Into Dark Woods

The path through the field

is arched with briars

that claw and draw blood,

               but that is not pain.

The path into the woods

is like a descent

into a cellar of souls,

               but that is not madness.

The cabin under the trees holds the night,

the house over the hill is empty and quiet,

footfall keeps open the path,

               but that alone is a man and his dog.

As Forests Burn

Canadian smoke in the Laurel Highlands

       

Code Red Air Quality Alert

A good day to practice

The art of tranquility

Meditative detachment

With smoke in our lungs

From 800 fires up north

Wind stirs the oaks

But the wind passes

And the oaks are still

Come sit on the porch

And we'll speak of what was

The further the bluer.

Imagist Pandora

The path between wires

 

And the music plays,

sad songs,

thousand-mile voices,

cellos, flutes, dark keys,

shadows of crows

sliding into the valley,

sustained chords, silences,

hawks floating in gyres,

reiki, chakras,

the path between wires,

O love of my life,

endless deep space,

your hair on my chest,

a few hours at most

as the music plays.

Fodder

Where peace comes dropping slow. (Yeats)

My mind is a millstone grinding the grain of memory, my thoughts a low grumble, a millstone rumbling as it grinds against itself while I walk the dark and dripping woods, confronting the past in a world of gleaming leaves, a place without anger or fear where Yeats' peace comes dropping slow.

Walking the woods in the rain, I think of what my mother said in her eighty-eighth year, after the death of her third husband. "The trick," she said, "Is to live without regret." If only.

In this shaded haven where teaberry blooms and spotted salamanders shine under stones, where the rill purls cold on its way to the creek, the low rumble I hear (as strange a comfort as distant thunder) is the slow and heavy grinding of rationalized regret.

Sorry, Mom. You were tougher than me. Some things I would fain not forget.

A Summer State of Mind

I stepped out on the porch in the dark

To welcome the summer

And forget the emptiness of what once was full.

The way the fireflies rose from the field,

The way the bullfrogs groaned in the pond,

The way the train promised rain in the valley,

Healed me somewhat,

The wind on my neck,

Moths pattering against the glass.

The summer welcomed me back,

For I was the one who'd been gone.

Notes on a Homecoming

Presence in shadow and mist

The wind in the giants seemed a welcome,

the great leafy boughs waving me slowly

into their cool shaded haven

where I felt you close again, and heard your voice,

and became still in the darkening dusk,

listening to crickets in the tall grasses,

fireflies rising toward the stars that hung in the trees.

I tried to get it down in your presence,

the facts of evening falling onto the page like seeds,

the heavens and earth and memory one flower.

Relativity

Oxeye

 

You may call it invasive,

my lovely xenophobe,

but so is our dusk.

Test Pattern in Grandview

USS Clairton Coke Works, 2019. Reid R. Frazier/The Allegheny Front 

We barely knew each other

high on our own after-image

overlooking the smoky town

where we began our life together

early in debt and breathing

the ochre air

of the Monongahela Valley

when smoke meant mill jobs

and furniture on credit

for the young and the restless

in an early wave

of a disenchanted

televison generation

coming of age

with graphite on our shoulders

under the Good Housekeeping

Seal of Approval

and channeled for divorce.

 

Needful

Rolling back from our star

 

It is needful

to have night

in one's body

the west coast poet wrote

in a stone tower he built himself

on a cliff above the lathered sea

Further east in these old hills 

in an 1860s farmhouse

I've kept standing until now

I am filled with doubt

—with a quote from Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

Strange Voices

To the woods then

to be where I am deeply

Strange voices

coming in on a dry wind

Lines of the dead poets

leaning against each other

across the old maple desk

I read in a chair by the window

until the owls call

I write by candlelight

to hear myself

to set the darkness echoing

Untitled

Peonies

 

Swallows tracing tendrils

in the brilliant air

A bucketful of peonies

sweetening the kitchen

And spring goes away