Sea Level Abstract

Returning to sea level,

The water's lift and fall

Across the decades since,

As much as I will know

About infinity.

Little has changed.

The pathway between us

Still moves as i move.

There was only ever you.

March Woodland Pasture

This way into the woodland pasture,

Through the open gate, the corner ground

Hooved to mud and stones

Where yearlings had stood to watch me pass

With kind dark eyes, long-lashed and expectant,

The way my children looked at me so young.

I should have done more.

In Freezing Rain

Loading logs in freezing rain,

Snow still in the woods,

Anxious for the peepers and the daffs,

I pause beneath the woodshed roof,

Impatient with a spring this late

Until I think how many more?

Listening to sleet on corrugated steel,

Savoring the rhythm and the wait.

On a Poem by Charles Simic

Fingerless gloves

Snow swept from the porch boards

The door propped open

Working on a poem on a poem

Sighing as the wind sighs on the hill:

SIT TIGHT

When the old clock

That woke the dead

With its loud tick fell silent

Eternity moved in.

A mirror looked toward the door

With eyes of a dog

Who wanted to be taken

Out for a walk.

Straws from the old broom

Scattered over the dark-staining melt

Things thawed to their essence

Water and magic

Flow through us.

—Internal poem by Charles Simic, The Threepenny Review, Spring 2018.

Then for the Owl

  

Then for the barred owl,

Her call in the woods,

Who thinks of you,

Who thinks of your life,

Then for the Prince of the Storm,

A young red-tailed hawk,

Sailing pale in a pale clotted sky,

Then for the ones who have flown

But stand with me still,

I think of you,

I think of your life,

One set of tracks among trees.

Equinox

All things in balance,

Mantra

As winter ends,

Woodpecker staccati.

Slowly,

I write it with a stick

In last night's glitter,

Vanishing.

March

Through the unchained gate

when the wind paused, catching its breath,

into a hilltop pasture, a world in itself

with its starched oaks and long views,

and I a world in me, and you in you,

the wind in our ears again,

the trees singing backup, snow devils

spinning themselves into oblivion

in our kingdom of wind.

On the Cabin Porch

Snow brushed from the rocker,

Wrapped in old wool,

I sit to slow the day,

Listening for bluebirds,

Hearing only crows and chickadees,

Warm light through cool air,

And sleep.

Shadows of the trees point east

When I awake. Dusk is in the cabin.

It's been a day without a human voice,

A privilege, I think, as I head home,

In a world of billions.

Out of the woods, over the hill,

Something immortal, the sunset on snow.

Age in a Minor Key

Snow on the wreckage,

First beauty then depth.

To die on the earth,

Hurtling and blue.

From NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, October, 2015

Notes from a Parallel Existence

  

It is summer in another life,

And you say you want to listen, so


I will tell you the mistakes I've made,

Admit to everything, the pain I've caused,


Or promise to, the sun so warm on flattened grass,

Tall goldenrod around us our horizon,


The mated hawks so high against the clouds,

Nothing feels so good to human touch


As human touch. Perhaps next time,

When there's so much more to tell.

Mon Valley Reunion

  

Thirty years ago for twenty years

I had known them well and loved them some,

And here they were again,

Gathered in the banquet room of Butler's Golf

To sing surprise as one of them turned eighty.



It was the third of March, the in-between

Of freeze and thaw, a time of mud and fog

In mountains to the east

Where a marriage ended, and half a family

Was lost to loyalty of blood, and here



They were, survivors of Monongahela mists,

Welcoming me back — this was, you see,

Western Pennsylvania:

Accordion and gnocchi and a chicken dance,

 And sturdy matrons polkaing in pairs,



And some who could not sit for long, and some

Who could not stand, and some who hugged me

And held on with shining eyes,

All of us in our slow slide into the dark,

stunned and clinging briefly to each other as we go.