Doves

Deep sky ever-changing

          

          

No human sound, no engines,

no manufactured outrage,

Sunday hilltop interlude in church country,

deep sky ever-changing,

theaters of weather footlit by evening,

an easy, short-lived rain hushing in the corn,

the dirt road's dust pocked beneath the trees,

while in the solitary house,

kitchen yellow at its windows,

supper dishes rinsed and racked,

talk of treatment ends —

best tonight to leave the TV off

and sit outside,

for sadness will rise up around them if they let it,

this couple of long-standing,

shoulders touching on the glider

as the sun goes down behind the barn,

less need for words with years,

silence valued by the wise,

listening to the finish of the day, its quiet passing,

the consolation of the doves' reprise.

Owning the Evening: A Bicycle Poem

Please click to enlarge.

 

Call it escape if you like,

I call it focus,

On the storm passing south,

Panthers of cloud

Leaping up from blue hills,

Swallows on wires like notes,

Redwings rustling in flocks

Over mowed fields,

The smell of wet hay

In pooled August heat

I turn and ride with the wind

Through veins of cooler air

Pouring into the valley,

I call it calm,

As a curtain of rain not yet here

Scrubs smoke from that distance,

I focus on the close-at-hand, and I

Call it my own if i like.

Simply I Am

a rare paradise

Out of the sun

away from the road

into the quiet and shade of the woods

I have no illusions

knowing myself to be

nothing more than an echo

soon gone without a trace

unless for a chapbook of shadows

cast by the shadows within

product of genes and mistakes

in an ambivalent universe

of rare paradise

and mandatory hells

I am simply the thing I am

working to outlive my life.

—After Shakespeare's Parolles in  "All's Well That Ends Well"  

If Wings and a Running Leap

The way

 

Young

I believed in belief

convinced I could fly

and would have

if my arms were wings

Old

little's changed

my arms still arms

but I believe in poetry

and own the strength to try

The Last Hour of Night

Nothing is distinct

down step by step

in the house's trapped heat

despite the window screens

undone again by paradox

in the last hour of night

with its flawed angels

its calm and quiet

as the inner world churns

the shirt I left on the porch rocker

heavy with dew

the grass wet in the drought

the moon masked and sinking

as the dark sky thins in the east

the woods on the verge of definition

you and I in our fragility on the verge

of coming to our senses.

—Inspired by, and borrowing from, Eavan Boland's "Midnight Flowers"

—

In Goldenrod in Rain

Goldenrod in a wet dusk

         

Picking the last of the blackberries

in a wet dusk between storms

we agree to keep the talk light

tending the wounds we have

in the time we have

rib-deep in goldenrod

surrounded by rain

By rain by rain and rising wind

that wear these ridges down

soaked to the shoulders and knees

in vanishing light in rain in wind

that throw the crows upon the sky

and lave the poor of spirit

on the gilded ground.

Nihilitic

The farther I look

The less I see

The moment

Even that

An invention

We take our music with us

As it is

Finis

—as the Taliban entered Kabul during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan

The Berryfield

          

Time is shadowless here

Blackberries she dreamed of

Staining her fingertips

At the top of the field

Where she lies scattered

In the last weeks of summer

Mornings recurring as enhancements of absence.

He will not abandon her now

The man she was half of

In a Gulf-damp wind

Blood and salt on the back of his hand

Reaching.

—with a line by Eavan Boland

300cc Rebel

       

Old best friends have cancelled

now the weekend's come.

          I think I'll ride my motorcycle.

The family moved away

now they live in Michigan.

          I think I'll ride my motorcycle.

No relatives close by

except the buried and the burned.

          I think I'll ride my motorcycle.

The temperature is rising

and the creek is going dry.

The dog dug up the ground hog

she buried in July.

          I think I'll ride my motorcycle.

Hank Williams sang it true

so lonesome he could cry.

          I think I'll ride my motorcycle.

The Woods Saves Me: Part 2

     

It's quiet.

I think things.

I see what I know to be real,

Gray on white sliding on blue over green,

Standing at the bottom of a depth of wind,

Casting a shadow on a path among trees,

I hear what I know to be true,

The tender violence of distant thunder,

The rush of sky in the crowns like the sound of the sea,

The earth sound,

The endless planetary exhale,

No trading this world for another,

Finding my raison d'etre in work,

Doing what only I can do for myself,

Omitting all else

In this era of one afternoon.

The Woods Saves Me

As the day heats up,

Past the ridge of summer,

Pears fermenting on the ground,

I cross the field into the woods,

Hang my shirt on a nail,

And unwrap the gift of loneliness.

A good old shirt, chambray,

Triple-stitched in Maine,

Faded to comfort over 40 years.

In cooler, overarching shade,

Past the ridge of summer,

I doubt I'll need another.

Soloists

          

Sad music feels right.

Tenor. One guitar.

Old enough

to know, to accept,

we lose what we love.

The night has cleared,

everything powered down,

including the moon —

stars like bullet holes in a tin roof,

the sky deep and silent,

Across the forked river of heaven,

a train of satellites passing — well,

we need all the help we can get

communicating, all of us

ineloquent misspoken creatures.

If only we knew our own minds

and had the words for it, reminded

how little we need to go on,

no backup singer, no harmony,

writing, rewriting, into day-break.

        —Cover, "This Empty Northern Hemisphere," Gregory Alan Isakov.