Old Best Friends

 

Dear longstanding friends

Late summer's wilting flowers

Lovelier with age

Dry Spell

Parched maples and oaks

Whispering to each other

False rumors of rain.

Others Know this Landscape

Cash Valley, MD

 

Surely there are those

Who only watch, and watching,

Wander off in mist.

Abandoned

What is it about

Desertion and emptiness

That echoes in us?

Life as a Summer Day

Peaceful near the end

No more pounding engines past

No more yellow dust

Late Summer

 

from the public domain

  Under a starched sky

  Memories and hover flies

  Kiss me in the sun

Under the Runaway Sun

Leaves on the porch boards

The old-fashioned universe

Ever expanding

On the Ridges after Rain

Mood Indigo, Laurel Mountains

So, there you are in your life,

and here am I in mine,

mist lifting from the valley,

ridge from ridge obscured.

Mood indigo.

What saved us from each other,

our flaws too well-aligned,

you in the middle verses,

me in the final phrase?

Mood indigo.

—with a nod to Duke Ellington

Afield in the Dark

 

The night sky

My singular reality

Fireflies extinguished

A mosquito at my ear

A broadcast of stars

Sometimes you visit me there

In my secret life in the sky

A late summer dirge

Accompanied faintly

By crickets far below

Arrhythmic

wilhei / Pixabay

Even if the survivors

dismantle this lightning,

I can no longer tell

if I am alive,

absence my darkness,

leaped and drawn,

indestructible.

—an erasure of the 450-word poem Lichen by Jacques Dupin, as translated from the French by Harry Matthews.

Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Tortured soul,

Desperate for meaning,

Beauty where we find it

Has to be reason enough

 T

At the Confluence of Wonder and Sadness

Kelly, 1975

  Hooded woodland child

  present and absent

  clutching daisies

  at my center

  hovering

  even after.