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.

Breaking News Breakdown

(click for detail)

August and the goldenrod,

The dragonflies

Aclatter in the field,

The printer's hands

Upon the map,

The UPS truck

On the stones,

The shedding dog

Expecting bones,

Spider lines

Across my face,

Morning best

To contemplate,

Toes in heavy dew,

The breaking news,

Water in the mantle

Of the moon.