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.