Whiparound

The last morning

of the old year

dismantles a mind

consciously ordered

to take the long view

of only one morning

about to begin

its eightieth turn,

almost elliptical,

surely orthogonal,

a thin strip of life

lived alone,

as if it were real.

Lephart Road Metaphorics

Our ride cut short

in winter's tarnished light,

far enough along

to rest

against a weathered barn,

slow-vanishing by rain.

A cold wind shakes the briars.

We will not be spared.

Muse in a Cornfield

 

She walks coatless toward me

in the pale landscape of a dream

across a stubbled field

windswept with snow.

I have come to teach you

to live in imagination,

she says. This way.

You have struggled long enough.

Is she not cold, I ask,

and how will we begin?

Never again, she says,

and I follow her

through the treeline

and over the hill.

When I look back,

I can see my house

close to the horizon.

Smoke rises from the chimney.

The fire is still alive.

As if it were real

—after and with the ultimate line from Louise Glück's "Song."

Prose from the Solstice

     My tracks in and my tracks out in the year's briefest light. Yet, in my own company, which includes the cats and the dog, the day felt as full as ever.

     The dog ran the deer trails, nose to the snow. The Pinkertons, as I've come to call the cats, stood guard at the breathing holes, totems to lethal patience.

     Thoreau was there, too. I read him by candlelight until the shades of night took possession of the woods. We live too fast and coarsely. And he was right, as usual. Even still, even still, and worse.

     He wrote that in 1852 when, in the village, sleighs were propped on poles to keep the rails from freezing to the ground, which seems neither fast nor coarse. O, if he could haunt the internet just now and see what we've become, our accounts far from fitting on our thumbnails.

     We left the woods at last, the Pinkertons, the dog, and me. Clouds in the west had arranged themselves in converging bars according to the tactics of the sky, and the pink of the solstice sunset had lifted off of them and onto corrugations overhead; the snow-covered hill itself submitted to the sentiments of endings and blushed a little.

     We took the long way home. Slower, finer. You could call it a resolution. You could call it a small beginning.

Time Enough

 

I hope this reaches you in time,

before the ridden earth

spins us 'round the fire again,

before it flings us into space,

centripetal adagio,

is there not still time to care again,

to be kind in our passing,

you with your back to the sea,

to all you've left behind,

and me on this same hill

where I've grown old watching sunsets?

We remember how it was, indelible,

and is there not still time enough

for each of us to bleed forgiveness?

High Up

 

Honed edge of hope in a young moon

All that comes between us is shadow and light

Love and death out of the tangled earth

These last cold days more beautiful

Our deep, deep flight.

Even in the Darkest Days

On the sill above the sink

I snapped them off as I passed,

reaching out the window

as I turned into the yard.

In the barn I found an old bottle,

filled it with well water,

and sat it on the sill above the sink.

Given a bit of warmth,

even with the least attention,

you never know what can happen,

As with us.

Needful

Sugar Loaf in the distance behind a young maple. Click to enlarge.

 

Privacy, solitude,

as needful we come,

wounded by news,

to observe the hours of the universe,

away from the cameras and drones.

How often at sunset the sky opens.

—The sun sets behind Sugar Loaf on the winter solstice.

Thin

 

This limbo of early December,

I feel it in the woods in light snow

that would be a drizzling rain

off the mountain, between rain and snow,

between seasons, between growth and decay, 

life and death, between worlds — thin,

the Irish say of such places and times,

closer than usual to another reality

where spirits and memories dwell.

All day the bare trees touch each other.

Winter

Takeoff

She came back

with fractals in her hair

to keep me with her this time.

The frozen ground.

The blinding sky.

Young again forever.

First Measure

Pause in a storm, January 22, 2012

The storm resumes,

two inches on the ground.

I call her Winter now, cold flame

down from the north, feisty and beautiful,

spinning her incantations

across these worn-down hills

to overstay her welcome once again,

her icy breath upon my neck.

When I open the back door,

she comes in with the animals,

but I don't mind, she's gorgeous as ever,

and I am sure of myself this time around,

for I think I have fuel enough,

I think this frame is strong enough,

I think that I am tough enough

this time around — illusions in a squall.

Poem Beginning with Doubt

Doubt

As manifest night

As the temperature dropped

'Til the misshapen moon

Three days from full

Escaped from the black

Cage of the trees

And we took it to be

A vague prophecy

And we took it to be

First light

Sudden and brief

Ourselves

Sudden and brief

Ourselves

At the edge of freezing

Ourselves

At the edge of flight.

With Gratitude and Reverence

Among the gratitudes

Hills

even in

cold wind

Sky

even with

the smoke

Woods

even with

dead ash

Fire

even with

the tending

Friends

even in

long absence

Kin

even at

this distance

Dog

even with

the shed

Books

even still

unread

Hot water

even with

the wait

Sight

even where's

my readers

Poems

even with

an ache

Bike

because

the legs

Music

because

it's magic

Neighbors

because

they'd help

The dark

because

it's dark

You

because

because

Time

because

it's ours.

Freezing Rain

The rain turned hard,

pierced deep the pond,

soon to join its like

as one firm plane

we skated poorly on.

Back to my own devices then,

the shovel hanging from its spikes,

the sledge on its head in the stable

built from hand-hewn beams

after the barn's demise —

Deep snow, hard rain, the weight.

It woke us when it fell,

committed to each other still

in mixed precipitation.

Collapse shook the ground.

Woodland

 

     

On the last night she could speak

she dreamed of rocking on the cabin porch,

rocking in the old mission rocker

her great-great grandmother had rocked in,

and how it all creaked as leaves fell.

How it all creaks now

as shadows swing 'round,

woodland beings finding peace

where we can, rocking,

desperately native.

Valley

Steady wind and wooded hill

Jeering in the night,

The damper flopping in the flu,

Colder air and me the same.

The front moves in.

The house exhales.

What is this emptiness we share

Which we cannot name?

Other Days

 

Some days all of it seems true,

Stillness on the hill,

The perfect falling line.

Other days I wonder

If you wonder, too.

Gift

Sugar camp, mailbox, Upper Turkeyfoot

Unexpected marvel,

only you can judge

which of your friends

hide behind the miracles —

pleasure, passion —

lovely by first-class mail

when you are far away.

Even a person

who has everything

needs a poem now and then.

—an "erasure" of a gift subscription promo for The Threepenny Review.

Some Like It Darker

          

Entering the afterglow of the year,

reading in candlelight among the sinews of trees

where the hawks have nested and the owls perched,

the wind 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.

—Title after a song by Leonard Cohen

World News

We worked until sunset.

I've read too much. The planet. The people.

It's worse than I thought.

But today I worked in the woods until sunset,

cutting firewood in unseasonable warmth,

and I saw no one.

I stopped in time to watch the sky deepen

from gold to red in quiet solitude,

staying until the first stars blazed

in the violet chill — this was the world,

 and I saw no one,

The fathomless sky, these woods, this field,

light, gravity, the mystery of consciousness,

spinning through the infinite void

on a hurtling sphere in an expanding universe,

and I saw no one.

The calls of geese, unseen behind the hill,

brought me back, jets nicked the west with neon,

the dog leaned warm against my leg, and surely

for some others, impermanently blessed,

some one.

Back to Now

 

Such expectations

we had for ourselves,

waiting for our moment,

as the small things passed.

Day breaks in the contrails

behind the walnut trees.

Finitude

Script of  the finite seasons

On a wooded hill,

reading old poets,

old poets looking for answers

near the ends of their lives,

old enough now myself

to try to know

if the cold rain through bare crowns

holds ancient truths,

if curled leaves in the desiccated field

keep old secrets,

the chill and the finitude

of life being what is,

as I have known it to be,

my own heart, too,

an ancient text

without explanation.

Late October

The oaks hold on in the wooded hills

And give the wind a voice

Mountain lullaby for a longer night

 

Good Company

Someone to be sad with,

someone else who knows,

to sit with on the porch

when the sky bleeds through the hemlocks

and the blue-green lights come on

around the corner post,

and we become the dark side of the earth.

Someone to be quiet with,

looking out across the field,

ashes scattered there,

mostly from the old wood stove

we read beside in winter,

in our doubled silence,

and in hers.

(15 years after a daughter's death)

First FIre

Like leaves on the pond

Caught in the tension

Between worlds

Between seasons,

Like woodsmoke in moonlight

Hung in the chill

Of the calm before frost

Between what we had

And what we have left,

First fire in the grate,

Heat and time up the flue

Into the ravenous night.

The Sentimentalist

Afeld in light rain

 

I can't go slowly enough

over these tilting planes of solitude,

unstable in the great layering,

in the showcase of gravity and change,

succumbing to both.

The trouble is you won't stay gone

but keep reappearing

in the substance and hue of October,

as mist lying down in the hollow,

as rain tapping on my hat brim,

as gusts of leaffall across this wooded slope

vividly feigning its death.

Sometimes I think I would welcome oblivion

with its second chances, but I wait,

I wait for the rain to ease and the moon to uncover,

for I remember the moonlight,

and it is beautiful through bare boughs.

Local Time

In an October field,

midges dancing backlit

in the low corridors of the sun,

crows in the thinning woods,

claiming the day as their own,

we two deep in the season

of goldenrod and asters,

you with your lemon water,

me with my crooked stick,

better to listen than to talk

 at this age, complicit in silence,

rapt in an evening state of mind.

Panacea

Under a tall sky

an unsullied mind,

free to think

the best of humanity,

the earth unspoiled,

the children healthy and prosperous,

the days quiet and numberless,

removed from the news,

would still trail clouds of glory,

even now.

Woodshed, End-Grain

Sunrise over a full woodshed

In the propellers of morning,

Beams of chestnut remember the light,

tisking in the dark inside the old barn 

As the day heats up, end-grain stacked to the roof,

Histories of growth on this slope between winters.

The work praises itself, satisfactions

Of the resilient thriving in solitude and poverty.

Solo

No road to solitude,

just a narrow path and a ducking under

in an envelope of silence and mist

as the ground cools, more sky in the crowns

each day now, a delicate lace overhead.

You left your phone in the kitchen

and carry a book for the cabin porch,

but you don't open it, another leaf

about to release, another barrell-rolling cherry,

another spiraling maple, another tumbling birch.

You hear them tap the earth

when you hold your breath, it can be that quiet

at home in these Pennsylvania woods,

alone with your instincts and thoughts,

if you dare.

Sooner Twilight

In sooner twilight

a southeast shift

freshened the rooms

and loosened a walnut

that fired off a round

on the logshed's steel roof

jolting me back to the present

and I haven't thought of you since

until now.

The Ground

Fallow

The sky presses down.

It takes a long time

for the ground to be land,

a field returning to woods,

verdant and bent by the rain,

While in the old house

a woman in love rises early,

leaves with her shoes in her hand,

in the dream of a man still asleep

Who has learned to accept

that everything ends,

but finds that no reason

not to begin

In a field returning to woods,

verdant and bent by the rain.

For the ground to be land,

it takes a long time.

The sky presses down.

Unconditional

We said it

each in our turn

belief undoing

our disbelief

Of course

it couldn't last

years and years and years

and yet

It snowed today

deep on the hillside

where I walked your name

visible from space

Satellites

in continual sunlight

sometimes falling

into the rising sea

A.I. (Artificial Ignorance)

Seclusion as long as it lasts

The lesser god Elon,

who took away the Stars,

offers me The Link,

to which I say fuck off,

condemning myself

to engineless Limbo

without money or rockets or influence,

no orbiting views of troop movements

or hurricanes or boreal forests in flames,

proof no longer required

of rabid greed and cruelty,

and who needs to see the coasts sink

as icebergs fall into hot seas,

desperate millions in flight,

better to watch from my porch

the disappearance of songbirds,

alone until the Sheriff arrives,

witness to the local Extinction.

Cycling Down

Evening ride in Upper Turkeyfoot

 

Our faces part the air

downhill on a country road

in solitudes of speed

that elevate the spirit

and free the imagination,

cooler through the swales,

red barns and white houses,

broad foreheads of cows,

baled hay in wagons,

blackbirds crossing field to field,

wild turkey chicks running into the corn,

sunlight in the tops of thunderheads,

the universe expanding

infinitely in all directions,

yet we are central still.

In the windrush you may think

you hear me breathe your name,

but I am barely here,

and you not at all.

Parabolic

September in Upper Turkeyfoot

The light that happens in September

When at last we broke our promises,

How much further could we bend ?

Firewood stacked and drying in the shed,

Floating cobwebs catching sunlight

Post to post along the cabin porch,

Sunlight silver in the hemlocks' open arms,

Sunlight gilding tiers of oaks

When you said divorce,

Sunlight bending through the glass

To where you'd stood, once upon a time,

At Webster's Second on its stand,

Golden head-to-toe and unabridged,

Such light we'd known

Now tangent to the afternoon,

Now bending toward the void.

A City Girl Sees Heaven

An Elon Musk satellite train

 

Afield beneath the Milky Way

she touched my arm and asked

what would I do differently today.

Fireflies ascended from the weeds.

I mentioned more respect.

She looked straight up and said, Ah, a first.

And the mystery remains.

Could she have meant the Forked River of Heaven,

for she lived an illuminated life ?

Or was it my apology twenty years too late ?

A satellite train passed overhead.

I think we missed each other,

she said, her hand still on my arm.

And she left me in the dark.

Glimpse

Young moon

A glimpse of the infinite

is the most we are offered,

passing through,

the blade of a young moon

hung in the scarves of sunset,

animals watching us from the darkening fields,

muscle and bone in the shadows, their eyes

flaring as our lights sweep over them,

turning onto our dirt road,

gravel snapping under our tires,

coasting home to confront the night.

Arsonists

from the public domain

Easy to sink

into the vortex

of our own stories

Myself and yourself

molten at the core

of separate star systems

So here's the plan

you forget mine

I'll forgive yours

Self-immolation

as it turns out

common practice

Consumed by desire

eight billion flares

torch the Earth.

Birds on a Wire

August evening in Upper Turkeyfoot

Each day a surprise

Each moment

Lived in stillness

A waking dream

Savored

As long as it lasts

For the night is stark

And charred with loss.

King of Downpour

A cold rain

Walks the field

Legs against the woods

Usurps the hill

 

You had your secretary call

Eight years ago today

Reign ending — and I

Am weather unforgiving.

Neither Here Nor There

The off-season

          

Why do you leave for happiness?

Why not stay around a while?

I haven't seen the sea since before the pandemic,

and I miss it, the unbroken curve of the horizon,

the surrender to tides and to wind, the cry of the gulls,

the advance and retreat of the surf effervescent,

the erasure of where we have been,

the great weight of the swells' rise and fall —

ah, by the sight and the smell,

by the sound of collapse and retreat,

the sea soothes the pangs of the heart.

Yet, here I sit on the porch with the dog,

contented in Pennsylvania, both of us

scanning the treeline for visitors,

rabbits and deer emerging at the margins

of the fallow field returning to woodland,

watching it happen, taking the long view in time,

listening to the wind in the crowns at twilight

and hearing the surf as it recedes on flat sand,

sensing the sea from my porch, sane in this place,

nearing the end of my eighth decade on Earth,

I've paid my price and am here for the duration.

—with three lines from Henri Cole's Sow with Piglets

Diurnal

Half a lifetime

Over the same hill,

For you it became

The center of a kingdom,

Preferring one day here

To a thousand hereafter.

—after Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

Tornado Watch

Upper Turkeyfoot

A man apart

with the wind in his mouth

wheels into the shadow of the earth

pushing for the center of the spinning mind

where it is empty and still

21st Century Ghost Dancers

Arapaho Ghost Dance ceremony, 1890, an engraving from the National Archives

          

You who smiled with me

in the geometries of evening,

the red sun between barns,

contrails crossed in a darkening sky,

it is not too late for us,

it is not too late for us.

Did you not see the crow

when it flew down

to the earth,

to the earth ?

He has taken pity on us.

Did you not feel the earth tremble ?

My child, my child,

stretch out your hands,

every being will rise,

circle with me in the dust

five days and four nights,

we shall rise again,

we shall rise again,

singing ourselves

into a different reality.

—with elements of songs from the Ghost Dance religion in the late 19th Century of the Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Comanche as anthologized in "Technicians of the Sacred," edited by Jerome Rothenberg, University of California Press, second edition, copyright 1968, 1985, Jerome Rothenberg.