The Court of Morning

  

Grasses rising through the thatch

Cold wind on our ears

Shadows of the chasing birds

We must guard the earth

Corporations, too, my friend

Our small and petty lives

Languages of birds and wind

Broken by the road

Contrails screen the sun

Who guards the earth

Who guards the earth?

—"The earth, too, was once a heavenly body."  -- Galway Kinnell, 
from the  final stanza of "Gravity," his last published poem.

An Ancient World

  

To walk in April woods

In the early shade of evening,

The sun just now below the hill,

And the first violets closing all around you,

Is to know a sense of things

Nearly as eternal as earthly life can be.

Stopping in Wet Woods

Awakened by water,

Magnificent and sanctified,

The shooting leaves

To open with the sun,

Answers in the common rain

About to be revealed

For those that watch

And do not speak,

Movement in one place,

Like trees, it seems.

Continent

Evening at the edge, into the wind,

Sleep with the drapes blowing into the room,

A day's drive north, the perilous flow,

Tires at last on the driveway stones,

The quiet assurances of home,

Away from the surf and the road,

Evening at the seam of the seasons,

The cabin porch, the frozen fog,

The old oak rocker in nightfall,

The beauty in things.

—"No beauty but in things." William Carlos Williams

When One Has Lived Long Enough Alone

The last of snow on fogsoaked fields,

Our winter slow to leave, when one has lived

Long enough alone,


More to the mist and to occluded views

Than to the sunsharp day, when one has lived

Long enough alone,


The thunderstorm that's soon to come

Will calm the swirling mind, when one has lived

Long enough alone,


The leafless budding rainbright trees

Will tint the dismal hills, when one has lived

Long enough alone,


Rejoicing in the close-at-hand, when one has lived

 Long enough alone.

—Taking a form from Galway Kinnell in an alternative direction

Water Planet

Currituck Sound, NC

The source of wind swings south

and calms the mind.

Water and meditation

are wedded together.

—the last sentence is Melville's.

In a Gale from the East

Seabirds in a gale,

Sailing north, sailing south

With a turn of their heads,

Gulls in singularity,

Pelicans in squadrons,


A man behind the dunes

At the edge of a continent

Faces the sea and the years,

His ghosts in chronology,

The loves gone missing,


The living and the dead,

Sailing north, sailing south

With a turn of his head,

The sea spills toward him

Under of the curve of the earth.

Amen Corner

Snow and then rain and then fog

and then wind and then snow and then rain

and water in your shoes

and your shoes coming off

in the sucking mud,

and you wish you were in Georgia,

but you have a big coat

and firewood enough,

and isn't it all lovely

with no one around,

just you and your selective memory

with the jays calling in the mist

and the ground showing through,

with the Bucs on a tear

and the Masters about to start and, oh,

can't you smell the azaleas so sweet

as you make the turn and head home

on your own little winning streak?