Rural Abstract

 

Take hay

Nothing is ordinary

Marshmallows for example

Vision wobbles

The Distance Between Us

Give us the long view, through mists to indigo.

Vision is a picture, painters know,

Back to front, light to dark, frame days.

The rest is rapid brushwork, horizon line, and haze.

Earth to Earth

    

I.

I used to think cremation was the way to go,

but of late the cool, wet ground appeals

(if one is clever enough to avoid the concrete),

save the air, and fertilize the soil to rise again

as Mayflowers in rain, to be nibbled by deer

and fall again to ground and yet another life

as maybe violets or skunk cabbage, almost

as thick in the cycle of things as if you'd never left.

II.

Tibetans call it bya gtor, "bird-scattered."

Wrap me in hides, and lash me to a platform

deep the woods, twenty-feet up, like a fallen

warrior of the plains, let my friends the ravens

and the vultures clean my bones, and not a word, please,

to the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association.

III.

Whatever you do in my declining years,

don't put me in a home, unless it's adjacent

to a golf course where my pals and I can burst

out of hiding in the out-of-bounds weeds to scoop up

the bright new golf balls driven into the blind hollow

and sold by our slower buddies on the next tee.

Some of us were retailers, you see,

and, anyhow, God bless the American Way.

Insular

An undeveloped Pennsylvania mountain woodland

    

After a storm at this season,

the sun comes out and lights up the tender, rising field,

the birds sing without ceasing,

and all of nature is full of light and fragrance.

The woods stands dark and glittering with rain, 

fully leaved at last and insular to sight and sound,

and to walk in the woods in the last week of May

is to enter the present in an envelope of peace,

Leaving behind both the past and the future,

time stopped by dripping rain and green shadow,

Maypoles pooled around you, each with its thimble of rain,

you stand hip-deep in lady ferns among the sanity of trees.

For a moment you try to be as still as an oak,

steadfast and strong, firm in one place for centuries,

and though you are a human among humans and can't stay,

you'll take it with you when you go,

For such a simple act has revolutionized your day,

and you'll be back.

Being Here

          

How strange to be alive under the willow,

To be still in the motion of boughs

Under the passage of clouds

In the music of wind and coursing blood

In a fiery, scattering universe.

Dream Song

There's a woman in dreams

and we're happy it seems

life's not hard

There's a rooster a hen

a black dog we call Ben

in the yard

When the sun's going down

and our shadows grow long

we sit on the hill sharing silence

It's so easy to be

we're at peace young and strong

as night brings a calm to the hollow

Where nobody lies

and nobody dies

not for long.

Da da-dum-dum  da-dum

da da-dum-dum da-dum

da da-dum-dum da-dum da da-da-dum

—patterned after Iron & Wine's "Calm on the Valley"

Poppy If

 

Could you even imagine

A poppy if

 You'd never seen a flower?

So, you've failed

At love

Too many times,

And now you know.

Murrow's Common Prayer

"Macbeth and the Witches," Albert Pinkham Ryder, oil on canvas,

mid-1890s, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 

        

This is no time

to talk of the surface

switch off the monitor

We have left undone

those things

which we ought to have done

The powerless

pull small belongings

on anything with wheels

We have done

those things

we ought not to have done

There is no desperation

tanks turn the corner

wounded spill

We have too much

followed the devices

of our hearts

Down in the air raid shelter

money dirty ankle deep

has no meaning

War more real than peace

people have little to say

there are no words.

—From the radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow as American troops

moved through Germany in the spring of 1943, with quotes from

The Book of Common Prayer, issued to American servicemen at the time.

Mt. Union, Dairy Country

A small battened church

with no pastor

on a mountain at the bottom of sky,

Graves in a cornfield,

clans of the land

gathered under their names eroding,

Red barns and white houses,

beeves in the fields,

a few farms still milking, as it once was,

Cows on their shadows,

long vistas,

birds passing over,

The seventh generation

holds on if it can,

feel the wind blow, strong as ever.

On Revisitation

Evening gathers

Always to go back

to erase an error,

to ease a guilt.

But we don't,

only in memory.

It is hard to be anywhere once,

and twice is a dream.

—a cento from poems by Cid Corman (1924-2004)

The World Will Kill Us

Birch leaves opening in rain

   

The world will kill us,

                    Hemingway wrote,

Plain words for what we tactfully ignore,

                    protecting each other's sanity.

The trick, my mother said,

                    after her third husband died,

Is to live without regret,

                    and then the world killed her, as well.

But death can't be the only truth,

                    should the kind find someone kind,

Someone present, caring, joyful, 

                    whose touch thrills,

And if ever until then,

                    kudos to the brave who venture out,

And kudos to the strong

                    who don't look back.

Endlessness Aloft

Illusion shared, a definition of what's real?

 

The couple in the sky,

aloft, floating, holding on

above the Pennsylvania forest,

do they exist,

Or are they actors filmed

before a green screen

in one director's vision

of a new heaven and a new earth?

Let's say they're real, believers

in the illusion of each other,

a quorum of two, unique

to themselves in a flung galaxy,

For them, they're endless,

high up in blue-black

where magic reigns, and endlessness

brings peace, and brings forever.

—baased on a scene in Roy Andersson's "About Endlessness" and its review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. 

Spring Tanka After Rain

Like swells of the sea,

Cloud shadows cross the green field

On riptides of sun,

Wind praising the edged world drawn

In a poet's undertow.

Voicemail Through a Barn Window

 

Tell me again, old friend,

your thoughts as quick and exact

as swallows sailing

through a broken barn window,

your voice as bright and clear

as I remember

from days when I wished—

I won't say it,

others are otherwise now,

and we are the same,

and the time for wishing

has ended.

Tell me again, old friend.

Fly west.

The Collected Late Work

Bobolinks

 At the crest of the hill

with the sun going down

winter rolled up

and stacked in long grasses

a fire still burns

just under my skin

stoked by the whistling wind.

Magical Elders

"Star Catcher," Mihail Minkhov photo.

          

This is the part of the movie,

you said,

where one of us dies.

I'd thought of that, too,

and we laughed.

What else should we do ?

"Magical elders," you called us,

in a new age, all of us only

for as long as it lasts,

With time enough

for you to read me your story,

time enough for me

to read you my song,

Time enough for us

to sit on the porch

in the dark and the quiet,

our shoulders touching,

Time enough

to walk out into the field

together under the stars,

alone with the abyss,

Time enough

for one of us

to remember

we had time enough.

—with two lines from Edward Hirsch's "The Guild"

Arm-in-Arm

          

She said it is as if

you have returned

from years at sea

to walk the tideline

arm-in-arm

talking about love

And yes it is except

you're trying not to

fall through a hole

in an interrupted dream

where you've been lost before

in promises and time.