Shadow Tracker

    

    

Can it be only me,

adding my tracks in the field

to those of the vole and the deer

and every other warm-blooded creature

that fled across the snow?

My shadow extends

as the sun swings 'round,

my form a streak up the hill

and off into the silvered blue,

a tangent to the earth—

I raise one arm

to see it move,

and for all the world

it looks like a greeting

to infinity.

Courting the Present

  

The man is blessed who every day

beholds the western sky at sunset

while revolutions vex the world.

—Henry David Thoreau, December 27, 1831.

Springwater

You who drank

from the same tin cup

cold and sweet

from under the stones

if only you could.

Moss and red efts

undisturbed

into another year.

What miracles

from thirst.

Through a Dark Lens

  

Let it be enough to know

                    you're not alone

                    the way you feel


The music you hear


Beneath every other music

                    across the white fields

                    above the bare-treed ridges


The colors you see


Beneath the red and green

                    you're not alone

                    the wounds inflicted

                 
Unintended unintended


Sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep

                    vanished beauty

                    broken hearts


Everything not nature falls away


What you are soon must recede

                    looking at the living

                    wishing for the dead


The illusion of rescue the rescue of illusion.

—after reading Frank Bidart's collected poems, 1965-2016.

Higher Latitudes

A sticking snow

bends the boughs

and slows us in the dusk

in reverence for the solitude

and privacy of winter

at the higher latitudes.

The Loneliness of Artists

Farm road, Middlecreek

A watercolor wash

in the misted dusk


The drench of loss

over the cold-pressed fields


Taking their inspiration

from charcoal and sepia days


Andrew Wyeths in their provinces

dream of red-gold braids.

And So Ourselves

We may infer

that every withered culm of grass

or sedge or weed still standing in the fields

answers some purpose by standing.

                                                       —Henry David Thoreau, Dec. 1, 1853

Abstract for the Dead

Each December since

beside the sea

                    its lift and sway

                    its infinite collapse


Until this latest longer dark

determined now to stay

                    steady wounded soul

                    a decade past


Frost in the ground at last

                    firmer footing

                    in winter rain


In these hills

it is the sky

                    that heaves and sighs.

Two Twilights

The hollow draws me in

tempts me down

into the depths of the year

to where night begins

feeling the pull of the solstice

the light so weak and brief

two twilights make the whole day.

Single Digits

  

Single digits in the dark

crystalize the night,

level bars of frozen mist

across the snowfield in first light,

pale blue against the woods,

as those of us who watched for dawn

add our tracks to yesterday's,

the heat of memory

lifting from our flesh,

old enough to know regret,

and though the past is never past,

we are still young enough to want

the next thing and the next.

Speechless

Speechless were

the day's best hours

when time eased by

unbroken

which is to say

were timeless

and joy was fueled

by even the weakest delusion.

Untitled

So much of the day is now evening

a fine and quiet snow has calmed the ground

chalking the sky and erasing the farther hills

as it sifted straight down

to pile up on my shoulders

where I stood peaceful and sad

paying attention to my breathing

eight counts in and twelve counts out

thinking of an ancient teaching

that says if you feel depressed

you need to think about death more often

eight counts in and twelve counts out

breathing in this one place.

Living December

No internet

No traffic


Only the wind

In the wire


Only the strength

Of your heart

Indian Summer

Warm enough

to plant your stick in the earth

and hang up your hat,

born-again midges rising and falling

between you and the advancing clouds

expanding overhead like heaven reheavened,

the planet with its wind and its wreckage

ever rolling back into its own shadow,

and all of its people

rising and falling with the light.

Lake Effect

  

The lake takes the township by storm

exerting its will over the highlands

fierce and affecting

from 200 miles to the north


I  meet it alone among trees

me in my big coat trying

to be still with such wind

speaking in the hollows of my face


Snow-sided trees circle and sway

with a popping and cracking I feel at my core

the wind in the crowns saying her

the wind on the hill saying she


What the wind says

I remember it all

carrying the best of it

into what remains of a passing life.

Faith to Get By

  

Then let it be the fog

of nightfall crawling

out of the valley.


Let it be the sky

prone on the ground

between vague hills.


Let it be the world

with its thickening night

and its people in fear of each other.


Dear ones, whisper it in the dark:

Most of us are kind.

Cling to each other.

Skeleton Coast

The Skeleton Coast, Namibia, from Marco Polo TV, 2014

I am not the sea

and you are not the land

what is the metaphor then

for two animals touching

or rather who have touched

and shared a coast

if even for an era

can it be marriage

can it be divorce?

—after a poem by Donika Kelly

November Tao

Expand with a click.

  

Stopped among trees

in softening snow

ankle deep in quiet

lady ferns ground pine wind

an oak leaf lifts


A few small words

to link our silences

a few strikes of the gong

then listen to our breathing

how the emptiness rings

Soft Focus

Finger-cold and overcast

this walk we're on

together in our solitude


The grasses are not dead to me

soft focus in near-night

form has so much life


One season as another

and so lost love

we still reflect low light.

Where We Find It

     

I went to sit beside the sea

to quell the inner tides

and missed the oak leaves' fall,

the final layer on the ground

before the snows,


And now I find the peace

I sought on distant shores

in barer woods

and ringing geese

and even in the rain

freezing on brown fields,


I feel the calming of the hills

and know I should have stayed.

Leaving the Barrier Island

Under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility pier, Duck, NC

  

Escadrilles of pelicans

sail up the beach,

angled toward the vanishing point,

the scribed horizon, the next moment,

the continuous future,

under a sliding sky, low and gray,

in opposition to the sea wind.


Soon I will start the truck

and drive five hundred miles

into the hills.

I will carry my heart in my body

over bridges and through shadowy tunnels.

Someday I will let it go again,

like a kite.

Rain on the Atlantic

  

The wind sighs across the sea for hundreds of miles.

I don't understand this uncontainable grief,

What summons its return from forgetfulness.


Ah, dear ones, I remember too much,

The scholar I had been waiting for all of my life,

The one reader who understood the language


And deciphered its mysteries, blood of my blood,

Lost forever in the heart of a great city.

Let what rises live with what descends.


Awaiting the sunrise with its bandages of light,

I can feel the dark sky tilting on one wing,

Shuddering with rain coming down around me.

–with images collected from 30 years of Edward Hirsch's

work, assembled and shaped to speak personal truth.

Paris

Not halfway

I close the translated French

To read the ebbed beach.

We lost much

Twice in the City of Light

To what shared darkness?

Late in This Extinction

Below your northeaster

Sighs a south wind

On a road through the dunes

From the sea to the house

Where silence restores the unknown.

Dirt Road

Sometimes all I could hear

was the wind in dry corn

as the hay wagon vanished

over the hill that fall

piled high with the furniture

the hands had carried out of the house

as I sat in a chair in the yard

and watched with a gun and a bottle.

Sometimes all I could see

was the yellow dust.

Love Story

Venus

  

A touch in a dream,

He felt it all day,

Always the same sense of loss

For what he'd never known.


The earth cooled beneath him,

Thoughts were fast clouds in twilight,

All he'd ever wanted,

And why she was not there.

More Rain

The waiting continued 

The waiting and the dreaming

Eyes on the wet ground

I'm dreaming here

We're all dreaming

Walking the wet ground

Tomorrow was very far away.

Place

The step to the porch

Has rotted with rain,

The roof has gone soft at the edge,

There's moss on the shingles

And worms in the posts—

All things of this earth

Become earth again.


Built with these hands

From scraps and barn lumber,

This cabin in these sylvan hills

Is falling down around me.


I'll make the repairs as long as I can,

Now slower and now with more caution,

Remembering the thrll of creation

When these walls first rose

From the subfloor that spring,

And these rafters were set on these sills,

Solid and upright and strong,


I still see her dancing

In framework and sunlight,

With laughter and friends and with singing—

This is the place i belong.

Mist after Rain

Mist after rain,

breath of the creek

rising in the valley,

the quiet times with you

when the hills were our world,

do you think of them, too?

74th Fall

Breathing the mist

in early autumn woods

empty and still

an ancient thought

When the student is ready

the teacher appears.

As the Reds Come into the Field

a slower pace

a closer look

a deeper longing

for a word

a sweeter music

than is heard

From the thought of peace some peace we borrow

–George Santayana

Life on the Frontier

A clean form of meaning

solid as the hill may be

too much to expect

when our whole lives

go unexplained even

with our few flourishes

which themselves

need explanation.


A mob of blackbirds

settles in the oaks

their chatter sounds

like running water

their sudden launch

like surf

a thousand wings

against the air.


You understand

without the shape

of thought

you love your life

poor as it is

and may have found

an impermanent heaven

by not knowing hell.

–afrer reading the early, undated journal entries of Henry David Thoreau, circa 1845.

Equal Night

   

     Alone at the top of the field

     Near the end of another summer,

     What was I hoping for anyway?

Without

From the cover of "Exoplanet Science Strategy 2018" 
by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine

If the universe is infinite

surely there are other heavens.

I'm still thinking about you

and why you are not there.

–crediting Townes Van Zandt, who still throws a shadow.

The Going

Honoring the spent,

I lift the flowers from the vase

and lay them on the steppingstones


Every entrance, every exit,

the old, the decomposed,

lovely in the passing


I sit and watch them go

with settled mind.

Saturnalia

The final full view of Saturn from the spacecraft Cassini before is crashed into the planet.

And what about Saturn

with its towering hex at the pole,

thirty years between summers?


And what about us,

feckless in a chain of storms,

how little we know and how late,


Distracted and screenblind,

we all deserve more,

money and pleasure and peace?


And what about song,

the train in the valley,

do you hear it, too?


And what about love?

And what about death?

And is there still time?

The Cassini spacecraft captured this image of the ringed planet on April 2, 2014. Image via NASA.

Hillside Sunset

Opening to distance,

to the shifts of evening

on your skin

as the light lies down in the west,

consciousness 

fills the valley like mist.

Is it only you?

Mount Union

Mt. Union Cemetery, Upper Turkeyfoot Township, PA.

  

Even still, a few

of revolution's sons,

clothes heavy with sweat

from the mote-filled swelter

inside red barns,

bare arms corded

with muscle and vein,

thick-fingered men

with their names eroding

in stone on the hilltop

of Mount Union Cemetery,

rising from the midst

of their farms,

high ground shared

with the corn,

blue-green and gleaming.


Even still, a few men

of the soil and flag,

small on the graves

of the veterans of wars,

big on the pole,

luffing over the hills,

over the barns and the fields,

over the stones and the names,

higher than everything

but the sky with its birds

and its weather,

a few men slowly walking

on paths to their kitchens,

cows slowly filing

out of the parlors from milking,


A few men with the land

on their clothes

and their skin,

a few men with the ground

in their lungs,

a few men near the end

of a day

under swallows

feeding in flight

and late summer clouds

like galleons afloat

on an inverted sea,

a few men

with the deep

cool Earth all around.

Reason and Truth

The line of the hill

Against unending depth,

Riding the surface of Earth,

Nowhere else we know of,

Each other.

Riding Alone: A Flow

  

Young blackbirds launch

from the tops of the pines,

a rush of wings with the sound

of broken shells

slipping in the salt wash.


Shift into high,

lean into your shadow,

rounding the bend with the wind in your mouth,

red barn a blur.


Suddenly there, panting beside you,

Good buddy Huck, who loves to keep pace,

tongue of a farm dog flopping with joy,

hot from a chase across windrows of oat straw

gleaming with the intermittent sun.


And you ride, and you ride.


Back at the house,

a stranger on the porch

come to clean the furnace,

now that the maples are dropping some leaves.


In the cellar you learn he is skilled at his trade.

He knew your daughter, in the same class,

surprised now to hear of her fate in Manhattan

a decade ago.


You study his face,

he seems far too old,

and for the first time you see

how she could have taken on years,


And when he packs up his tools,

and his panel truck vanishes over the hill,

its dust trail settling into the cornfield,

you are more alone.

The Night Has a Thousand Voices

  

Katydids rasp zydeco in the old oaks,

Crickets fiddling their wings for mates,

As dusk descends upon the fields

And fills the woods, throbbing with deep summer.


The dark is a crowded place,

 A thousand voices to the night,

Yours close by, curious and kind

As in the best of hours that never last,


The yellow young moon high up and fuzzy

Through the smoke from the fires in the west,

Our brief time dwindling by the day,

Listening to the songs that rock us to sleep,

The heaven we inherit approaching.

—with two lines from a poem by Tracy K.Smith

Own World

Locust Borer

  

The beetle on its goldenrod,

Does it sleep and dream,

Or watch its sky at night

As I do mine,

Or listen to its pulsing heart

And hear its tick of time?

Turn Silver

To listen to the wind in the great crowns of the oaks

And hear the surf,


To feel the pull of something you can't see

And know the tug of what is lost,


To watch the maple leaves turn silver before rain

And see her eyes


Is to understand you can't go back

To where just you have never left.

Children of the Universe

Stellar nursery N159, 150 light-years across, in the Large Magellanic Cloud,

one of our Milky Way's satellite galaxies. (ESA/Hubble & NASA photo)

  

Can it be that the universe is ours,

Self-orphaned as we are,

Drifting to the edge of what has no end,

Molten and atomic, inheritors by birth

Of what we cannot know,

Wonder-stunned and fearful and alone,

Desperate for reason and belief,

All there is so brutal and alive?

—with a question and 2 lines by Tracy K. Smith

Sonnet for the Habitant

click to expand

I could use a break,

Exhausted as I am from speaking now,

From speaking earth, from speaking love,


So I swallow my fresh veggies

And go blank as an act of will

Under a caravan of summer clouds,


Up to my shins in wild oregano

In a field of Joe-Pye tall-blooming and

Aflutter with swallowtails, an empty boat

Adrift on an afternoon in August.


If it's true that I'm here by mistake

Better to stop thinking in sentences

And do nothing to speak of,

Making the most of it, not coming back.

Sunset Moonrise

  

Still enough

                    to feel this old earth roll

Old enough
                     
                    to be unsure

                                        of everything

But this

                    and when the poet asks

                                         Is there another world?

I know there is

                    I know there is  

                                        and it is this.

—Reading Justin Boening

Entering the Realm of Dusk

Laurel Hill Crrek Valley

The sun has left the sky,

The valleys fill with fog,

The elements assemble,

All the scattered elements of the earth

And all the children of heaven

Gather over the creeks and rills.

I have lived a good deal

in the mist-bound solitudes.

If the hills would bow down

I could see her again.

Ekstasis

Ken Christison photo 

To be here and there at once,

Otherworldly and ecstatic,

Accompanied by music,

An ancient, mystic Greek,

Trying to say what can't be said

For there is no vocabulary,

Only equations and optics

For shifting distances,

The moon so far away

And beside you here among trees,

The loves burning inside you

You will not see again.