Riches

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Looking in through woods

reflected on the pane

to where i worked

am working still

and out the other side

to woods i'm standing in

in rain this is my wealth

the thunder overhead

this little poem

hissing at its end.

Multitude

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Worlds within a world,

as deep as we can know,

each one webbed with mystery,

line and color, form,

the beauty of unknowns,

heavens in the heaven of the norm.

"All the way to heaven is heaven." –Catherine of Siena, 1370.

Into the Mist

This is a road to nowhere

You had said,

But listen,

Someone comes from there.

Ars Poetica 7

Rustle and stretch

bristled and gleaming

in the Infrared,

sharp-edged lyric

 soon silage.

Road Rider Sonnet

When I become dismayed by news

and my will is watered down,

I ride the hills in early evening

through the shadows of the fields

beneath a swirl of swallows,

cows lined up behind their barns,

thunderheads conspiring in the south,

salt in my eyes in the heat of the climb,

 then over the top and the cooling pull

of the planet and the free flight down,

wild with the wind in my mouth,

mad with the thrill of the lean,

the promise of the hill fulfilled,

inspiration flowing on two wheels.

—with a line by James Dickey

Migratory

Young blackbirds

strengthening their wings

above mowed nests,

practicing to go —

so soon, I think,

flightless and solitary,

reading old poets,

their thoughts unspooling

with death before them,

feeling how it feels,

strengthening my wings.


Butternuts are falling

in their husks, and soon enough

I'll smell the corn in tassel —

feeling how it feels,

solitary, not flightless.

On Thoreau's Bicentennial

"The Milky Road Version Two"

by Larry Landolfi

Indeed, we cannot be silent.

We are forever breaking silence

And mending nothing.

—Henry David Throeau, July 12, 1851

Laurel Mountain Aubade

Golden hours in a golden age,

Extant on the earth

Among these hills,

And none of us much longer.

In an Ocean of Trees

The rain in the trees was the surf overhead

as he stood on the floor of the sea

up to his knees in the ferns and the tides

of the mind's dark flow.

He had always imagined them there

living out their days looking up

at the flashing blades of the surface,

wrapped in a world of their wishes.

Hawks soared in the light high up,

the waves broke above him,

rain on the face of a fool ––

a good place to wait,

as if he had never turned her away.

The Search

The world is full of truth

But we only find it

In ourselves.

Come let us be friends

This one time

For the earth will be left

To no one.

—Inspired by Talat Halman's translation of Sufi poet Yunus Emré, ca. 1300