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