Three Near Winter's End

Allison Meier/Atlas Obscura

  

The Gift

She gave him geraniums,

The color of embers,

To keep in his cold room.

Paris

Like a hundred thousand other lovers in the rain,

They closed a padlock on the grillwork of the Pont des Arts,


But they didn't throw the keys, and that was their mistake,

Over their shoulders into the Seine.

Joy and Hope

The mosses are in fruit.

Tonight a circle 'round the moon.

"The Gift" and "Paris" after the early and the late work of Michael Longley.

"Joy and Hope"  extracted from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Feb. 27, 1852.
NOTE: The locks on the Paris bridge, complete with grillwork, were removed in 2015 --
Combined weight: 45 tons.

A Weak Moment at the End of a Day

  

There is nothing to be done about it,

Doves caroling as the woods goes dark,

Indigo clouds in tatters over a small sunset,

The sky full of methane from wells in the next county.


Nothing to be done, the dull boom of weather,

Hemlocks shaking their boughs, skidders roaring,

Trees falling in the dusk, nothing to be done,

Alea iacta est, the die is cast.


The earth is turning and all of us with it,

Everything's passing, there is nothing to be done,

Owls' call-and-response in starlight,

Until money has no meaning there is nothing to be done.

In the Company of Crows

Constellated birches

Nightrain hangs in the birches,

Morningfog gray in the valley.

Crows complain of my presence,

Changing hilltops through thick air,

Scolding as they go, the local clan.

I might learn their language

If I could be still long enough.

Perhaps I should try, an effort of stasis:

Still long enough to rise from this local circumference

Into the blackshining infinite night.

Visitation

Sometimes I get up and don my robe and go

out onto the porch looking for magic—

a silver thread, a winged horse, a flight

of swans returning in moonlight.


Sometimes i circle the dogwood in daylight,

counterclockwise to strengthen the spell.

Sometimes the field seems empty of facts,

except for the dream that lasts days.


She touched my arm. She spoke my name.

–– with two lines from a short story by Denis Johnson

Starlings Over Westsylvania

Starlings over Great Falls, VA. (Robin Loznak/AP)

I shall have lost my way

At last somewhere between

The Neshannock and the Youghiogheny,


As porous as a shifting cloud

Of starlings over ruined fields

And the waters that divide them.


How do they not collide?

—a poem that begins with two lines by Michael Longley

Red on White

The melting snow lasts longest in the woods,

Water ticking in the ground as trees awaken,

One human heart beating in the universal hum,

The whole hill pulsing.

February Fog

  

Soft thoughts in soft weather,

Waxed cotton and wool,

Gentle touch and gentle separation,

Soft wondering with no answer expected,

Easy disappointment in the elemental mist,

What we were and how I think of it,

Inverted worlds in gleaming domes

Hanging in the trees.

Remains

Titan and Rhea, moons of Saturn, photo taken by NASA's

Cassini spacecraft from a distance of  713,300 miles.

  

With her then,

at the top of the field

where the blackberries ripen and fall,

where the dogwood blooms, and the lights

I have strung are stars on the hill.

With her then,

at the edge of the woods

where the hideout she built of softening rails

sinks into the moss and the ferns.

With her then,

in the flow of the spring

running muscled and cold over stones

where she touched crayfish, earth on her cheek.

With her then,

downstream,

where the dog drinks,

broadcast my grayish-white dust.

The death of a child is a trauma that never goes away.

—Amanda Bestor-Siegal, The Threepenny Review

Shadowland II

Of those blue shades, the living and the dead,

Stretched across my daily path like shadows

Of the past, the living are the saddest.

Biopic with Moonlight

  

We cross the snowfield in moonlight

In moonlight counting constellations

Rising from the silhouetted woods,

Interrupted by the meteor

Reflecting on the drifts.

—a take on Michael Longley's "Meteorite"

Sea Foam

In such mortal wind a steady groan

no breathing out no breathing in

no calming swells no Doppler reassurance

and yet and yet

our thoughts extend to the source of light

in the shivering mysteries of absence

surrender to the laws of physics

our Pavlovian preference for solitude

our plain ambition on an empty beach

for all of our remaining days

we could listen to the sea.