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.

The Hill Itself

One calm August evening

on a warm country road

you find again what you need,

the sun going down between barns,

the necessary silence,

fields and farms and sky in balance,

no need to look elsewhere,

the marvelous

lies just behind the hill

and in the hill itself.

Love Is an Agent of Chaos

from the public domain

You fell for good reason,

Always for the first time.

Day is darkness

Compared to the lightning-filled night.

Next time, fall higher.

—title from a line by André Breton