True North

When you lose a child,

the grief never ends,

But here's the thing:

Her wool scarf around my neck,

the warmth and scratch of it,

The day went pale with blanketing cloud,

and the sun was a blot on the sky,

But here's the thing:

The night turned colder and clear,

the moon an ice blade in the pines,

Again, in a dream, she touched me,

and all the next day by my side,

But here's the thing:

Snow like feathers, no wind,

a cardinal blood-bright in the laurel.

Winter immaculates the north,

and heaven reheavens the ground,

But here's the thing:

When you’ve lost a child,

the grief never ends.

The Ascetic

   

Life under the sky,

with its starched blues,

its plank-bottomed grays,

its vanishing birds,

the light running low

and the air running cold

over the ridge and into his ears,

the alto wind in bare woods,

the baritone jets connecting great cities,

all those familiar strangers

inside the empty house

waiting in the downloaded dark

to be juiced into presence,

all those agile minds

shoulder-to-shoulder on shelves

waiting to be read,

is still life alone.

Cloud Road

This road home

no travelers

but you

Never fully gone

Disconnected

    

Dark screens in a dark month,

mistanthropic in nautical twilight,

yet how I long to see you

crossing the field

between the house and the woods,

exalting in the strength of your legs

through this paradise of sadness,

each stride turning the planet a little,

and it makes me wonder

if I still might be in love

and if that makes me a fool.

Climate Change

Expand with a click

I can just make it out across the stubble

in the snowless overcast of another mild winter,

the standing ruin of our cohabitation,

the empty house and briared yard,

the haunted sheds and silt-filled spring;

I can almost see our children run.

Beside the road the barn abides,

bearing the injuries of time;

if animals have souls, they're still there, too,

imagining each other huddled in snow,

inventing a life they can live with.

In the Dusk

Out of the barn and into the field in the dusk,

Geese somewhere in the sky calling,

The lost somewhere in the past calling,

Out of the field and into tomorrow in the dark.

January Thaw

Rain on the path

through the woods

in wet snow

The sound of it

on a bent umbrella

Smoke from the stove

in my lungs

In the sobbing twilight

your voice

from the device.

Halfway Sonnet

Up on the hill

where the wind blows cold

after a freshening snow

I sit with a memory

until the earth rolls on its side

and the sun slips away

into another realm

her warmth against me

again and when I return

I think about meeting

halfway like we used to

but I'm awake now

and the land is in shadow

and I know it's too late.

So Early and So Late

Detail from Wasserschlangen II (Water Serpents II), Gustav Klimt, 1906

  

All his life

he had been looking

for the one

who had been looking

all her life

for him.


Tragic

that they found

such love

so early and so late.

Beauty

    If we have it in our heart

We find it where we are,

Making time to look.

Beginning Again

The nights are long,

And the people are sad.

Let us sit in the sun.


The future is fiction,

The past a flawed recollection.

Let us sit in the sun.


Now is the heat on our face,

Real is the wind in our ears.

The moment is always beginning.


See how the clouds expand

Sailing over in blue,

Changing as the moment

Passes through them.

Let us sit in the sun.