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

Off-Season Sonnet

If I stare long enough, the ocean moves, and I hear it.

If it is true as a great poet said

that the soul is the external world

then i need a few weeks by the sea

barefoot alone in the wind

a few weeks in old clothes i save for the sea

with a few books i've bagged to reread

in the negative ions and cries of sea birds

and the unending scrub at the margins of dreams

with passionate rains and sudden sea change

that seem like a promise renewed

the sun sinking fast behind dunes

the moon rising out of a perfect horizon

with the Great Outer Darkness behind it

the same as the small inner darkness in me.

–with lines by Ted Hughes

As the Waiting Continues

The trees deep indigo,

With us on her surface,

The Singer of Days

Lifts her hood over her head.

The moon is in the folds of her hood.

— with an image from Stevens

Magnificent Cause of Being

This way into the field

Through the visible breath of morning

Our legs wet with dew

Imagined one

The magnificent cause of being,

The imagination, the one reality

In this imagined world.

--Wallace Stevens

Natives of the Rain Are Rainy Men

The dog wanted in

the maples showed their silver bellies

and we knew a rainstorm was coming


The wind rose in the trees

walnuts banged off the logshed roof

I welcome storms now


We watched the rain come

a curtain hung from the back of a cloud

with the sun behind it


We heard it coming

a rush through the trees

moving up from the valley

a rush of time and memory

pattering across the stubbled field

to find me at last


Standing in a bronze rain

how it shined on your cheek

how it jeweled your eyelashes

how we always looked for refraction

light divided against itself

always opposite the sun


I welcome storms now

the rain on my body

mists filling the valley

mirages hung in the air

helping me to see what I saw

and how much I never saw at all.

— Title from a poem by Wallace Stevens

Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Odessa

Counsellors have been deployed

Grief centers opened

Chiefs of police want us to know

Blood has a smell


From the mountains to the praries

To the oceans white with foam


Most evenings in these green hills

Rifle fire tears through the vales

Semi-automatic but normal

Just local boys in open fields


Stand beside us and guide us

Land that I love


Too sparsely populated here

For anything en masse today

And only the usual number

Of people are dying.

Back to the Moon

Ken Christison photo

An unpopular president

Has ordered us to the moon

We've been there before

We were so young

Home from a shift in the mill

Rushing to change before class

A bride at the table

A child in her crib


When we looked too closely

We found no reason to stay


The moon abides

Waxing crescent adrift

Over the simmering hills

Still holding the key to madness

Still controlling the tides

That lap the shores everywhere

Still guarding the lovers who kiss

Under no banner but the sky


I say leave it alone for awhile

If only we could.

–– built on a "found poem" from a NYRB review by James Gleick and
with  lines by E. B. White printed in The New Yorker, July 26, 1969.