Lake Effect

  

The lake takes the township by storm

exerting its will over the highlands

fierce and affecting

from 200 miles to the north


I  meet it alone among trees

me in my big coat trying

to be still with such wind

speaking in the hollows of my face


Snow-sided trees circle and sway

with a popping and cracking I feel at my core

the wind in the crowns saying her

the wind on the hill saying she


What the wind says

I remember it all

carrying the best of it

into what remains of a passing life.

Faith to Get By

  

Then let it be the fog

of nightfall crawling

out of the valley.


Let it be the sky

prone on the ground

between vague hills.


Let it be the world

with its thickening night

and its people in fear of each other.


Dear ones, whisper it in the dark:

Most of us are kind.

Cling to each other.

Skeleton Coast

The Skeleton Coast, Namibia, from Marco Polo TV, 2014

I am not the sea

and you are not the land

what is the metaphor then

for two animals touching

or rather who have touched

and shared a coast

if even for an era

can it be marriage

can it be divorce?

—after a poem by Donika Kelly

November Tao

Expand with a click.

  

Stopped among trees

in softening snow

ankle deep in quiet

lady ferns ground pine wind

an oak leaf lifts


A few small words

to link our silences

a few strikes of the gong

then listen to our breathing

how the emptiness rings

Soft Focus

Finger-cold and overcast

this walk we're on

together in our solitude


The grasses are not dead to me

soft focus in near-night

form has so much life


One season as another

and so lost love

we still reflect low light.

Where We Find It

     

I went to sit beside the sea

to quell the inner tides

and missed the oak leaves' fall,

the final layer on the ground

before the snows,


And now I find the peace

I sought on distant shores

in barer woods

and ringing geese

and even in the rain

freezing on brown fields,


I feel the calming of the hills

and know I should have stayed.

Leaving the Barrier Island

Under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility pier, Duck, NC

  

Escadrilles of pelicans

sail up the beach,

angled toward the vanishing point,

the scribed horizon, the next moment,

the continuous future,

under a sliding sky, low and gray,

in opposition to the sea wind.


Soon I will start the truck

and drive five hundred miles

into the hills.

I will carry my heart in my body

over bridges and through shadowy tunnels.

Someday I will let it go again,

like a kite.

Rain on the Atlantic

  

The wind sighs across the sea for hundreds of miles.

I don't understand this uncontainable grief,

What summons its return from forgetfulness.


Ah, dear ones, I remember too much,

The scholar I had been waiting for all of my life,

The one reader who understood the language


And deciphered its mysteries, blood of my blood,

Lost forever in the heart of a great city.

Let what rises live with what descends.


Awaiting the sunrise with its bandages of light,

I can feel the dark sky tilting on one wing,

Shuddering with rain coming down around me.

–with images collected from 30 years of Edward Hirsch's

work, assembled and shaped to speak personal truth.