Remnants of Winter

I. Snowbound Haiku

     1. 

Behind the blower

Under its thirty-foot arc

The mist of our songs

     2.

A shared solitude

Hoping for the township plow

But not for awhile

II. Cold Truth

I should not have wondered

               where the wind was

               for the thought summoned it,

Touched off avalanches

               in the hemlocks,

               launched sparrows,

Spun snow devils

               up the gusted slopes,

Felled the giant elm

               at the back of the field

               where it had stood for centuries,

And blew in the workshop window,

               leaving me anxious and certain

               I never would see you again.

Private Life

When the wind eased at sunset,

we walked in fresh snow,

our heat rising into the sky,

and some of our regret, too,

you in your field,

me in mine,

each of us enduring

in a cell of ourselves.

Resignation

Morning is another chance

To lie back down

And let the music play

Crows and wind

Nowhere to be

Monochrome Transit

 

When the sun is a coin in a flat gray sky

above the dim stirrings of bare March,

I do not wish for more color,

silver to black a safe-enough transit

in a world too vivid with shelling,

too tie-dyed with greed.

Our time is expiring.

The Goldenrod Field

I remember everything,

how the snows flattened the goldenrod field

flat as the sea,

how the wind dried and lifted the swells,

thatch of past summer,

how the sun warmed the earth where we lay,

swept out to sea,

caught in the undertow

of finding each other too late,

adrift on the wreckage of winter.

To When It Was So

Grace Henry Meyers photo

The kindness of fog

On the last morning of winter,

Sheltering us from an uncertain world

On our mountain at the bottom of the sky,

The comfort of knowing

The day will warm as the sun rises,

The fog will lift,

And we will still have each other.

Sanity

           

A man with no schedule

wheels firewood past midnight

in moonlight and silence

hearing the creek

pouring over the dam

in the valley three miles below,

and he lingers.

Texting in the Dark

The Milky Way over Killarney. (Conor Healy) Click to enlarge.

Disturbing times, these.

What enters our minds we control if we can,

Falling into this shared photograph, say,

Hoping to sleep and to dream of our stars

Arched over the lakes of Killarney, say,

Dreaming a universal caring exists,

Or did, or will, at least in our land, 

If ever sleep comes, fitful at best,

And failing, resorting, instead,

To what's worked in the past —

Tending, my love, to the near.

Those who have each other have much,

Throw an arm over that warmth if you can,

And dream on, dear friend, sleep well.

A Change in the Weather

 Last walk in snow-filled woods

for awhile, the forecast reads.

Last night on earth

for a hundred thousand souls.

I take the long way home.

The Day the Maternity Hospital Was Bombed

Snowing with birdsong

mallards returning in pairs

silhouettes flying in smoke

the ground softens

yielding to the march of men

dazed by the beauty of weapons

crazed by the beauty of blood

—bottom photo a screenshot from the front page of The New York Times, 3/8/22

"Neither the woman nor the baby could be saved." —NYT, 3/14/22

We Turn Away

Riding in plain country

through dispersing flocks

of red-wings and robins,

contour flying, all of us,

with the smell of wood smoke

over the corn-stubbled fields,

listening for killdeer,

neighbors hauling firewood

in front loaders,

doves calling all day,

a city of a million souls

falls in Ukraine.

We turn away,

attached to the look of this sky

and the smell of this land,

living our life

in the place where we made it,

lucky and privileged

in the poetics of peace,

weak and ill-prepared,

ignoring a brutal world

because we can,

for as long as we can,

if we can.

From the bike at sunset

      

—Top photo a screensave from the front page of The New York Times, 3/6/22

A Common Prayer for March on Earth

West Kerry, Ireland (Graham Davies)

The sky opens wider,

the sun burns stronger,

and so do I,

for what are we

if not the weather and the day,

if not the thawing ground,

if not the surging sea,

if not the open sky

where rise our hopes for humankind,

despite the news,

but, oh, to stand in sunlight

and think what we could be.