Wretched Excess

From the public domain

Too many hammers hung in the workshop

Too many nails rust in their bins

Too many beetles tunneling under 

Too many rabbits chewing the weeds

Too many scans shoulder to knees

Too many doctors fleeing the state

Too many pills hawked on the telly

What's with the dancing too many smiles

Too many rooms too many lawyers

Too many women go when I'm gone

Too many dogs where apples fall

Too many stones too many graves

Too many daughters under the dogwood

One is too many from city to hill

Too many faces locked in the iCloud

Too many minds tangled in blue

Too many lies too many believers

Too many markets too many thieves

Too many missiles too many drones

Too many poems no one will read

Too many satellites poxing the sky

Too many humans only one home

Everthing's plastic

Too little time.

Under the Leaf Moon

Not the same roof,

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.

Again But Otherwise

 

The sun has returned,

And everything's again,

And nothing is the same.

Communal Spring

Men launch drones

To kill each other.

Bees fly pollen

To their queens.

Soothsayer

            

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

Creatures

Eastern garter well-met

at the pond's edge

on equal terms

in April sunlight

as if looking and thinking

were our real work

newly emergent.

After the Eclipse

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

Eclipser

Billions of people cover the earth

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

Untitled

Rain

on pools of rain

perfect circles

intersecting

souls

expanding

music

with little sound

cellos violins

of the mind

yearning

made visible

geometric

change a line

and it is your life.

A Lullaby as His Eightieth Year Begins

Silver, we'll call it silver,

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.

*—Bánchaic Éireann Ó