Life on Earth

Big red sun

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.

Sunsong, Moonsong

One sustained note

From sunrise to sunset

Then another

In a minor key

With owls

Snow Moon rises over Upper Turkeyfoot

Winter Birds

 

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.

Future Perfect

 

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.

The Zen of a February Field

What is there to learn,

what is there to discover

in the chilled depths of solitude at dusk,

afield in the creamy, melting snow

with the wind on your face

under the rush of wings,

a low wedge of geese passing over

with sunset on their breasts,

at the seam of the earth and the sky,

at the seam of the day and the night,

at the seam of the past and the future,

on the thin, thin edge of the present,

what is there to learn?

Something. Anything. Everything.

Fade

Cabin porch

Tell it true,

Emily wrote,

But tell it slant.

Therefore,

Open wounds

Over decades

Bled ego.

I grew pale.

Chanson du Matin

To honesty

and a day's

hard work,

To love

and a life's

disappointment,

To faith

and a skeptic's

salvation.

 

Private World

Going, and being there, and coming back,

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"

Late Risers

First hours of light, soundest sleep.

Too many dead in the dark.

Don your sequined jacket

And follow me, Dazzler.

Ending in the Lot of the Out of the Fire Cafe

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.

Act III

 

Where is my friend

As mists fill the hollows?

Has he yet to wonder

Where is my friend?

Alive on Earth

Haunted by night

Sunburned by daylight

Willing to suffer the cost

Winter by Half

It's not supposed to snow today

                    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.