But the same moon,
Herb Moon, Pink Moon,
Egg Moon, Fish Moon,
Moon of the Growing Grass,
Moon of the Distant Child,
Moon of the Scan and the Solid Mass,
Moon of the Card and the Insufficient Funds,
Moon of the Haunted Dream,
Moon of the Died-Young,
Moon of Faint Hope,
Moon of Love Lost,
Your moon, my moon,
Not the same roof,
But the same moon.
The shadow of a crow Backlit by sunset
Passed across my face Overlooking the valley
Like a cold wind Where time
Through bare trees Poured in the dark
Etched on the ridge Toward the sea
in April sunlight
as if looking and thinking
were our real work
newly emergent.
 |
| Clouds hid the sun |
I stayed home
Hot spice in a mug
Feet on the well
A little off center
True to the rest of my life
Looking up
Bullfrogs welcomed the evening
Doves mourned the dusk
Clouds hid the sun
While on the big road
Heading back from totality
A slow moving river
Of steel and exhaust
Not that the day
Wasn't amazing
As usual
 |
Yet how empty it feels
In the shadow of a solitary moon
Content in the penumbra
Tumbling through the void
With nothing to hold on to
—NYT photo illustration by Bularama Heller
this tarnished, rainy day,
silver in the pond's small leaps,
road paved silver winding up the hill,
drops of silver tapping on the attic boards
above his head where the chimney flashing bleeds,
silver Celtic lullaby* of loss sung beside the bed
as he awakens to the tapping rain
with dampened expectations,
we'll call them tarnished dreams,
but silver still.
I'm sitting in the middle of the field,
dunned and flattened by winter just past,
in a rotting wicker chair with my head thrown back,
watching clouds and listening to crows,
feeling less alone in our cosmic aloneness
for the company of the afternoon — I needed this.
This morning I took my diamond to the pawn shop.
As the jeweler squinted on his eyepiece
I lifted the lid, and it knocked me back,
the flash in the stone, and I remembered
starlight in the cut, starlight in her eyes —
nothing settled, nothing forgotten, nothing gained.
Damn necessity, for showing me
I had failed to change, leaning on the heavy
beveled glass with all those future
promises illuminated under my elbows,
and woe for the silence of what's dead,
not silent in my head, not silent in my head.
you and me now
Apart from all the others
Who think this is wrong
think I was right
When I say
that I
am not in love.
So go ahead
brush your hair
tangled
In sunlight
that
Filters through the screen
Sears the skin
head thrown back.
Who was the one
exposed?
You, or
me?
It's madness,
and we are
addicted to it.
—Raw, from a time capsule
 |
| First day of spring, 2024 |
on this cold, explosive day
to know what world I inhabit.
Crows cavort on gusts,
and the sounds of their calls
soak into my spirit.
I left the house to escape the present,
but I've found it, instead, on this hill.
The world I inhabit is sky.
Feral daffodils bloom
and now between the trees
a temple appears.
—adaption of an 18th C. haiku by Buson
 |
| Drifting in sunlight, Please enlarge with a click. |
We drifted awhile
on the surface tension,
tapped into the essence
as the earth warmed
and our minds unfurled.
We had what we wanted awhile,
then lost it without knowing,
the way sunlight rises on the wall
as the room fills with shadow.
—after Saadi Youssef's Exhaustion as translated
from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
 |
| Eightieth Spring |
We'll leave the lights down low,
For also am I old.
Yet, are our minds not beautiful,
As love can be,
In our closing seasons?
What years we spent
Discovering gratitude,
Kindness and grace,
Let them not be wasted.
See the child in me,
As I see the child in you.
 |
| NYT photo |
Out of order, arrhythmic,
the center unspooling,
we stood on the sidewalk
with little to say,
the woman I married
no longer my wife,
twenty years signed away,
unable to awaken,
unmoored and numb,
and never the same,
our children, our children...
How much can a man leave behind?
 |
| A cold wind came between us. |
Around a wind-whipped fire we passed the bottle,
antelope leaping in the theaters of sunset.
A wedge of geese dropped out of a cloud
like the thin edge of winter over the plains,
and a cold wind came between us.
Snow fell through the steam of geysers,
flakes floating on her honey-colored hair —
this was the snow that would smother
the Yellowstone flames
as she lay in her bed with her children,
and I lay in mine alone, far from home,
reaching out for her hand in the West's tall dark.
How much can a man leave behind?
These days I awake in the tree-scattered light
of a spent life, the house empty and quiet,
rising from calm to fear and back again.
All you I have loved are alive in the dawn,
I remember it all, sometimes as a nightmare,
sometimes as a song. You'd think by now
I'd have the notes down.
And gone.
The stars are weak
Behind thin clouds
And far apart.
All those I've loved
None of us
Are coming back.
Big red sun.
One sustained note
From sunrise to sunset
Then another
In a minor key
With owls
 |
| Snow Moon rises over Upper Turkeyfoot |
 |
| Never a discouraging word |
Chickadees appeared
as I filled the feeder,
mittened and scarfed,
a difficult line in my head
trying to work itself out,
syntax and meter and sense,
stinging with criticism
that had shaken my confidence
until I was greeted
by my black-capped friends,
and we puffed ourselves up
against the cold wind.
When morning strengthens
behind the wooded hill
turning sideways to move
through dormant trees
above the sagging stable roof,
I stand and watch
and think I can shake free
of tenses, past and present
future perfect, accepting time
as one existence
with still the chance
to set things right.
 |
| Cabin porch |
Emily wrote,
But tell it slant.
Therefore,
Open wounds
Over decades
Bled ego.
I grew pale.
 |
To honesty
and a day's
hard work,
To love
and a life's
disappointment,
To faith
and a skeptic's
salvation.
sunset in an upstairs window,
the passion of things: finches, hemlocks,
white-footed mice in the attic,
spotted newts in the cellar,
the place on the horizon
where Sugar Loaf meets the light,
the moon crossing the sky,
waxing and waning, out of and into
the woods that surround us,
the stars above our heads.
We never understood the life
we've lived, and not the one now,
stopped still in the evening
of our private world,
rolling back
into the mystery to come.
—a cento of adapted lines from Linda Gregg's "All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems"
First hours of light, soundest sleep.
Too many dead in the dark.
Don your sequined jacket
And follow me, Dazzler.
You backed over my sunglasses.
I watched your taillights
Go over the hill.
Suddenly in the dark
One more step
At the bottom of the stairs.
but it does,
Graupel bouncing off my thrift shop sleeve.
The yard is sopping, the field flatttened,
Melt runs in the ditch,
tendrils of yellow mud
Unfurling beside the road of broken stones.
I'm supposed to have half my woodpile still,
but I don't.
You're not supposed to hear
Your daughter's final breath,
but I did.
The dog leads the way into the woods,
A raven croaks, lifts off heavy
And black as forever
into the curdling sky.
Time is supposed to ease loss,
but it doesn't.
 |
| Mid-winter in Upper Turkeyfoot |
—Siri Hustvedt
1.
A live-in love.
Nothing physical.
A suitable arrangement.
I made that up. I live alone.
No one in my bed but me,
And you, once upon a time.
You can say I made that up, too.
Could be, poetic license being what it is,
Tie-dyeing my oeuvre,
Three decades of songs,
Each with its image,Mostly hills, mostly trees, mostly skies,
And you. My way of seeing,
Largely unseen,
Cherishing memory.
Let someone else be judge,
Long after. Then let it be said,He never forgot, and tenderly.
2.
In the mind there is no chronology,
Impressions of a life, not as a stream,
but compartments disordered,
existence a pastiche, a jumbled
amalgam of blended sensations,
the vivid colors of movement and act
faded to weak pastels,
profered piecemeal
as art.
 |
| Club Cafe in Pittsburgh's trendy South Side (from the public domain) |
After the reading
she bit into my lip
and vanished into the night
I drove around lost
in her paved-over hills
trying to find my way back
Where the road ends
I kissed the stone
and carry the scar in my mouth
Thirty years on
the wine we poured into the snow
leaving the woods together
reaches the Gulf.
—an adaption of James Richardson/s "The Touch"
Alvarez has many pictures
of his daughter
dark eyes wide
with love and heartache
the only thing he paints
behind the river and the wall
self portraits.
 |
| Back from the city. Please click to expand. |
Adjustments
from the city
Lists and cancellations
what goes
what stays
in an empty house
music in my pocket
fluid notes sustained
strings and slow pianos
that eased me through the night
carried now in insulated jeans
where my wallet used to ride
in the days of requisition
Preparations
since returning
from the city
The need to simplify
more flashlights fewer rugs
three quilts on the bed
readers in each room
the heating pad
careful on the stairs
a bright chrome rail
anchored to the shower wall
a blanket on the chair
before the fire
a friend at the door
Music in my pocket
since returning
from the city.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Reading the ghosts in the image
is the other side of the hill
the toll of living made visible
where the wind pushes against you
even the brave hold their breath
honing the drifts into edges
waiting to hear
against the bare trees
the buzz of the phone is a blade.
 |
yet how it comforts me,
there on the mantle,
as it was in Will Hall's sitting room
in the village of Neshannock Falls,
four generations mostly quiet, firelight
lambent on the faces and the hands
I remember well, the lamps turned down
to save on oil, the youngest of us
silent and attentive
as the oldest told their stories.
Outside in the cold dark,
the rush of the creek
braided up the night —
when I listen, I can hear it,
and I feel once more
the warmth of family at the hearth,
the youngest of us oldest now,
together ever still.
