Paris

Not halfway

I close the translated French

To read the ebbed beach.

We lost much

Twice in the City of Light

To what shared darkness?

Late in This Extinction

Below your northeaster

Sighs a south wind

On a road through the dunes

From the sea to the house

Where silence restores the unknown.

Dirt Road

Sometimes all I could hear

was the wind in dry corn

as the hay wagon vanished

over the hill that fall

piled high with the furniture

the hands had carried out of the house

as I sat in a chair in the yard

and watched with a gun and a bottle.

Sometimes all I could see

was the yellow dust.

Love Story

Venus

  

A touch in a dream,

He felt it all day,

Always the same sense of loss

For what he'd never known.


The earth cooled beneath him,

Thoughts were fast clouds in twilight,

All he'd ever wanted,

And why she was not there.

More Rain

The waiting continued 

The waiting and the dreaming

Eyes on the wet ground

I'm dreaming here

We're all dreaming

Walking the wet ground

Tomorrow was very far away.

Place

The step to the porch

Has rotted with rain,

The roof has gone soft at the edge,

There's moss on the shingles

And worms in the posts—

All things of this earth

Become earth again.


Built with these hands

From scraps and barn lumber,

This cabin in these sylvan hills

Is falling down around me.


I'll make the repairs as long as I can,

Now slower and now with more caution,

Remembering the thrll of creation

When these walls first rose

From the subfloor that spring,

And these rafters were set on these sills,

Solid and upright and strong,


I still see her dancing

In framework and sunlight,

With laughter and friends and with singing—

This is the place i belong.

Mist after Rain

Mist after rain,

breath of the creek

rising in the valley,

the quiet times with you

when the hills were our world,

do you think of them, too?

74th Fall

Breathing the mist

in early autumn woods

empty and still

an ancient thought

When the student is ready

the teacher appears.