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.