The Coming Winter of Our Relative Content

Woolly Bear

Wiseworm of the snows

Forecasts a warm November.

Celebrate the light.

We Heard an Owl

Unsteady afoot

In fall's woodland mosaic,

Disoriented.

It's not that we're lost,

Just quiet, nothing to say.

The owl spoke for us.

Equinox

I have travelled far,

Isolated in a field,

Goldenrod, and time.

 

Silent Majority

We were about to

Say something like a windrush,

And then we didn't.

Trying not to be

Afraid explains everything.

Call out to someone.

—a cento with lines from the collected poems (1975-1997) of James Galvin

Drought Abstract

In greener times

 

  

  This hot summer Rain

  Is the tallest girl I know

  And I miss her laugh

Aged Summer

 

The field wants for rain

In an absence of Monarchs

A presence of pain

Ten-Farm Loop

click to enlarge

Flyways and biway,

The few vehicles that pass

Hold waving neighbors.

Heaven a Thinner Sea

 

Ocean overhead,

Fiery urchin in the sky,

Breathers underair.

Plain Spoken

click to enlarge

        

Red barns, white houses,

Country people holding on,

Quiet and prayerful.

Crickets Sing

 Deep in goldenrod

Where we once spread a blanket

And entered the sky.

We will remember when Lethe is frozen that life to us was worth ten heavens.

—Osip Mandlestam, 1918

Anniversary

They watch from the porch

Flyways golden above them

Her hand on his arm