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.