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