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