Time Paints

        

Before I sleep

a bright moon uncovers,

its light

like snow on the fields.

Lifting my head

I watch the bright moon,

head on the pillow

I dream we are home.

An Upper Turkeyfoot version of Li Po's

"Quiet Night Thoughts," c. AD 750,

said to be the best-known poem in China.

In a Field of One's Own

One star over the hill

stops me in nautical twilight,

breathing the cold plain air,

grateful for a place to stand

in the rising dusk

without interruption,

sailing.

Pedaling Grateful

 

Open sky and open land

room for who I am

and room to ride

neighbors waving hi

a few a few

are just enough

and one who leaves me

mailbox pie.

In the Pause Before Winter

The oaks and the dry-ice wind

conspire to lay the final mat

on wooded slopes before the snows.

Aware of the spin and the hurtle,

 

on a few uncultivated acres

of flung universe,

I wait for Nothing to happen.

Postcard on the Wall

Easier against the sea to imagine

that we have the only world we know

to ourselves and that the moment

is everything if not the sea in this constriction

then at least the wind unwinding in bare trees

at least your last postcard on the wall

your handwriting your thoughts from the city

your fears and loves and observations

(your bold move to London fast approaching,

your boyfriend coloring on the couch,

your cat puking in the corner)

at least a little of your consciousness

unwinding in my chest

and that the ashes on the hill

were not the end of you.

Lunar eclipse over Santa Monica, CA

(Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images)

On the Loss of Critical Thinking

         

Diffiusion

overhead and underfoot

afloat in the insubstantial

nothing to cling to

so many savages

on a dying planet

Nature a wounded salvation

the arts to tell it

piled up and burned

Jumpers

from the towers

held hands.

Distilled

November, Upper Turkeyfoot

       

She died,

yet still sunsets were beautiful.

Beauty is not always lovely. — Robinson Jeffers

First Snow Chalks the Remnants

First snow chalks the remnants of summer,

another layer of seasonal time

brightens the dead and the dying,

ourselves among them, mon cher,

we knights of aging,

accepting change as it happens,

professing contentment

and peace in frozen fields.

Let us raise our polished faces,

proclaim faith in each other,

and move through the world, old school, 

armored in wool and feathers,

though our maille be thin,

and the effects chilling.

Plein Air Painting in November

     

Gather your brushes,

the good ones, and the good paper.

Paint the slopes of the Casselman Valley,

paint the oaks holding their leaves,

exalted among maples, their burnished crowns.

Paint too the aspens of the northern moraine,

gold and quaking by the swamps,

paint a boy where the glacier stopped,

risking his fingers under duckweed for tadpoles.

Paint also the ravens, oily with light,

claiming the sky for themselves,

celebrating wind,

paint the ghosts of plants,

hoary with seeds taking flight.

Paint the farmers on tractors,

small in long fields,

haying once more

before snow highlights the contours.

Paint my face,

erased by low sun,

paint it smooth, as a boy,

jumping stone to stone in the river,

hands in cold current,

Not wanting to go home,

testing shadowed depths

where the stones were slippery with life.

Paint the dark places.

Paint what never was found.

—after Martin Espada's "The Caves of Camuy"

No Whining In the Land of Enough

 

Frost in the shadows of morning

Gratitude in the aftermath of night

Senses intact

In the reveries of solitude

Only as much suffering

As the psyche can bear

Clarity of thought

And the will to continue the fight

Flare in the trees

Fall, Back

 

Last hill on the ride home

      

The final up

as the sun goes down

on a ride into the standard of time

which I shall try not to measure

in minutes

but lives.

Local Immersive Exhibit

It doesn't last long

leaves on the ground

nature's installation art

on a grand scale

a collaborative masterwork to walk through

each step in quiet reverence

complete with the effects

of calling crows and wind

and a mist rising from the hollow

crowning the crest of the hill

the woods newly bare

the trees looking stunned

at what they've created together

the show soon to close

with the first snow.

 

Instead of Gulls

Click to enlarge. Duck, NC

He gave up the ocean,

gulls on the wind,

traveling less,

to walk the field and quiet the mind,

to watch the winter come.

Leaf by leaf and seed by seed,

the hills were as deep as the sea

and held as many mysteries.

And still he found

he was traveling far.

 

Milkweed, Upper Turkeyfoot