Bi-polar Vortex

         In the shadow of the earth

                    rolled back,

                              sub-zero solitude.

         I did what you asked,

                    silence the proof

                              spread upon these frozen fields

                              under this starched sky,

                                        will be.

          No purer passion,

          No colder truth,

          No me.

                             

When the Wind Dies Down

Back turned on a vanishing day

Hip-jarring ice under a sifted snow

Over the hill and into the safety of night

                    Tending the fire

                    Dividing the dark

Accepting what comes with first light

Those who have known

The terror of sunrise.

Tribute

    

At the top of the field

Where the night wind blows

                    A dogwood strung

                    With solar lights

Planted by her teachers

Transplanted by her brother
             
                    When the school board

                    Closed the school

As an unnecessary expense

And started a football program

                   Blooms every spring

                   To remind me.

Mystic Snow

A male plum-throated cotinga. Photo by Ken Aoki for the New York Times,

What ancient thoughts

                    the snow betrays

                    feathering our wings,

Surely long ago we flew

                    as we do now

                    motionless in snowfall,

Joined in flight by those who died

                    as we held their hand,

Into their transparent sphere we rise

                    as they rose into ours,

Somehow closer to them now

                   than when they lived,

               

Folded crystal wings.

Umbral: Under the Eclipse

Too soon sunset

Behind the old sugar camp

Snow gone blue.


Too long night

When even the moon

Bled dark alone.

In the Privacy of Winter

      

Easiest to see her

when snow falls through the trees

her tracks among the deer's

          and filling fast.


Easiest her smile

beyond the towers and the screens

day's lone music from the trains

          deep in the pillowed valley.

To Make

Photo by Radu Anghel, Romania.

   

In the frozen solitude

of creative search

for the true voice

                    of feeling,


My field could be any field

where dark accidents lead

                    to the mind's

                    sufficient grace,


And the ordinary, divided,

                    unsimple heart


Becomes the poem

                    on the page.

—quoting Keats, Delmore Schwartz, and Frank Bidart.

Returning from My Son's House on the Next Ridge

King's Bridge, Built in 1802.

  

Down the mountain in another long snow

out of the northeast, the road gone white,

to cross the creek on the new, wide bridge,

the water gone black and rising again,

then stop to turn around on a mud lane

no longer used for farming, to spend some time

with the old covered bridge, restored as relic,

to hear the creek purling under heavy trusses

in the quiet of a windless, early dusk, the wooded hill

disappearing in the fading, fine-flaked light,

everything vanishing in the veiled air, everything

passing away in the valley in the dusk and the snow,

winter twilight in the mountains, and who among us

wouldn't better span the flow rebuilt?

A Mood

      

The train in the valley has one song

it's a moan close by


The yard a stumbleground

of frozen tunnels


The inbox under the pine damp

with windowed envelopes


Only a few really care and a few

are further away


Don't sell me on anything just now

glad-hander


What the train says in the valley

that's what i say.

Long Grade Down

In the bicycle peace

of a long coast

between stubbled fields


                   the wind in my mouth

                   the cartridge sweetly ticking


i lean into the bend

at the old barn

in the solitude of speed


                    i hear it again

                    what no one else has ever heard


the tone of her voice

when she called me "J"

why not say what happened


                    and here's the barn

                    with its captured dark


passing as i rise

shifting down for the climb

my eyes tearing


                    from the speed of it all

                    someday soon?

Time Gone By as a Year Begins

  

A suggestion of landscape

the smudge of a hill

the hint of a treeline

                    vanishing in mist

The weight of night

the murmur of memory

in a country of ghosts.