. 19, 2017

Living as i am

Without

Half a life suffices

Peace to the past

And praise praise

The splendor of solitude

Superannuated

Ganglia and the freed

Dumbfounded intellect.

Due East, Due West

Please click and expand, expand, expand.

No matter how small, it can be halved

No matter how large, it can be doubled

Limitless in all respects, beyond imagination

Elemental, infinite, and eternal

Each and each and each

The universe of you, the universe of me

The universe of everything

The ineffable all

Brief specks of consciousness

Bowing as we pass on the equinox

Ever so slightly

Flying with Bees

He carried a camp chair into the field and sat with wild bees

At summer's end in tall solidago heavy with pollen and past

He was quiet and listened and the sun drew water from his flesh

And the day slowed down

And the longer he stayed

The more he belonged

The more he took root

The more he unfocused

The better he flew

Flower to flower

And into the blue

To expand with the clouds

As everything opened

Into everything else.

Meditation On the Approach of Autumn

Each tree writes its poem as i watch


Communing with her ashes in the field

The dead want leaves to fall on them again

Butterflies fly tattered near the end

Being As We Are

A day moves on,

Everything being as it is,

Aphids drinking goldenrod,

A crash in the corn is the deer,

Grinnies planting oaks among the ferns,

The barred owl calling in the vale,

A man awaiting sleep

In the late haunted dark,

Still expecting more,

Listening to an absence

That inspires verse,

Coyotes yipping and howling.

In a dream he felt her touch,

In jewelled morning fields

All of it seemed real.

Expand with a click.

Ephemeron

Today it doesn't matter what

She'll never write again.

Candle smoke was pretty

As it curled.

This Constellated Life

Launching from the cabin step

To navigate among the trees

Into a field of stars

The grounded constellations

Unanchored in this floating world

The woods is sleep

The field is sky

The dream is rolling sea

Druid

Again to the woods

The protection of trees

Standing together

With their young

Reaching for heaven

And each other

A stoic intelligence

We don't understand

Yet they know us

Too well.

When Money Has No Meaning

In the field-returning-to-woods

A coin falls through a hole in my pocket.

How little it is worth, I think, stopped

By a maple leaf against my thigh,

The ravaged beauty of its dying,

Forgetting where the money fell.

The Descent of Summer

Teachers in-service and the fair wrapping up,

The squash dying back and the robins gone,

Only transients from Canada peeping in the woods,

Elderberries purple and weighing down their bushes

Beside outbuildings abandoned and a shade grayer

For the passing of another summer, as are we,

Walking the country not to find something new,

But to discover something old,

To be reminded such things still are.

—Thoreau on the remarks of Ellery Channing, August 23, 1858

And Yet

Comes a dragonfly

across 300 million years

to perch on the edge of my bookmark—


In signs and shadows

I am old enough

for primitive belief.


The sun tops the woods,

a tide of light

on the goldenrod field

steaming at the edge as it goes—


Such endings,

The beauty of this life

I must forgive.

Luna

Luna moths joined in the grass,

their wings looking back at me

from another realm,

realms upon realms,

this layered world.

Universal News

(A click feels like an entrance)

The fire and fury of The Leader

left behind, I go

into the August morning hills

where the cricket in the woods

reports the news, the likes of which

the world has always known.

Shadow of the Earth

Shadow of the Earth rising from the Atlantic

  

East before sunset

The shadow of the Earth

Under the Belt of Venus,

A rising of the night

As love goes dark,

Missing you it's true,

But solitude is not loneliness

And I have little choice

But to be magnified by absence,

West before dawn.