Turned on the Lathe of Poetics

Soul Alchemy photo

        

The invitation

of open space,

the sanity

of light,

the kindness

of brevity,

the courtesy

of commas,

the sway

of syllables,

the very look of it

wih a carpenter's eye,

and the reassurance

of a point at the end.

In a Room in Roosevelt

In April rain in the city she loved

Deadly quiet

when I awoke and knew,

on a cot in a room in Roosevelt.

I thought to open a window

to free her soul

but all I could do

was raise the blind.

Below us, magnolia petals

fell on courtyard stones.

Above us, only sky.

I did not call the nurses

right away,

father and daughter

together.

Cold Mountain

Doing without the world,

the nearby fulfilling the need

for astonishment,

dandelions turned to the sun

beside the ditch,

the shapes of oak leaves

on the mud,

the shining sky

on gathered rain,

mists huddled together

in the valley,

and you

and the heart you were born with

and the years that are left.

—after rereading Han-shan, late 8th C. T'ang poet

Foolish Romantics

Zodiacal light, Oregon coast, photo by Ben Coffman

   

When the town priest

eloped with the principal's daughter

just after the caps and the gowns,

we were all for it.

Good luck to the coach and his pitcher.


Dreamers, subversives, one foot on the moon,

lights of the zodiac just beyond reach,

so many of us with our secrets,

adrift with desire and illusions

that sometimes aligned.


We thought we knew,

with our guard down,

the power of love,

but we learned we had no idea.

If only the rest of our lives.


Be advised.

Interlude

   

Winter can stay for awhile,

Fewer engines, locked down,

More birdsong each day,

And more quiet.

If tomorrow belongs to the meek,

So be it.

Wyoming Snow

Spring snow in Upper Turkeyfoot

A woman in Wyoming told him once,

with snowflakes in her hair,

when it snows there in July

cowboys debate

as to whether it's the last snow

or the first, as if Wyoming

were a land of just two seasons.

But in his older, worn-down hills

his two seasons seemed to be,

did another love him still

or not, his fate?

Lasts are hard to know.


Juncos through the glass,

will they leave today

for colder north?


As she stood there on the porch,

waving as he headed for the air,

was she crying?


She still disturbed his sleep.

The end of things is mostly a surprise.

Returning from Land's End

to find an empty, quiet house

missing furniture and spoons,

at the ragged edge of absence,

was it last or first,

and did he weep?

Piling Up the Anti-Griefs

Too much scowling President

and too few faces

softened with love close-by

have left me jittery and profligate,

amazoning my way out

of that tepid agony, rethinking whatever,

when I should have been sleeping,

but who can sleep?


So maybe come morning

I'll give up to spring snow

like a new beginning,

and come noon there will be joy

hung from the mailbox—

anything, anything,

arriving from a land of plenty

in its golden age of which

the adults would not approve.


Forgive me my anti-griefs.

I'm piling them up,

like the dandelion singing by the well,

like the bullfrog's astonishing arc

into the pond as I pass,

like my own tracks through the yard,

proof I am here, and this is real—


The noisy solace of blackbirds

roosted in the trees by the roofless silo

standing bereft of its barn,

the sunset in blue clouds behind the hill—

all of this needed now,


For it is not a new beginning,

nothing is finished,

and the adults are all dead,

only the chidren are left,

alone, growing old.

—last four lines from Louise Glück’s “A Warm Dsy”

—title from a poem by Marianne Boruch

Orion Tilted at Passover

   

Reports from the cities are grim.

The corpses pile up

In refrigerated warehouses.

Long trenches are dug

On Hart Island

To bury the unclaimed dead.


The living are cloistered and fearful

The center will not hold.

Lacking lambs' blood,

Cats' blood is smeared on the doors.

What dark angel

Slouches down empty streets ?


Yet over it all,

Except where the burnings

Ashen the air,

The sky is brilliant and lovely.

Small wonder

We  taught ourselves to fly.


And tonight Orion will be back

From that other hemisphere

Tilting

Perpetually amazed

His dog's reduced to a star.








—Closing stanza from Marianne Boruch"s Genuine Fakes

Epilogue

Abandoned horse-drawn farm machinery

Goldenrod and briars

after the first years,

asters and black locusts

after five,

sweeten the ground for the poplars,

then maples, then oaks rising

through broken machinery,

the ashes crowded out,

a new world thickening

on the floor of the nascent woods.


Who can tell

where the springhouse stood,

and where the sugar camp,

where the arbor and the swing?


While in the cities again

families reported their dead

and fled.


Wild onion spikes the clover.

—patterned on Ellen Bryant Voight's prologue to Kyrie,

a collection of sonnets based on reports

from the 1918 pandemic. 

Carousel

   

Stand still awhile

I tell myself

though it's easier

to turn.


Have you ever

stepped off

a merry-go-'round

with the horses

still rising ?

Then to the Knob

click to see a man on a walk

Then to the knob,

as the farmboys call it,

to look into the valley

where the creek runs

under blue haze,

the sun in my eyes,

the wind from the next ridge

luffing my shirt,

aware of my size

and my meaninglessness

in all things other than this,

my breathing in

and knowing it,

my breathing out

and knowing it;

myself,

my own master.

April 2020

Neck-deep in the ordinary,

with the wind going around me

under the crow-crossed, silver sky,

staring long enough

into the common beauty

of forsythia in bloom to feel

awe's inexplicable swaying,

considering the silence now,

and the silence to come.