Praise for the Ordinary

Dirt road, Upper Turkeyfoot

People blessed love clouds

lifting their heads

as great armadas

of light and shade

sail above them

there for all to see

as the wind is on the hill

there for all to hear

the trees singing background

for the crow

soloing in blue

with last night's rain

still gleaming on the road

common gifts on a common day

surrounded by ordinariness

and blessed be.

—with lines from Adam Zagajewski's "My Favorite Poets"

Ancient Evening

Expand with a click to see Venus.

    

Out of the woods in the civil twilight,

Leaving the owl to her silent flight

And the pileate to his lament

Amplified by the stillness of the pure early dark

Rising from the frozen ground,

A  pause in the rush of our world,

Climbing the slope of the field in its shadow,

Things of the earth black on the dimming sky

Pierced by the evening's bright planets,

Knowing the peace of our minds in this time

Of the stopped sun, communing with ourselves

When souls have passed over

And wait in the void to be born,

Light a candle for the sun's return.

—Touching upon pre-Celtic Irish myths surrounding the winter solstice.

Solstice

Under the swing of the sun

Each moment is a pause


The night is long

And filled with wonders

Breathe deeply and wait

Aging in the deep blue dark

More Likes

Cabin in nautical twilight

  

I've reached the conclusion

We all see too much of each other,

Boorish in our digital presences,

Barging into each other's lives

When who asked us?


The more time I spend in the woods

Away from my own disappointing species,

The happier I am with the market cashier,

Perhaps my only live interaction

In two weeks, and a stranger.


I'll load the pickup thinking,

What kind and helpful creatures,

These smiling humans, which lasts until I finish

Restocking the cereal and peanut butter

And check my devices. Then humbug.


Thus, I promise myself more cabin time.

I'll order stamps and fill the Meisterstuck.

I'll refine my thoughts, consider the best way to say

Something worth saying, for an audience of one,

make notes, rewrite, on cotton paper, in cursive—


Boomer secret code.

Claims that the Animals Are Not Harmed Proved False

Las Luminarias, the annual ceremony of the purification

of the animals, Avila, Spain. Antonio Zamora photo.

  

I've seen it again

Just before I awoke,

Horses, fire, and night riders,

A vision that has come to represent

The end of our union,

Muscle, hooves, escape

Through the flames and the smoke.


We should have practiced old ways,

Reviving our ritual from the provinces,

Las Luminarias, a celebration of the physical,

A leap over bonfires,

Purification of the animals

On the Feast of Saint Anthony,

Singed, even scarred, but not felled,

As the night I worked late,

And you came home later,

Smelling of horses and wood smoke and distance.

This Thin Place and Time

  

This thin place and time,

These in-between weeks,

Thin as the Celts called it,

Closer than usual to another reality

Where spirits and memories dwell.


You feel it walking the woods

In drifting mists and cold rain on old snow,

Between seasons, between worlds,

Between growth and decay, life and death,

The limbo of early December.


So often our mood matches the natural world,

All day the bare trees touch each other

As I walk this thin place

Of the ghosted, dripping woods.

I see no one, the dead going with me.

Storm Damage

A super cell over Colorado, 2012. Cammie Czuchnicki photo

You imagined a world. I saw it, too,

Both of us fiction in each other's eyes.


Forces of nature, beautiful from a distance,

Love, of course, and no survivors.

Clearing Near Sunset

Much of the light

has been blocked.

Cloud and cold rain

were the day, were the years,

some would say.

Yet see how it clears

close to sunset,

and isn't it heavenly

under the sky,

and hasn't it been?

A few moments' clearing

in the waning hours

is hope enough 

to keep me working

toward that end.

Divergence

Chelsea Richardson photo

Perhaps we shouldn't

See each other anymore...

It's alright.

It's a relief for me, too...

Will the moon still speak to us,

Do you think,

On our narrow, crooked paths?

Only every night.

Other Days

Some days all of it seems true,

Attention to the close-at-hand,

Stillness on the hill,

The perfect falling line.


Other days I wonder

 If you wonder, too.

November's End

 

Briars catch me by the sleeve,

walking after early morning snow,

not so much a fall as an appearance,

even less distraction now on the sleeping hill,

happy to be headed for the trees,

my words before me if I speak,

but I just want to listen

for those voices still traveling in space,

the calls of my children running in the field.

Expansion

Room to unfurl, Click to expand.

Broad silver skies

wide pristine horizons

leafless wooded hills and whitecapped seas

room enough

to let regrets unfurl

beyond distances and time

until the winds blow clean and hoarse

in barren trees

the winds that lift the waves

the winds that once connected

you and me.


What else are we if not time

if not rivers flowing to the sea

if not clouds and rain on hills

if not children of the sun

desperate for love.

Self-Taught

I stopped to see the patterns in the sand,

creation of the dune grass and the wind,

a masterwork of balance and propulsion,

drove home 500 miles to walk the hill,

stopped to see the patterns in the field,

a masterwork of leaf and stem and hue.

Draw your own conclusions.

Off-Season T'ao

   

Into me she leaned and touched my cheek,

Thanked me for the words,

Called them lovely,

Said she'd stay,

Or so I dreamed.

Spilling surf and drifting sand

Filled the empty day.

—In order to be filled, one must first be emptied. — Lao Tzu

Justice to the Visible World

Moon in the Belt of Venus just after sunset

A passion for things as they are

can make the purest poetry,

verse without metaphor can be

an electric truth with the telling detail,

doing the highest possible justice

to the visible world, believing as Yeats believed

that a "perfect and kindly world" still exists,

buried like a mass of roses under spadefuls of earth.


(Well, perhaps not without metaphor.)


But the moon last night rose full from the sea,

floated up through the shadow of the earth

to hang in the mauve Belt of Venus

with the transit of gulls against wind.

Limited, even, to one of the senses,

"things as they are" seemed three worlds at once,

and realism not without magic,

not without mystery.

Even So

A few days against the Atlantic

clear my view,

the haze of what I think I want

is stripped away by wind and tide,

leaving what I have

and loving that —

a few paths through the field,

a few books on the shelf,

a few friends in the hills,

with strength enough and time.

The want that still remains

is what I thought I had and lost —

to call myself beloved, to feel

myself beloved on the earth. 

—with two lines by Raymond Carver.

Fourteen Ways of Looking at the Sea

Please click to expand

I.

In shifting winds

The only steady force

Was change in me.


II.

I was of four minds,

One was a stairway down into the dark,

And two were others' hearts.


III.

Driving on packed sand near the tideline

With my windows rolled down,

First brush with the sea

After 500 miles from cold mountains,

An eagle drops out of the wind,

Hooked yellow beak framed in my door,

Snatches a willet from the edge of the surf.

The Atlantic roars with indifference.


IV.

I do not know which to prefer,

The thrill of inflections

Or the thrill of innuendos,

The eagle screaming,

Or just after.


V.

Three bronzed hipsters with white pony tails

Scavenged the beach in short strides,

One used a staff he'd peeled with his penknife,

One carried a board he'd found for his deck,

One studied the sea for the spouts of humpbacks,

All loved their wives where they'd left them.


VI.

Ninety-five per cent of the ocean

Remains unseen by humankind.

We know little more of each other.


VII.

Three thousand years

After Homer wrote "the wine-dark sea,"

It remains in human parlance,

But never have I seen gray-green pinot noir.

Perhaps something more was intended.


VIII.

Leave it to an Irishman:

James Joyce sniffed at

“The snotgreen sea.”


IX.

Here comes another Safari Tour down the beach,

A 4WD pickup painted desert camo with chairs in the bed

For bundled tourists of an age looking cold in the wind,

Come to aim their phones at wild horses

Without driving their Lincolns on sand,

Down-encased flesh, shoulder-to-shoulder,

Jostling over the gritty drifts.

The horses, descended from Spanish shipwrecks,

Graze on dune grass without lifting their heads,

Furred like bears, adapted, and as ordinary to locals

As big rabbits in the yard.


X.

When the eagle flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of many circles.


XI.

Give me the rougher months

When the sea is up and terrifying,

When gales shake the house on its pilings,

When the surf is a thousand-foot churn

That threatens what's left of the dunes,

And I am alone with my grief,

Knowing I should have done more.


XII.

The tide is running out

After setting things right;

With a turn to the west,

Wind shears the waves.

The soul is a kite without strings.


XIII.

Nothing's enough

After the loss of a child.

The sea is too vast, I once thought,

To ever succumb to the waste of our kind;

Most of us know better now,

With an island of plastic bigger than Texas

Perning in the North Pacific Gyre,

As SpaceX seeks another world to ruin.


XIV.

Everything’s once.

We should have done more.

The ocean is mortal.

East

—after, and with two stanzas adapted from, 

Wallace Steven's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The Call

from "Smoke," La Fabrica, 2019, Theo Ellas.

Who still calls? But if you call,

wild and sad enough to call,

you needn't speak.

I'll know it's you.

I've been waiting.

Who else would call in silence?

Who else would know I know it's you?

I'll fall silent, too.

We will hear each other breathe,

the wisest, safest thing.

Who else, wild and sad enough,

so many decades later?

Just you. Just me.

Poetry, madam, is the supreme fiction. —Wallace Stevens.

Solitary Before Sunrise

In that moment before morning

when the first faint fans of light

spread up from behind the immaculate rim of the planet

into the dark velvet sky with its weak constellations

and into the Milky Way arching overhead

like a basket handle connecting the visible ends

of the long, shadowed, empty beach,

I am neither old nor young,

merely between my own vanishing points,

as if I had no origin or destination,

like the waves that come from nowhere forever,

and I am grateful, grateful,

for this one, fine moment alive on the earth,

and for the day that will be with me soon enough.

Inner Coastal

Currituck County, North Carolina

Facing the sea with the mountains in me

a few words on a page are the most I can do

when the hills and the coast

are the me and the you

with the wind off the sea

and the wind in bare trees

with birds in a line

sailing over the waves

and birds in a wave

rising up from the fields

their calls on the gale are the calls of the sea

the calls of the surf are the wind in the trees

the calls of the heart on the November coast

are the spill of the waves

in our tossing horizons

a little of me

a little of you

a few birds in the air

a few words on the page

are the most I can do.

Music

When the string section comes in I want to write it

a few pentameter lines that perfectly capture

the hollow I've felt as long as I can remember

the longing for what's missing or what could've been

and the vague sense I knew it once not so long ago

as if it were just out of reach over the next hill

waiting for me again if only i had the right words

if only I could slip a little sideways and find it

there moving beside me all the while like the moon

when I walk the fields at night knowing how the land

falls away in the dark as if the valley had no bottom

and the spirit world existed

and you were real

and losses were cellos.

Nature Has the Most to Teach

When the oaks distinguish themselves

      

Mists shroud the morning

the field and the woods going brown

this season for closer inspection


Finches sailing fast in flocks

over hoary stands of goldenrod

both losing their brilliance


But the finches don't leave

they stay they feed

they become the field


And the oaks the oaks

distinguish themselves

standing tall with their leaves

raising their voices

when the weather turns

and I and I

in my seventy-fifth year

reprove myself Persevere.

Of People and Seasons

      

Last night's rain

dropped walnuts and fronds


Across the seeded field

the oaks hail each other

in a minor key


Under a fast sky

pocketed with light

the woods begins to look bare


A hawk turns on the wind

I knew it was coming

another ending



To something I have loved

I want more

and a pen to write it down.

Dirt Road

All my changes are there

  

Oh sure

I may have arrived sooner

or at all

if I had lived bituminously

all these years of mud and yellow dust

instead of smoothed viscous intent

but then what ?

—caption by Neil Young

The Poet in Exile Looks Up Long Ago Hearing the Voices of Wild Geese Far Above Him Flying Home

   

All this way with our meeting in my mind

you who never told the whole story

only what came to mind

only the calling of the one note at a time

and where it will carry us together.


The house is the old house and I am here

hoping to catch sight of what has not yet been seen

knowing that this may be the only time.

There will be no one to remember us.

There is no other voice or time.

(A cento comprised entirely of last lines from W. S. Merwin's "Garden Time," 

2016, Copper Canyon Press, his last original volume, composed

while he was losing his eyesight and dictated to his wife, Paula.)

Living Will

Please click to enlarge

Sleep to the troubled

Peace to the grieving

A path to the lost

Faith to the dying

Roses to us

Singed by the frost

Ashes ashes

We all fall down.

Once We Were Golden

   

Once we walked October woods together

               mind in mind

               in a golden depth

breathing the menthol of fall

               illumined and immortal

spider lines across our faces

               when once seemed forever


The trees gathering their shadows under them

               stood guard for the day

watching the warm-blooded pass

               infrared and brief

               in the echoes of crows


              Walking October woods

              needing nothing more

once we were gods together

              trailing heat and gossamer.

A Moment Without Human Sound

With the crickets and the dog

at the top of the field

watching the sunset

to feel the earth roll

I drift into another realm

and when I return

my finger itches from a bite

Venus has joined us

floating in mauve

above Laurel Ridge

the dog sees it too

crickets sing duets

and I tell myself

remember this.

As the Light Goes

Suddenly now the day rushes off

like redwings startled from brittle corn

still standing in the fields where I have watched

the seasons pass for almost half a century

here where all that went before has gone

the same way into the one night

where time means nothing

the leaves blowing down now in gusts

the fields mostly shorn and the skunks

waddling toward their long sleep

somewhere in the dark

I hear a walnut fall.

That Autumn Sensation

Where one can hear a leaf land

The cabin holds the chill of night

four-walled in this warmer morning

moisture from the Gulf has fogged the glass

a stick fire in the stove will clear our gaze

into the woods sighing toward dormancy

and more sacred for it

more sky in the overarching crowns

more dappled shadow on the hushed and cooling ground

the sum of our losses welling up within us

how sadness can rise in the midst of joy

and we want to tell someone if they will stay to hear

how happiness can surprise us as just now

in a commotion of black-and-white wings

and scarlet crests a pair of pileates alights upright

with a scraping of claws from maple to cherry

one follows the other from trunk to trunk

with a cooing and chiseling and we think

perhaps they're companions for life.

—with lines from W. S. Merwin's "From Our Shadows"

An Erasure

Two sleepers in a pine cabin

both us


Horizon in the window

like a spirit level


The coast on her lips

but it was dusk


I will never have a clear mind.

—an erasure of D. Nurkse's "Blackbird Island"

October

 Sometimes it feels like it never happened

walking in morning fog toward the trees

but there was another time

when our hands met and the clock struck

and we lived on the point of a needle like angels

—with lines by W. S. Merwin

Andy's Last Stand

Andy Warhol, The Last Supper (detail), 1986

Migrating vultures in flat-black benday

low turning in an Milanese sky,

the faithful and the skeptics

crowding the sidewalks

to stare at a hundred Last Suppers,

pink Jesus doubled in silk,

a reversal of the sacred and the secular

conflated with the presence of God.


Catholicism on the artist's own terms

towered over the empty pews.

Outside, an animal dead in the weeds

writhed with maggots of primary colors,

calling us down to a field of screened ink.

Our lives hang by a thread.

—image from Carnegie Magazine

Hikers of an Age

From a friend's hike at 11,000 feet

Forgive me

my shoes are heavy

my pack unbalanced

for not keeping up

let's pitch our tent here

surprised by what we've become

no rescue expected

and risk a small fire

the stars at this altitude
               
grow scandalous by night.

Reductio

The less there is to the day

          the better i like it


Backlit birds flying south

          they're not coming back

When i enter the woods

          the fields and the hills disappear


The fewer people to love

          the more dear


The best poems

          finish too soon.

Woodland East

  

Emerging from my own shadow

Seeking what

In woodland’s filtered morning?


Waiting for the next thing

Meaning redemption

When it's already here.

Flowers for Kelly

The old house is empty and quiet.

Flowers from the yard wilt in the vase

He keeps filled in a darkened corner,

Slow to replace them, and even then,

He lays them on the stones where the path ends,

Because death is not the end of beauty.

Nowhere Else

An ordinary jet-tracked sunset

much the same as yesterday

tomorrow may be too

contrails going gold and ash

west to a vanishing point

from where we are

in this rich and fertile mystery

close enough to touch

watching the sky feeling the currents

of evening on the backs of our necks

we two alive at the same time

when in the sprawling universe

this happens nowhere else we know of

and even more

we can tell each other what we feel

you can understand me

i can empathize with you

so let us honor language

and let us praise coincidence

among these gentle influences

perhaps even dare to touch.

Still Standing

Sunset ride over country macadam

the usual route through the farms

breathing the perfume of hay

with the wind in my mouth

and you on my mind

still strong enough

I can't remember

topping the hill to the old barn

filled with shadows and memories

after all these winding years.

Animal Life

  

They had happened into my dimension

The moment I arrived just there.


Red-breasted nuthatches

Fledged in the porch post mortice.


A placid eastern garter snake

Shed her skin in the well stones.


A woman carried tomato sauce

Down from the mountain in a  Mason jar.


One hour soul-eclipsed,

The next an Autumn light.

— connecting Hughes and Celine

This Thoughtful Season

First leaves begin to fall, as does imperfect fruit,

These lines, for example, rushed to fruition.

Better I should work with planetary dignity,

Moving like a wooden boat on a sluggish creek

In this thoughtful season, its cooler nights

Condensing dews and clearing the atmosphere,

Attending to a certain fertile sadness

I would not avoid, but seek.

—following Thoroeau's lead, August, 1851

An Elevation

Lincoln Karim photo

So much new poetry.

Read, instead,

The circling hawks

Against the daylight moon.

The Gone World

I found the book you gave me

fifty years ago.

Where are you, Patty O'Neil?


Ferlighetti, City Lights, the cover gone:

I wish I could remember

what you had written.


Yellowed pages, I've read them again,

slower this time,

with true gratitude.


I understand it better now,

who you were, and what we had,

and why it wouldn't last.


It's only human to be sad,

living in the past,

Irish as we are.


Where are you Patty O'Neil?

Permit me to confess

you still disturb my rest.


Forgive an aging animal

for mining memory

and sunsets while he can.


All we really care about,

we realize so late,

is love and death.

–Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 100 years old on March 24th of this year.

To the Roaring Wind

The syllable he had sought

All of his life without knowing it,

A force of breath, a release of need

Trapped too long behind the tongue,

What would become her name for him

Spoken for the first time, a song, a call,

The wild cry of a spiraling hawk,

A primeval force that rent the sky

And conjured storms.


The night was heavy with thunder.

Her hair across his chest

Was the colors of lightning.

–an exposition on a Wallace Stevens poem of the same name