Elegiac

 

Slow to green,

Some hilltops,

Where she grew.

Here in mist,

Wet shining road,

Here in grounded cloud —

Without.

How the distant follow you,

Absence moves with me.

Reflections

 

Sunset wind on water

Wild calls of the pileates

Echo in the woods

The trees lose their shadows

Preoccupied with evening

In this unprofaned hour

I have no answer for the doves.

Near the End of the Ride

The last hill

near the end of the ride

no traffic no noise

no human sound

those who move with you

silent and unseen

the sun behind the ridge

the chill descending

birds against the sky

black and high up

crossing to roost

the ground the mind

tilted toward home

you could coast the last mile

if you had no fear of the edge.

So Deep Away

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The flicker's cackle

brings another year around

half expecting you again—

too soon then

and never since.

I wander the same winding path

exploring stillness

rain in the west

a dark blur beneath cloud

so deep away.

—after Meng Hao-jan (689-740 C.E.)

Underwater

Early spring pomd

Twenty years underwater

holding our breath

waiting for seasons to change

waiting to surface

for sudden brain-spinning love

and it happened

it happened for each of us

separately

gasping

we drowned.

Recluse

Who can say 

Which is nothing now,

The hill, the heart

Gone black with contrast ?

Left to itself,

The mind sees through appearances.

Left to myself,

How easily contentment comes.

—inspired by the poetry of Po Chü-i, c. 800 AD

Warm April Night

 

After the rush of light and shadow,

leave the window open.

Who will keep us company

at the far end of quiet ?

Polyhymnia

Unnamed run in Upper Turkeyfoot

 

She calls when she can,

Sometimes as gathered rain

Purling over stones,

Glimmer in the motion of her moves,

Sometimes from the east,

Streaming in the tresses of the willow,

Sometimes on bright rails,

Praises 'fore the crossings in the valley,

Sometimes from her pickup

Driving home,

Mobile blue gloaming 

In my room.

We Tilt Roaring Over the Glittering Zodiac of Intentions

Approaching the end of another heating season

No shortage of firewood of late,

thanks to the emerald ash borer

and to the roar of the wind and the chainsaw,

to the old wheelbarrow, and the long-handled maul,

the stove seldom cold from October to May.

When a man cuts his own fuel

adding a split to the fire takes him back,

back to the woods, to where the tree fell,

to where the wild mandrake now rises,

the rise and the fall, the rise and the fall,

takes him back to his own rise and fall,

a natural enough progression

on a living planet,

despite the best of intentions.

—Title from the Pinsky poem, "Immortal Longings."

Ephemeris

What we do, we know, won't last,

Not for long, trying each day to record

What it was to be a person on the earth,

Sure to succumb to the whims of physics

And to the fickleness of our own kind.

A book, a barn, a hard drive, a carving on stone—

Roofs to keep the rain and the sun

Off the few feeble works of our making,

And our tools with their handles worn smooth.

So go on, small song, written in vanishing ink,

Infant of the brain, beamed by satellite

From continent to continent,

Find eyes to be read,

Talk to as many strangers as you can, 

Find those aching, joyful souls

Who remind themselves each day that we die,

And cherish the chance at impermanence,

If only for a little while.

Pink Moon

April's full moon is the Pink Moon

Reading on the back porch by foreheadlamp

as day left the field and crossed over the ridge,

the Pink Moon rose up from the woods— and I had it,

a rhythmic, emotionally-wrought first line

for a new poem, a gift from the poetry gods

that vanished just as quickly to be forever lost

no matter how much I fine-tuned reception.

What a day it had been, the first warm afternoon

of the year when everything happens at once,

goldfinches brighter at the feeder,

dandelions' erupting with joy in the yard, 

leopard frogs leaping into the pond with a shriek,

friends texting avatars with red hearts for eyes,

and... what else ?

I've been saving an especially keen observation for last,

but I can't think of it now— so much I can't think of,

Easter nearing, my daughter's favorite holiday,

ever since she awoke one Easter morning not so long ago

to a yardful of inflatable, ridiculous rabbits

I'd blown up in the dark after night shift.

(Seeking cellophane grass, I'd hit a sale at Jamesway).

Pen in hand, I wait in vain for word from the Muses,

hyla piping their plaintive, piercing chorus

under the Pink Moon, buoyant behind the old walnut

and casting pale shadows under the dogwood

at the top of the hill,

planted in her memory,

ready to bloom.

Whitmanesque

Awakening to daylight

Form and line

joy enough

in morning light,

we wonders

of the universe,

singing ourselves.