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.