Elegy in Another Smoky Sunset

I think of it, too.

I have kept everything whispered,

All the tenderness we could work in

Between the highway and the mountain,

The crook of my arm wet with tears,

No path forward,

No path back,

So brief, your eyes.

There was never a way,

And we knew.

It ruins me, too,

Still alive,

The forests aflame.

Corn in Tassel

Evening spreads its coolness on the fields,

scents of the land pooled and lingering

in the still air as the day unfurls

in ordinary details of the plain country—

the roadside height of chicory blue-blooming,

the towering sky,

the deepening amber of whiskered grain,

the rabbit-tufted distances

from barn to barn,

and the fertile smell of corn in tassel,

spires against the high and fading light

as keen as swallows —

and me, picking blackberries,

fingers pierced and stained,

arms edged with sunset,

momentarily at peace

in my sullen, common longing.

Bella Luna

 

It's not my mind

It's the moon

Pulling the oceans

It's gravity

It's physics

Eroding the coasts

Of eight billion

Internal seas

It's my mind.

The Animals Above Me

 

The wild has been bred out of them,

The beeves above me where I pass

Most evenings spring through fall,

Docile, curious, communal, lifting

Their heavy heads when I speak,

The yearlings sometimes galloping

With me as I go, this country road

So quiet I can hear them chew.

Stop and look into their eyes,

Reflective, huge, unsettlingly deep,

And wonder how they think

Of their short lives,

And what of me?

And what, my fellow wildlings,

What about their souls,

Placid in their innocence?

Oh, not to know.

Before

Cat at sunset

      

Once upon a time

In a land far away,

We loved sunsets.

Now we see fire.

Hold your children closer.

Smoke Jumpers

Big, red sun, orange moon.

Uneasy on a smoking continent

As the West burns,

Remembering the fires

That scorched my life,

Now in the smoldering air

That whistles in my chest,

And bloodied the stars.

Not the apocalypse, you say.

I should have done more.

Praise for the smoke jumpers

Leaping from planes

To save what remains.

To a Friend Who Disapproves

I should have come to the woods sooner,

just after a swoop of finches rose gold and black

from the queen's lace, frightened by my passing

as I leaned into the bend near the end of my ride,

tattered gray clouds dragging their skirts

across the ridges, blue in the mists of evening,

when I stopped on the bridge over the creek

and switched off the engine to listen

to last night's rain purling beneath me

and doves calling in chords,

while the hills were still peaceful,

and the new motorcycle still gave me unqualified joy,

untempered by a friend's reasoned criticism

echoing over the fields and in my head,

before I came to the woods to consider myself

healthy and sane, seeking out a little fun

in the midst of aging's griefs.

 

Riders

          

They rise with the dusk, the dead and the missing,

Trying to tell me in minor keys what they know now,

                         but have no language.

 The air is against us.

Behind me in half-light they ride, racing toward night,

                         twisting the handle for speed,

                         the hills rushing toward us,

                         the clouds keeping their distance,

Full throttle into the dark.

July Evening Idyl

Nightfall after rain

Turn off the wet and steaming macadam

in the quiet after the thunder has passed,

thumping now softly behind the misted ridges, 

and find the ruts of a farm road

along the edge of the dripping woods,

the cardinals and sparrows singing

and fluttering dry on their perches,

tractors parked in their sheds,

cows filing toward barns,

men of the land falling asleep on their couches,

work mapped on their broad hands,

still for the first time since daybreak,

as light lifts from the fields

whose contours they've known all their lives,

the silence of evening filling the hollows

and spreading over the hills,

no human sound but your breathing,

and you want to sit down in the beaded high grasses

to watch the does step out of the trees

and into the corn, ears cocked, tails twitching,

and then their dappeled fawns,

and you think it's been a good day,

a day without news,

and you want tomorrow the same.

The Horses of Poetry

Common milkweed

 

When too happy to write

poetry, which is expected to hold an ache,

all I have to do is wait for the return of normalcy.

A text from a close friend will do it,

asking politely for more sacred space.

It's all about the heart, you see.

Most everything we get twisted.

A meeting with an ex will do it,

accepting the return of your daughter's journals—

the things of the dead have their own weight.

Opening one at random will do it.

Reading "I'm so very lonely" will do it.

So, now I am ready to write,

to spin off in my own separate galaxy

as I head for the cabin in the woods,

the long, pained lines unfurling before me like gossamer—

trauma, loss, survival, emptiness— on a hot breeze.

Time to get to work,

Until I am stopped halfway through the field

by common milkweed in bloom,

the marvel of its mauve geometry, its sweet traps,

and if I stay long enough, look close enough,

I'll lose that ache to the joys of the natural world,

the horses of poetry galloping riderless into the trees,

trailing those sad lines behind them like dropped reins.

After Rain

Rain at last on the ridges

               and the valley where the creek runs

You can hear it when the day's work is done

When towers of steam mark the coldwater springs

               and the pileate drums

               mists lifting into cloud

               memory into history

And you want to write it now

               before it blows out to sea.