Coastal 5

Enlarge to discover.

These are my last days on the water,

Sharp-eyed and windblown on Currituck Sound,

Standing still on one leg after so many years,

Stock still in the smoke and the tides.

Can't you still see me there in the reeds

Working alone to find the right words,

Convinced we shared what was real,

Reminded with every full moon i am sinking?

Wake

Dawn, March 25, 2017

No sleep

like the sleep

to the waves'

self-destruction.

No shock

like the shock

of the world

as it is.

Your Role as a Gull

Return to your role as a gull,

Wings spread on thews of wind

That sweep the foaming terraces of the sea,

Ride under the pier where i pace the margins

Going nowhere like the pylons of pulverized shells.

Once we were light in a fiction of waves,

In a scansion of birds, flocks and one horizon,

Soothed at last by the Atlantic's unrest,

A rhythm we knew that made the heart stagger.

—with a phrase by Derek Walcott

Depths

Currituck Sound, please expand.

  

When wind from the north blows hard down the bar

drawing depth from the sound to add to the sea,

then the heron can hunt far into the sheen

with magnificent poise, a single, slow step,

then stillness and patience, not even a ripple,

as if it had its whole winged life

to feed its red-eyed hunger—

easy to wish we'd lived with such grace,

focused and calm in the shallows,

knowing which flash was out of our reach,

but our instincts were human and stronger.

Hill Country

  

Money never rinsed my life,

But there was the hill with its shade

And drifts on the lee.

Love never rooted on the hilltop,

But there was the wind that never stopped

When the rest did.

Snow at Dusk

  

Moving in twilight as the snow begins again

as fine as fog, dreaming of no heaven

but these fields, this sky, these trees,

the lines you read still hooking

heart and head, words that made you shiver

by the fire, a phrase like a shaving cut —

the very reason you love verse,

that deep and private piercing

like the loneliness you feel that no one sees.

Cynosure: A Meditation

wind and then calm

sun and then snow

in the pleasures of stillness

robins return

light on a sphere

turning in a night with no end

rooted in one place

at the center of everything


maybe nothing will happen

afterall

Yang's March Pond

Fetid, fecund soup,

thick with the spit of rotted ice,

this density i pass through

leaving no sign if i'm pious,

not even a name in my tongue

quickly forgotten in a thousand short cycles

of melt and spawn and hatch and tails and frogs and ice again,

i sit beside it while i can,

turn my face to the higher sun

and listen to legs sprout in the slime,

 the water snake feast in the reeds.

—with a line from Shirley Kaufman, 1923-2016

Open Season

Please enlarge.

A cold loud wind in a cold bright sun

shakes the shadows on the barn

where briars scratch the door

in an arc that pleases one

on the road alone,

paused in wonder at the things

that save a man from reason.

The Unsubstantiated Urges of March

Eight-degree morning.

  

Blackbirds swoop in from Virginia,

Gargling and shrugging in the apple tree

By the pond where perch are shadows under ice

Receding in an arc where the spring purls in.

I watch from a rocker by a fogged window,


Reading James Tate with an open mind,

I've just tossed a log into the stove and opened

The draft a half turn, the iron is ticking, and I

Want to go where pelicans are on display. Next

I'll visit planets of the solar system — the Tate effect.


On the other side of the mountain there's a man

Who lived his whole life and never left the township.

He watched too much Fox, became fearful and mean —

There's a lot of other beyond these mice-infested walls.

Then frackers appeared and poisoned his well.


Much of living is invention, yet fact from fiction

Should be easier to tell, like in this alternative poem,

But what of it? Lunatics are loose on the roads,

And no one demands proof anymore. Meanwhile I'm off,

Reading and rocking. I'll text you from Neptune.

The Squall

  

Timelessly lost in a few lines—

love like death and all the rest—

I look up through candleflame to find

the woods ghosting in a sudden snow,

and as the wicks curl smoke

I enter the skyless squall.


In the thick and sticking snow

the work still runs behind my eyes.

I vanish as I go, first my shoulders,

then my chest beneath my breath,

then my thighs and arms swinging

over the hill dissolving until

I have disappeared completely.


Only my thoughts remain,

pulsing into the laden wind.

Only these lines make it home,

with you in them.

If When

let it be on the bar

at winter's ebb

hearing the sea's

cold closure