Plague Conjunctive

Hokyoung Kim, The New York Times

 

I do not blame you

          yet i do

I should not have

          yet I did

I have seen the world

          without you in it

and it's not what you thought

From the top of the hill

          my shadow stretches

into the thaw-blackened trees

I do not accept your absence

          yet I do

I should never

          yet I will

The Simple Tactics of the Sky

 

Clouds arranging themselves at sunset,

A distant, barking dog,

A few ever-present crows.

Our thoughts are with those among the dead

Into whose sphere we are rising,

And who are rising now into our own.

A chill slips off the hill

And pours around us,

Shades of night take possession of the east.

The Sun Will Come Back

       

But we know how the minutes

fly off into the bare trees

 and vanish,

And we know how the weeks

walk off

into the valley shadows.

I reach for your hand.

It is not something

one is supposed to say.

—a cento from W.S. Merwin's Solstice

Best Wishes

...from Neglected Murderesses, by Edward Gorey

 

I sent you a card

again this year.

Call it my little

enigmatic love song,

a single note

in a minor chord.

                 — "Natasha Batti-Loupstein pulverized a paste necklace and sprinkled it over a tray of canapes. Villa Libellule, Nice, 1923."

Primitives at Solstice

Hungry for magic (Getty Images)

Walk in the skins of the dead

in their feathers and furs

with wolves in the lead

into the black and brown forest,

we masters of language and fire,

upright and savage

with instincts of eons,

hungry for magic,

violent over-sized brains

programmed to do the wrong thing,

thinking ourselves

in a new age,

the sun low and brief,

the whole day a twilight.

We Cannot

at the end of a ride

 

What sustains us

is that it could

be otherwise.

—after reading  Eugenio Montale's "Brooding"

The Charmed Life

As a cold front passes

 

All that's happening and wind

the sound of it at night the buzzing phone

messages and messages and news

I hope to tend today to easy things

to routine joys that quickly can become

not so easy for so many or for me

the porch the mail

the firewood and the fire

the apple and the pear

water processed decaf

walks with trees

hot water on demand and soap

the game on the TV

and being still just sitting in the field

watching change slide over me

reading doing while I can

just keeping on

with manageable regret

as much as one can lucidly expect

pain free.

Overnight Snow

Less of the world

at first light

and more to see.

Mostly with the Past

Ruffed grouse love wild grapes

Just you in thrift shop wool among the trees

alone with your own thoughts

a few crows croaking on the hill

silver up the sides of trunks

long shadows rooted at their feet

pointing toward town 

A busy place your mind

mostly with the past

mostly with the why did she

a lot of with the and why not

a grouse explodes from cover

buffeting your space

Plenty of room in the woods

the crowns empty and sighing

the tarnished sky spread out

no stopping thought

the mind has a mind of its own

How strange to meet yourself

in the solitude of weather

stranger in a strange land

finding comfort among trees

in a world that's not what you expected.

Yonder Star

Slow-shuttered sunset

 

Fractured sunset stacked against the ridges

tilted by the drive of snapping flags

evenings of indoctrination stoking fears

plutocrats escaping into space

leaving poisoned land to warring cults

jacketed and copper-clads on sale

this first week of Advent

shell casings seeding holy ground.

Powered down you step outside

yearning for platitudes

hearing your grandmother's voice

if you have nothing nice to say

say nothing at all

feeling her touch and her warmth

so much for the news of the world.

Out in the open the sliced-up sun

is rising in bare woods

out in the open the only gunfire you hear

is aimed at the deer

out in the open you're sure of one thing

in this violent beautiful world

we need to take care of each other.

Ascetic

      

Shining end of day

Gilded unbroken horizons

Rolling back

Into the shadow of the earth

No human sound

Immortal just now

Time Paints

        

Before I sleep

a bright moon uncovers,

its light

like snow on the fields.

Lifting my head

I watch the bright moon,

head on the pillow

I dream we are home.

An Upper Turkeyfoot version of Li Po's

"Quiet Night Thoughts," c. AD 750,

said to be the best-known poem in China.

In a Field of One's Own

One star over the hill

stops me in nautical twilight,

breathing the cold plain air,

grateful for a place to stand

in the rising dusk

without interruption,

sailing.

Pedaling Grateful

 

Open sky and open land

room for who I am

and room to ride

neighbors waving hi

a few a few

are just enough

and one who leaves me

mailbox pie.

In the Pause Before Winter

The oaks and the dry-ice wind

conspire to lay the final mat

on wooded slopes before the snows.

Aware of the spin and the hurtle,

 

on a few uncultivated acres

of flung universe,

I wait for Nothing to happen.

Postcard on the Wall

Easier against the sea to imagine

that we have the only world we know

to ourselves and that the moment

is everything if not the sea in this constriction

then at least the wind unwinding in bare trees

at least your last postcard on the wall

your handwriting your thoughts from the city

your fears and loves and observations

(your bold move to London fast approaching,

your boyfriend coloring on the couch,

your cat puking in the corner)

at least a little of your consciousness

unwinding in my chest

and that the ashes on the hill

were not the end of you.

Lunar eclipse over Santa Monica, CA

(Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images)

On the Loss of Critical Thinking

         

Diffiusion

overhead and underfoot

afloat in the insubstantial

nothing to cling to

so many savages

on a dying planet

Nature a wounded salvation

the arts to tell it

piled up and burned

Jumpers

from the towers

held hands.

Distilled

November, Upper Turkeyfoot

       

She died,

yet still sunsets were beautiful.

Beauty is not always lovely. — Robinson Jeffers

First Snow Chalks the Remnants

First snow chalks the remnants of summer,

another layer of seasonal time

brightens the dead and the dying,

ourselves among them, mon cher,

we knights of aging,

accepting change as it happens,

professing contentment

and peace in frozen fields.

Let us raise our polished faces,

proclaim faith in each other,

and move through the world, old school, 

armored in wool and feathers,

though our maille be thin,

and the effects chilling.

Plein Air Painting in November

     

Gather your brushes,

the good ones, and the good paper.

Paint the slopes of the Casselman Valley,

paint the oaks holding their leaves,

exalted among maples, their burnished crowns.

Paint too the aspens of the northern moraine,

gold and quaking by the swamps,

paint a boy where the glacier stopped,

risking his fingers under duckweed for tadpoles.

Paint also the ravens, oily with light,

claiming the sky for themselves,

celebrating wind,

paint the ghosts of plants,

hoary with seeds taking flight.

Paint the farmers on tractors,

small in long fields,

haying once more

before snow highlights the contours.

Paint my face,

erased by low sun,

paint it smooth, as a boy,

jumping stone to stone in the river,

hands in cold current,

Not wanting to go home,

testing shadowed depths

where the stones were slippery with life.

Paint the dark places.

Paint what never was found.

—after Martin Espada's "The Caves of Camuy"

No Whining In the Land of Enough

 

Frost in the shadows of morning

Gratitude in the aftermath of night

Senses intact

In the reveries of solitude

Only as much suffering

As the psyche can bear

Clarity of thought

And the will to continue the fight

Flare in the trees

Fall, Back

 

Last hill on the ride home

      

The final up

as the sun goes down

on a ride into the standard of time

which I shall try not to measure

in minutes

but lives.

Local Immersive Exhibit

It doesn't last long

leaves on the ground

nature's installation art

on a grand scale

a collaborative masterwork to walk through

each step in quiet reverence

complete with the effects

of calling crows and wind

and a mist rising from the hollow

crowning the crest of the hill

the woods newly bare

the trees looking stunned

at what they've created together

the show soon to close

with the first snow.

 

Instead of Gulls

Click to enlarge. Duck, NC

He gave up the ocean,

gulls on the wind,

traveling less,

to walk the field and quiet the mind,

to watch the winter come.

Leaf by leaf and seed by seed,

the hills were as deep as the sea

and held as many mysteries.

And still he found

he was traveling far.

 

Milkweed, Upper Turkeyfoot 

Guardian Cherry

One of the guardians

one of the border trees

dark with rain on one side

a giant in the witch hazel

standing its ground

stoic of centuries

even before the plowline

where humans stopped short

stripping bare the earth.

Sporogeny

 

Flattened and spent

returning to soil

under the pine

where the next generation

will rise.

Some will go far

riding the wind.

The bold have no choice

and the dead live on.

Forties and Rain

Forties and rain,

impossible

not to notice

what we've lost.

In the absence

of the living,

I keep the company

of the dead.

The dead make

good companions.

We expect nothing

of each other and

never disappoint.

Falling

 

Leaves on the porch,

I won't sweep them,

Not yet.

Too much has been leaving too soon.

The Madness Beneath

And so I followed you

to the dome of the capitol

signed in as Orpheus

and entered Hell

found you on the marble steps

rising to meet me

as you wished

and eye-to-eye I met my fate

the wild intelligence

the raging heart

the fatal sentence of desire

the madness beneath

the surface of the earth

and I looked back

at who I used to be.

—with lines from Edward Hirsch's The Hades Sonnets

I Know the Speed

..

I know the speed

of the turning earth

as the sun moves down

the harder stems.

I'm sitting still

on colder ground.

I'm holding on.

—Originally published 10/19/12

Such a Short Life

Such a short life

I seek to do little else today

but sit in the woods

my back against this old poplar

rising into heaven

as leaves return to the earth

from which we grow

grateful for a place to stand

a weave of conciousness

at our feet

air and light and ground

the warp and woof of earthlings

intermingling.

Exiles

 

      

Once we were gods

in the tired city

self-exiled

you ever deeper

in descendents

foundation heirs

the greater good

me under the willow

where the wind begins

half a moon in the south

over red barns and white houses

a loaded hay wagon

with its tongue in fescue

sunset pink on silo domes

ever deeper in going.

Purpose

As it falls. Click to enlarge

          

In the saturated duns of overcast woods

Disillusion dissolves

The oaks taller in mist

The maples with more sky in their crowns

The slow falling to a wet mosaic

A quiet acceptance closer to cycles

Rotation revolution the circular galaxies

An answer to an existential question

The purpose of life is to live.

Migrants

 

A shared humanity

those of us born near the middle

of the Twentieth Century

with the same aching void

when the geese anoint us in evening

with their calls from above

and we feel the passage

of those now lost 

their essence still with us

and you'd think we'd be kinder

to each other

we who remain

walking through the ruins

one autumn closer

to our own emigration. 

Preoccupation

Another season in Upper Turkeyfoot

I look up from writing lines,

and the leaves have turned to bronze,

frost has dropped the walnuts

into dying grass,

and the orioles have gone.

I look up from form and sound

to finches molted brown,

to neighbors carried off

to hospitals in towns,

and fewer friends.

I look up from broken meter,

isolate, preoccupied, and vaxed,

the world grown stranger still,

more beauty and more death.

I look back down.

Wright Brothers

Kitty Hawk, NC

 

Lift

It's sudden

The sea broken

Keeps breaking

Dune grass bent low

Makes circles in the sand

Such a little thing

In the wind to fly on

 —with lines from Marianne Boruch's The Book of Hours

The Few We Can Keep

In the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

We make few promises we can keep

You with a muse of your own

In the raw city

That profile of grave beauty

I see in dreams

That voice of true feeling

I hear in storms

Those postcards we answered

Rereading now

To say only this.

Morning Glories

on the porch post

 

Today for an hour

I shall sit beside morning glories

in the miracle of light

as the sun floats out of the oaks

where the red-tailed hawk

takes flight

and I shall suffer no deceit.

Dark Screened

Click to enlarge

 

Last cutting with Post-its

Flags admonishments consolations

On a dark screen

Regrets and reminders

A morning's reflection

Passwords to paradise

In a ravaged garden

Unnatural Order

In a fallow field

The order of autumn

How well we know it

Goldenrod then asters then witch hazel late

How the birds leave us

Killdeer then redwings then hawks on their glidepaths

What falls around us

Ashes and cherries then maples then oaks

Walnuts' indelible husks smack the earth

Things as we know them each in its time

Cycles repeating in a rational universe

Ordered by a mysterious intelligence

The turning of spheres the living the dying

Grandparents parents old friends then us

The natural order accepted expected

An orderly fall

Never a child never no never a child

 

Thrift

Mountain woods late September

Firewood stacked on the porch

Nowhere to be

No plastic no cash

Only time to spend

Loving this life

As rich as it is.

 

Shelter

Inward I turn

Pure instinct.

Native bees

Curl under blooms

Before the rain

Gives leaves a voice.

I am not alone.

Human

 The valley fills with moonlight

And the music of the train.

I go back.

The Going and the Gone

A lock of hair

In a metal drawer

A crucifix

A ring that turned my finger green

A hundred monarchs in succession

Stutter southward

Across the blooming clover field

The red-wings have abandoned

The German word is Zugunruhe

 

Drops Every Four Hours

Stylized from Earth & Sky

 

I've been in love many times

But I only fell once

With a redhead

And never recovered

The moon comes up early

pale and unrealized

A hawk flies the wire

Tinctured with sunset

As is my right eye

As is the cascading mane

Of the masked physician with intelligent eyes

Who says it's nothing to worry about

Argiope

 

Stops me in my tracks

With all of her eyes

Wasps hung like sausages

Pittsburgh girl

In a satin jacket.

Out the Window

The stars in their places

 

Orion strong as ever

hunter above the woods

high-jumping over the oaks

where he is supposed to be

the stars in their places

a comfort as I lean

out the open window

upstairs into the night

me with my thoughts

unable to sleep again

the heat from the house

rushing out around me

haunted by childhood

hunting for certainty

as if it exists

She escaped into our room

where we lay awake

blankets pulled tight

through the window we fled

me first as the oldest

then my brother then her

and left him to his rage

and his drunken slumber

and his eventual remorse

or what I took to be remorse

returning from the refuge 

of a neighbor's house

to find him brushing his teeth

getting ready for work

with no eye contact

and nothing to say

And nothing more

ever to be said

in childhood's memory

nothing of the fright

nothing of the shame

nothing of the betrayal

by one who should've loved us most

nothing but the brightness of blood

and the darkness of night

and the reassurance of Orion

rising from the woods

the leap in adulthood

the same as in childhood

even as the distances increase

farther away everlasting.