Orinthology

Brushed ink and watercolor, Endre Penovac

With so much unsaid, you rock

in your great grandmother's chair

on the cabin porch in the woods,

oak on oak among oaks.

The rain has stopped, evening rises

into the boughs where four crows have landed,

croaking and gleaming and heavy,

touching off a second rain, leaf to ground,

bough to fern, mind to heart.

 

They live in extended families, crows do,

parents and fledglings, aunts and uncles,

cousins and grandparents— you remember

the comfort of kin, you remember.

Orinthlogists believe crows recognize faces,

they know you, crows do, they read

your intentions, they know

you welcome their company,

and they keep their distance.

Locus

I could go.

Whenever I pause,

engines of the culture.

But sometimes not.

Sometimes after a storm,

only wind and breathing.

So I stay.

—after an Ojibwa death song

 

Found Ditty

 

Lost my phone

in the woods last night

My shoes this morning

are soaked with dew

Turned it off

and that felt right

Late to the Picnic: Dream Sequence

Fiction. Sturgis, SD. (Stock photo)

Grand entrance in leather on chrome,

you behind me, hair streaming like a banner,

the engine warm and quivering beneath us.

Shut down so quiet, aviators, bandanas.

Unlike us, friends gaped. What had happened?

Forgiveness had happened.

Poetry had happened. Justice had happened.

Unconditional love had happened.

The earth had cooled, the fires quenched.

A pure, sweet wind blew out of the west,

the Gulf Stream headed north,

glaciers stopped calving,

and the people did unto others

as they would have done unto themselves.

We hung our jackets on the handlebars

and toasted each other,

repeating like a mantra

the specialist's treacle—

Healthy seventy-five-year-olds

have another twenty years, or so.

Happiness had happened.

Fiction had happened.

It's Come to This

 

Sunlit on the sill,

one among the hulls

of blue-enameled flies,

legs up in triple Xs,

jolts to life for a instant,

and is still.

What was it you were promised?

Panting at your side,

the yellow dog,

tongue dripping on your shoe,

seems to love you, maybe,

tail thumping the rag rug,

as the next one will.

You could almost say forever.

The Work of a Primitivist

The vase's pattern in shadow

is no less beautiful

for not being seen.

In the month of the slow turn,

pulled back to the sling of the sun,

downhill on the planet

with the wind in my mouth,

I've stopped worrying

if you read me or not

and just bend to the work—

Simplicity, purity, even poverty,

in the preservation of being,

while there's being left to preserve.

Lines of an End

From the public domain, altered.

Wing of a swan,

Depth of a cello,

Draw of the bow.

Things, things,

Memory and time,

The rest is description.

Show me the city, my daughter,

Touch my hand for a moment,

And go.

Happy To Be Here

Upper Turkeyfoot Township

 

In the slowest curve of our orbit,

after counting swallows on the wire

as night filled the valley,

we walked to the top of the field

to better see the thunderheads,

enormous, darkening, slowly expanding,

more art than weather,

held in place behind the hill corn

by a windless, muted sunset

that filled the sky we stood in

with the colors of a dove's breast,

our spirits lifting with the fireflies

that rose from nascent goldenrod

like ten thousand beacons—

we'll find our way, we are not lost—

as the heat of day radiated into heaven.

Our concerns lifted as the earth cooled,

and we stood still in the shadow

of our planet just long enough,

as mosquitoes sang in our ears,

to find the thinnest blade of a young moon

surprisingly high above us. We were not sure

what had changed, but we knew

we would be here tomorrow,

and we were pleased, grateful, and calm.

Unpresidented Times: A Digital Reading

Jordan Gale for the NYT

 

It was not clear

what aspects the letter may be related to

But bad judgement is not a crime

said through a spokesperson

bearing in mind violence as a love-fest

recording a song.

Make Your Own Logo Online

A paperwork fight is frivolous

payments to porn stars many hoped

would serve as freight.

Search For One-Minute Monologues

Last year the Department set up a special team

code-named Coconut what started as a handful

grew as devices were legally seized.

Don't Let Myasthenia Gravis Define You

Lawyers have asked

for an indefinite postponement

We are in unchartered territory

Let's Change Beauty. Discover More

A misleading shorthand for something bigger

and the work of journalists

officials declined comment.

Search For 10 Best Toilet Bowl Cleaners

Scheduling is getting more complex

the reality is the inverse of the narrative.

Sign Up for Extreme Weather

We can't keep dealing with this drama

change your email.

Search For Vitamins for Longevity

Please make a contribution

to show you will never surrender.

—An "erasure" of a breaking story in the digital version of the New York Times of Tuesday, July 18, 2023, with quotes from politicians italicized and interspersed advertisements in fuschia.

Bitten

I get up hoping it's Friday.

But it's not. It's Saturday.

Close enough.

All night up and down,

Ice in a sock

Behind my right ear,

Cooling the blackfly bites

I suffered hoeing

In a damaged climate,

Careful not to disturb

The woman still sleeping

On the other side of the bed,

But that's only damp pillows,

Not an unconscious wife.

Old force of habit, I guess.

Grandma always told me

Not to scratch it.

But it's always worse in the night.

I Want You To Tell Me

The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula

(NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI via CNN)

Night awakens us

to another life.

The sky kicks over

its bucket of stars.

Finitude, earth,

a river into trees.

After relations it is good

to stare at the moon.

Sad humans,

we start grasping

at something we can't see

and stay that way.

Me? I'm just

sitting quietly,

part of an immense,

mutilated universe,

The dented metals of the sea,

raptors lying in a long sky,

too many divorces,

too many blood panels.

Matter, anti-matter. There's

still a lot unaccounted for.

But your leaning into me

was a sleeping bird.

How extraordinary

that other people even exist.

It is forever we seek

in each other.

The moon

puts its beak in my eye.

I want you to tell me

I won't be alone.

—A cento of lines from two of Dean Young's (1955-2022) seminal collections,

Elegy on a Toy Piano, 2005, University of Pittsburgh Press,

 and Fall Higher, 2011, Copper Canyon Press.

Time

Cabin porch

 

Time to think about it,

watching the leaf shadows

shift and fade and darken

on the porch boards,

silence moving through the crowns.

Will I ever see you again?

Every sunset, every moonrise,

every screensave, every redial,

the smoke from Canada,

wildfire, wildfire,

Jupiter's bloodshot eye.

Did you see the satellite train?

It keeps me awake,

swifts chattering

in the old brick chimney

that rises through the bedroom

and into the attic

where the rain gets in.

We had what we wanted,

but we didn't know it then.

We thought there was more.

Sorry to MIss You

 

A friend stopped by

And left a note,

Signed it with a star.

The knocking of the pileates,

The hover of the kestrel.

A big red sun,

Doves play their flutes.

Moonlight chalks the field.

Reading Dean Young on The Fourth

 

What will be beyond me soon

I can see coming

Of, By, and For losing its way

Collar cheekbone shades

Green-shadowed on the page

By an estranged sun

Through a canopy of eaten leaves

In a second-growth state

No reason to think

I'll slow down and see it clearer

When I can no longer

Climb my own stairs

I'm finished.

Green Burial

A field left be

 

The woods reclaims the field,

trees marching out

into the open over fifty years,

first the locusts, enriching the soil,

then the cherries and the haws,

then the maples, then the oaks,

welcomed by daisies and yarrow,

by ironweed and Joe Pye,

by rabbits and voles and white-footed mice,

a country boy among them,

returning also to woodland

with a thousand other forms,

known and unknown,

teeming on the uncultivated hill

as night's curved shadow

swims across the earth.