Sunday, February 28, 2021

Zugunruhe

 



Jump the valley

ridge to ridge

over covered bridges

where lovers leave their notes

and sometimes wed

ruining their secrets.


Jump the valley

ridge to ridge

over scarves of mist

September route of raptors

following an urge

no stronger than you own.


Some don't make it

some don't try

some become stone

guarding the halls

to the past and claim

we were never meant to fly.


Jump the valley.







Saturday, February 27, 2021

Life Raft



The work itself

the fewest words

for a precious few

for shipwrecked eyes

it helps to have night in one's body

as the sea holds night in its depth

to make something true for the surface

to offer survivors rescue.






Thursday, February 25, 2021

Another Winter Breaks



    
Haunts of the night

fade with the strengthening light.


Still shaken by dreams

he rolls up the blinds

and lets in the fields;


Yes, death will come—

he feels it closer of late—

but not today.


Today he opens a window

and leans out to listen to the crows

echoing thaw on the  hill.


Today he hears a richer moan

of wind in budding crowns—

so much water lifting in the trees.


Today he feels, in such power,

the nearness of the sun.










Sunday, February 21, 2021

As If Like a Simile: Why Poetry Is the Least Popular Art Form

At L.L. Bean, Freeport, Maine. Photo by Erin O'Brien Schlicher.

It seemed as if

we were swimming

up the arteries of fish

like as if it was like

like sheep like tire tracks

there was an eel too

it seemed a warning

backwards in Icelandic

If you enjoyed this poem, why not. . .






—an erasure of the poem "Auden in the Aquarium," the Paris Review, Spring 2000.


Saturday, February 20, 2021

The Mystery of the Present



Because an echo

is the only kindred voice he'll hear

he speaks a few words

just for himself

alone on this strange earth

deep in the February woods

the trees creaking with cold,

the thin white vines of frost on the glass,

the patter of small wings at the porch feeder,

the talus of snow on the sill,

and the man himself

finding themselves together again

just in front of the door

which he opens slowly

to enter the plank-sided cabin,

desk, chair, and book

blazing in a glory of sun.






—patterned on a 1933 miniature by Jean Follain collected in "Transparence of the World," 2003, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Schopenhauer on the Moon

December 24, 1968, by the crew of Apollo 8.

     


All of us,

it's warming to think,

dream the same dream,

but can that be right

on a planet brimming with humans,

deceitful, venal, fearful, and armed,

unless that dream

is someone to love us,

or someone to love,

or the existence of heaven,

and maybe that's all the same thing?







Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Outage

 



Tracks in hardened slush,

We made it into town and back

before the freezing rain.


When finally the power flowed

the world was art, desolate,

and ordinarily beautiful.







Sunday, February 14, 2021

Don't Tell Me


Don't tell me what you feel

After so many empty years.

Let guesswork fit my need

As the pendulum swings out.


Too much, too bold.

I couldn't keep the continent 

From tipping, and it all slid into the sea

With a hiss and a boil.


Memory tastes of salt,

The beach is strewn.

We were the storm, you'd said.

I still know distant thunder,


Far off flashes in the clouds,

Your amber eyes.

Don't say what could've been;

It's sweeter not to know.







Streaming Marlene

Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored," 1931.


Powers to hunt

Arachnid chiaroscuro

The elegant beauty of fakery

Dietrich's insolent smile

Facing down men with guns.




—An erasure from The New Yorker's "Goings On About Town," Feb. 8, 2021.



Saturday, February 13, 2021

Weathering





The weather was cold and unrelenting,

yet he looked to it for answers

under a sky as pale as ash,

hoping to be star-seized as the day ended.


The faces came to him when he slept.

He knew them all, the long-dead from his youth,

those who seemed to care, the older generations,

silent, all around him, depths unfathomable.


He should have asked them when he could.

Now old himself, the mysteries to the child

remained the mysteries to the man.

He should have asked.


This, then, the haunt of a poet's life,

trying again and again until he nearly got it right,

reaching into his own unfathomable depth

for what almost existed, or once did,


Risking visitations, frights in the dark,

listening hard, waiting for answers,

making again and again until the last voice

sounded like the first voice in weather.








Monday, February 08, 2021

Displaced Saints and Scholars (Lovers)

near Galway, Ireland. 

        
      There are places in the mind (heart)

we fear to really be

lest the real mar magic.


  Displaced for generations (decades),

blood and legend (memory) strong potion,

distance and time preserve an ideal.


We survive by trying,

you and I, returning ever

to an idea of home (love).










Sunday, February 07, 2021

In a Colder WInd




The wind shifts as we watch,

blows the icy mares' tails straight,

hardening the snowcrust.


If it's true that everything adjusts to honor

after the time of love,

why is your comfort pure fiction?



 





—referencing a line by Jean Follain, c. 1957

Zugunruhe


 

Jump the valley

ridge to ridge

over scarves of mist

September route of raptors

following an urge

no stronger







Saturday, February 06, 2021

The Earth-Sound

Nor'easter on the Outer Banks

 

Voice of winter's middle,

one steady cheer for days now

high in the crowns of the tree crowd,

so like the surf on the barrier islands

in a week-long nor'easter

that I've come to hear it as the earth-sound,

so like the roar of our blood,

our own individual sea,

some call the hum universal,

always at high tide and the moon always full

with the wind always blowing

and the gulls and the crows always calling

and the great crowns bowing and nodding,

closed systems in a closed system,

one unbroken gasp for as long as it lasts

in an infinite silence.







Friday, February 05, 2021

After Thoreau


     

In a February fog between snows,

focusing down

to a concentrated field of view,

a drop of sky on a thorn,

the world overturned,

only another human

can affect the quality of the day.







Wednesday, February 03, 2021

When We Were Ample

Hoarfrost at sunrise

 

In a windless, single-digit sunrise

we walked the field in snowshoes

in the shadow of the earth,

hurtling through space,

first tracks acoss an unbroken plain,

our words before us, our breath entwined,

far-flung.


And later, our captured sun

ticking in the stove, our jeans

hung up and steaming,

hot coffee in our hands,

with our music and our books,

with each other, we were happy,

we were ample, we were slung.


Ten winters hence, in my remove

and waiting for vaccine,

I've resisted sentiment,

content with solos and the company

of lines— that which seems enough

has been enough, almost ample— oh,

but how I miss the words that went unsung.







Monday, February 01, 2021

Half-Life

Lull at sunset


In a fine, steady, ground-glass snow

I step outside

into a muffled, quieter world.


In this fog of snow,

a willed imagining—

I think I hear you breathe,

you're listening again,

gloved finger to your lips,

snowflakes on your lashes,

poem perfect,

to the cars and toxins rolling

through the Casselman Valley,

a blended tone of passage

I hear now, assuring depth,

in a snowfall so peaceful it hurts,

a passage so weighted that sometimes,

in the middle of a mid-winter night,

from five miles away,

we felt the ground shake,

the trainsong running close to the frozen surface,

half elegy, half serenade.