Arctic Abstract

Whatnot, Moonface,

Of the winterworn?

Yuletide, she said,

Conjoined.

Dark Matter

Seventy-degree rise in a week

 

In this empty week

between the loneliest holidays

we are left to witness

a parade of the lost.

Such solitude

in the grip of the past

the dead more real

than the living.

Most of the universe

is dark matter. You can't see it

but scientists assure us it's there.

We don't need convincing.

By the 52nd Week

          

The cold and the year have worn us down.

In the pale sun let us gather our tired bones together.

Let us forget the ones who loved us,

and then did not, and said so.

Let us forget about those who left us

behind the velvet ropes and brass stanchions.

Let us not think of the unfaithful ones,

preoccupied with appearances and branding.

Those who smile when they're angry,

where did they take you?

The sun eases down behind Sugar Loaf,

setting now each day another click to the north.

It is good to know the earth a little,

to be part of the clear air,

to know birds by their silhouettes

and flight lines against the slate sky.

Let us forget with generosity

those who disappoint us,

even those who wish us ill.

What justifies not being?

What is better than watching the sun set

behind the five ridges in blue haze,

earthbound, touching the earth

with our beings, welcoming more?

—Merging the moment with Neruda's Sonata with Some Pine Trees

No Choice

from the public domain

Death on the porch

juncos and doves

sheltering from the cold

systems slowed to a stop

in the throat of the wind

roaring for days

through the sinews of trees

on the hills all around

like vengeance like Earth

shedding itself of humanity

leaving us no choice

but to cling to each other

for warmth for hope

if we dare

Ongoingness

The snowcrust hardened 

in the night

the sun rose late

The rabbit and the vole

the deer the fox

were here before

Another winter

in the life

to try once more

Off Season Ago

Swan Beach, NC. December 2015

Walking the tideline at night

alone by choice

in the labored breathing of the sea

content in the muscular dark

unseen unheard fearless then

as one year declined into the next

and old age seemed a continent away

Fragments in December

One winter closer to my last,

A tide of chill out of the north

On the back of my neck.

I'm thinking of you, too.

I know, I know. Too is pure ego.

Tires on the hard road behind the hill,

Jets in the sky, crows in the air,

You know the sounds.

Here, the road is mud,

And the mind pulses for engagement.

The old poets of ancient China

Went so far and high into the mountains,

Their regrets dissolved in mist.

I didn't do enough for some who loved me most

Before I lost them forever.

Higher, I must go higher.

The flash in the stone,

The pale belly of an owl in a storm of crows,

Everything is what it is, and something else, too.

The snow turns to rain and stops.

A Chant of Place

    

A day at the freeze line,

Light rain hanging like gel.

Surely there was more to do,

But where was the list?

Mars appeared in a gap of sky.

The moon rose and anodized the clouds.

I sat on the porch and watched it happen.

The cat climbed up my leg and onto my shoulder.

She had nowhere else to be.

Her purring, my heartbeat, Gregorian.

Under the Long NIghts Moon

Mid-December,

Assessing.

Dwell on the light as well as the dark,

I tell myself because I need to.

The adult is always lonely,

The poet wrote,

As if childhood were otherwise.

I feel a shadow on my back.

Advice

click for full size

No dressing it up

No spinning in pinafores

All sliders centered

Just the time and the quiet

And the space

Around

Words

Break my heart

With Winter on Our Doorstep

December, 2005

The day is bright and cold

The field beautifully empty

As we move over newly frozen ground

Our darkest weeks approaching,

The longer light we all want

A full hemisphere away,

Tilting further still from the sun.

Our shortest day is coming.

But the next will be a moment longer,

And then the next another moment longer,

And on an on for half a year,

With the warmth of summer to follow.

So, take heart, dear friend,

With winter on our doorstep,

I tell myself spring will win again,

And saying so makes it nearer.

Elders in my life did their best

To teach me how to wait.

I conjure them in darker hours.

I still can hear my grandmother,

Her warm reassurances in old age

Inflected still with the lilt

Of her mother's Irish accent:

Patience brings roses.

It's true it won't be long

Until the field is filled with snow.

But have we not seen

Lavender light on the drifts?

Meteorics

The wind dropped with the sun,

And we were glad upon the earth,

Wood stacked in the shed,

Water line shut off to the stable,

Vintage wool hung by the door,

Ready for the austerity of winter

With its special stars.

Late, cold, and clear,

Out with the dog in the overhead depth,

Frost on the ground like crushed glass,

An arrow streaked across Orion,

Bright and brief,

And lingered in the eye.

I thought of you.

Paris in Appalachia Sestina

Black and Gold Pittsburgh. Dustin McGrew photo (dustinmcgrewphoto.com)

     

Hello, this is Paris,

I used to teach in Johnstown, I'm from Turkeyfoot,

Everything we do is prettty much archaic.

The academic world is very egocentric.

Helen's is a restaurant in these mountains east of Pittsburgh.

This is an 1860s house.

There's a library in this house.

Helen of ancient Troy's lover was Paris.

The Paris of Appalachia is how some people see Pittsburgh,

The Turkeyfoot of Appalachia is Turkeyfoot.

To feel you are at the center of the world is egocentric,

To feel this is true is egocentric and archaic.

Swimming in an unpolluted creek might be archaic,

Especially if the creek is near your house.

A narcissist, like a poet, is egocentric.

Once I heard a woman say mon dieu on Pont Neuf in Paris.

Do women make poetry in Turkeyfoot?

They must make poetry in Pittsburgh.

Troy Hill sits on a plateau above the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh.

To have children is both archaic and not archaic.

Once I met a man off the grid in Turkeyfoot.

If the sun didn't shine, he couldn't watch TV in his house.

Maybe I should've called my daughter in NYC, the way Paris is Paris.

To think NY's the center of the universe is egocentric.

To think your daughter's cute and looked like you is egocentric.

The safest part of Appalachia might not be Pittsburgh.

You never think of dangerous places in Paris,

But there are some, though the ideas are archaic

As having a gallery in your house

In ancient Troy, not up-to-date Turkeyfoot.

Let's hightail it to Turkeyfoot

In the 21st Century full of egocentric

Copernicans, build a sun-filled house,

And pretend we're safe in Pittsburgh,

Where even video games have become archaic,

And we'll make better poetry than Paris in Paris.

I wonder if there's a Paris in Turkeyfoot.

Is it archaic to be egocentric,

Like a tackle in Pittsburgh, big as a house?

—Personalizing Bernadette Mayer's "Helen Parsons Sestina"

from The Paris Review, Fall 2012

Gratitudes, Even So

Sky

even under

the jet weave

Hills

even after

the leaffall

Fire

even when

the cherry's green

Friends

even in

long absence

Kin

even at

this distance

Dogs

even after

clean ups

Books

even still

unread

Hot water

even with

the power bill

Legs

even when

the knee aches

Words

even though

hard won

Jackets

even if

too many

Sight

even where's

my readers

Film

even with

sad endings

You

because

why else

Music

because

it's magic

The dark

because

it's dark

Time

because

it's ours.

Among the gratitudes

Echo

Dusk on a fallow field

Gunfire at sunset

rends the fallow silence,

frightening the old dog

more than the new dog.

The old dog is me,

and I've heard the news.

High Plains, Wild Horses

Tosca Suto photo

In late fall's spare expanse,

the bottle passed around the fire,

you chose to complicate your life.

Antelope leaped in the sunset.

Wild horses, drawn by the only light

for miles around, thrust in their big heads

through the shed's propped windows,

eyes like windless, moonlit seas,

nostrils flared and steaming breath,

humans up to their necks in heated water.

In such a world love-at-first-sight

was powerful and true,

even after forty years.

And then ten more,

and then ten more,

When, in an early winter,

you tried to match your thoughts

to the spareness of the season,

to flattened fields, to woods stripped bare,

to less and less of everything,

and there she stood, first love and ever dear,

High Plains snowflakes in her hair

in a storm that quenched the fires

in Yellowstone and left you burning

under cold and arid stars

in a desert of your own making.

Basic

 

Call it winter, atomic child, aging and basic,

food enough, heat enough, mind enough,

and a dog,

never enough love.

The Oldest in Memory

Entering the afterglow of the year,

reading in candlelight at 5 p.m.

among the sinews of trees

where the hawks have nested

and the owls perched,

the wind a cold basket

carrying lost souls

back to me again

with all their flaws

and kindnesses intact,

and as I did as a child,

I feel the touch of kin.

Darker now, a comfort.

The wind turns up the light of the stars.

—with a line from "Rain Moving In," by John Ashbery

Rain

We walked in the rain

Because it was raining.

There was no other life.

—with a line by Jane Hirschfield

Nature Has the Most to Teach

 

In my element, wiping my face with my cap,

I sit in my great grandmother's rocker,

its arms chewed by squirrels, sawdust in my cuffs,

crows complaining of my presence

at the cabin I built half my life ago,

done for now with the bowsaw,

firewood stacked on the porch,

nuthatches alighting with a scraping

of tiny claws to check me out, upside down,

then plucking a single seed from the feeder,

and off they go with a popping of wings

to shell it and eat it in a tall oak —

advice from the natural world,

sampling life one seed at a time.

I uncrumple a list from my pocket,

so much to do while there's still time,

but I let the sun drop without my own haste,

busy admiring the nuthatches

in their single-seeded, upside-down approach,

savoring each gift into twilight.

Evening moves cool through bare trees.

—Title from a line by Jane Kenyon

Come Morning

 

The moon need not be full

                    to be lovely,

Need not be crescent

                    to be poignant.

Wind, come morning,

                    brings down the last of the oaks,

Bursts of sienna crossing the field

                    with a sound from the confines of time.

In a lifetime of desire

                    to know our universe,

How little we understand

                    about its most common elements,

                    light and water, gravity and each other.

Come morning, we step through our doorway

                    into incomprehensible beauty.

It's not so much the wind and the moon,

                   it's their rising we love.

Shadows in November

 

The landscape is prepared for winter,

but there is no snow.

Such is November, the month

of withered leaves and bare branches,

the ghosts of plants almost as filling

to the eye as have been the green

in this month of shadows briefly seen,

dark flashes just beyond the limits of vision,

and you can't be sure you've seen anything at all.

First, we need a place to stand,

and last, a place to stay.

I've had both for 50 years, a conscious choice,

hoping, when it is my time, for a natural burial

in the ground I've lived upon,

an honorable progression, a rhymed demise,

a nutrient for oaks and goldenrods,

and a shadow worthy of these hills,

just beyond the limits of vision.

Live long enough alone

in one place and time,

and you may see such things.

A family of crows rides the wind.

A gibbous moon rises in the briars.

All You Want

A Turkeyfoot sky.

What has taken the place in our lives

Of the wind and the moon?

It's cold. It's richly lonely.

All you want is to be safe.

All you want is to be well out of sight,

On the other side of night, 

And you can't stop thinking, thinking.

Soon enough it's going to be

Another kind of adventure,

So sit still and just look at the sky,

Hoping humans will be calm

In our diminishing.

—A cento composed of lines from "Turn Up the Ocean," a final,

expansive collection of poems by Tony Hoagland (1953-2018),

Graywolf Press, 2022.

The Light Through Fog

    

Yet here's the sun

lifting from the quills of morning

through mist-filled woods

thinner now each hour

The sky deepens to the blue you love

midges dance with sunlight in their wings

refraction slips along on gossamer

connecting everything to everything

The spiders too have spun a busy night

and here am I writing in a field

another poem with you in it

so thinly veiled our past shines through

Translucent webbed and hung with dew

backlit by all that happened

with winter still two moons away

yet where are you?

The light through fog is convalescent. 

—Virginia Wolfe

Bucolic

On Sheep Hill

In dairy country

In that golden hour

On a golden day

The people of the land

Are unanimous and joyful

On at least the weather

The pastoral their salvation

And who's to say

That ours is not a golden age?

A Day Full of Character

 

Chestnut boards

A day full of character

a cold wind pouring through the trees

under a starched blue sky

leaves blowing in gusts

across the sparrowing field

browning leaning ever leeward

the first snow having melted

with the brash appearance

of the splendid silent sun

Too early I first thought

but now accept what comes

a welcoming of change

determined as I am to age gracefully

between spurts of anguish

wearing wool earlier each fall

no longer embarrassed

when a rare visitor notices

my patched insulated jeans

hand-stitched and worn in comfort

and pride in how the wear was earned

with what we once called honest work

Letting nature take its course

as leaves pile up against the boards

chestnut salvaged from a fallen barn

today I'll call it winter

and enjoy it while I can

that the dusk may fall now

and the moon rise.

—with a phrase by Whitman and a line by Beckett

Treasure

Ukrainian servicemen, Feb. 27, 2022. Maksim Levin / Reuters.

Treasure your bright quiet day

brothers and sisters of the West

savor your smoke-free sky

the mosaic of leaves at your feet

the music of breezes and birds

loved ones close by

expecting the beauty of snow

on a day without news

uneventful and rare

as once did the women

of occupied Bucha

captive in cellars

under trap doors

knowing the terror of light.

— for Oksana Sulyma

Leaffall Immortals

An enchanted place

It's not just me, ankle-deep in golden leaves,

There are others here, sensed unseen,

The wind chanting in loosening crowns,

The leaves in steady drift, the wind a siren's song.

The shades awaken, spirits that have gone before,

Souls that cleared the way, unwinding from my own,

Rising from an emptied mind, and I am freed

To rise with them through brighter boughs,

Feeling what it must be like, living without limits,

Never to be born and never die, 

Immortal for a moment

On this golden morning among trees.

Just After Rain

Everything looks better in the rain,

The veils of change over the field just after,

The ground ticking with wet,

The stepstones in the dooryard

Shining for awhile, winding away,

Your dark eyes, once so near to mine,

The years it took to find you,

And to lose you

In a place with no frontiers.

Earthly Instinct

High up

the hawks are soaring

across the currents

that float the clouds

Beneath the cooling earth

the snakes are denning

all coil and pause

in a world half dream

While on the surface

the shelling continues

calibrations of a species

fated for gone

Requiem for Father

Mother called me home

It was bound to be

The heavy sheets 

filled the cans in the hedges

I scrubbed the wall

And waited for my brother

We sat on the back porch

Late into the starry night

The end of fear

Is not the end of pain

Sufferers

We are not so far apart

Sadness is the bridge

At the End of September

At the end of September

as the trees distinguish themselves

it is easier to imagine I know

what Rilke meant when he wrote

Beauty is the beginning of terror

nights in the 40s

the grass slowing down

the coming of winter

one sure thing in this life

sure as age follows youth

runaway time and the rest

I shut down the saw

and head for the house

sawdust in my vest pockets

the world gone suddenly quiet

pleased by the look of log ends

stacked in the woodshed

annual rings concentric

yes yes yes we were foolish

but let's call it love and still

I see you here a lifetime ago

a walnut bangs off the sheetmetal roof

Startles me back to the present

flocking robins on the wire

bronzed by sunset

solidago going hoary and bowing

shedding cold rain in the field

goldfinches losing their luster

the world growing darker

finches evenings the field and me

It is needful to have night in one's body

said Robinson Jeffers being a poet

and I say Welcome

At the end of September

Some want it darker.

—Click on the last line for a song by Leonard Cohen.

Solo

Late unexpected rain

then ringing silence

as if you'd never been

Fragments at the Equinox

 

Crossing the equator

tipped away

where dreams recur

a double solitude

Poets being mirrors of the soul

face-to-face

as Borges knew

a  labyrinth

So just as well

except to say

what exquisite hell

being lost with you

All

 

Stop me here

Free in the sunset sky

Let me watch awhile

The wind against my cheek

Crows calling in the woods

That's all

—after Cavafy

Autumnal

The top of the hill is a stage

for the great balancing act

against the big screen of heaven

the transit of monarchs against towering vapor

the glide of hawks through evaporated seas

the life and the death in the fields

the seeds the wreckage the burrowing voles

the day and the dark and the light and the night

Unsettles the migrating birds as they flock

we feel it too the old urge to move

we feel it too but we stay

loving too much the world that we have

loving the chance to be in it

expecting the best as an act of will

expecting the best and finding it here

finding it here where we are.

Nomad

No use to embrace

Your compulsion to wander

O walker upright

No use to confess

You've searched all your life

O seeker of kindness and light

For someone to hear your confession.

Genius

Please click to enlarge.

Orb weavers reign

In the goldenrod field.

I am less important

Than the grass.

The End of Fantasy

Monarch and Sunflower

You made

the extraordinary

your province

Splanchnic stirrings

experimental

ventures of the id

The ordinary ever after

masking the surreal

my lost love

After Your Call

Cornfield, Upper Turkeyfoot

 

Crickets acorns sunsets

Long vistas clean lines

Vanishing points

On uncluttered horizons

Planetary interstellar

To feel our suspension

Hurtling through infinity

In our jacket of air

Thunderheads harvests meteors

Katydids leaf falls buck rubs

All the more miraculous

For universal solitude

Monarchs cellos E minor

Ubiquitous longing

Your favorite word

My penultimate state

Trumpeting geese overhead

And I miss you.

The Origin of Art

Father's blue today

Mother would confide

          Which meant

          Be careful what you say

Father was blue

On Thanksgiving

          And Mother

          Ate off the kitchen floor

Therefore poetry

          And the conviction

That happiness is

Too much to expect

          And the quiet days

          Are gods.

Was

I like to think

I saved you

In the end

Knowing

It is better

Not to know

But O what

Could have been

Instead of was

The Summoning

Waiting for the train to pass, Neshannock Falls, 1934. Cecil Hall photo

Help me, great grandfather,

to wait for what's coming,

to lie down in the garden

and sleep in the sun.

Lead me, old-timer,

to sit near the hearth,

rocking in silence, 

wicks turned down low,

Firelight on cheekbones,

lost sons and lost daughters,

the mantel clock counting,

help me, Will Hall,

Checking your watch

behind the house

where the rails used to be,

waiting for the coal train to pass,

Black smoke for the grade,

The Engineer in the cab,

his elbow and kerchief,

passing on time.

The house is still standing,

I am there waiting,

waiting with ghosts

for the ghost train.

Neshannock Falls, 1917. Cecil Hall photo

     

     

    

     

As Leaffall Begins

      

Inside

your eyes

again

Inside

my mind

again

I can hear

the leaves falling

again

Breathless

without

again

I can feel

myself turning

to dust

Breathless

and falling

again

Two strangers

turning

to dust.

—Recomposed lyrics, "Into Dust," Hope Sandoval/David Roback.

Mammals

     

I speak to the beeves when I bicycle past,

They listen together politely, ceasing to chew,

I have their attention, we voice no opinions,

I like these big, warm animals on the same hill,

The wire between us, fencing them out and me in.

Volunteers

Cellarway

Faith in the cycle of lives

faith in the seasons

natives sprung up on their own

volunteers heavy with seed after rain

bowing in the cellarway

dear weeds with the rest of us

sliding toward fall

hot breath of the past soon to cool

tickseed sunflowers

soon to rise again here

come spring

with or without us

faith in the cycle of things

ever faith in the earth

ever in us

soon to bloom.