Before Sunrise at Year's End

Unable to sleep

I step outside

in the grounded dark,

the sky and me

in our tragic robes.

Nothing moves

except the clouds,

no sound except

the dripping from the roof.

My premonition

that something fine awaits me

just further up the road,

where did it go?

And can this quiet teach me

what I need to know?

 

—with a premonition from Charles Simic

Old Barns

 

The old Lephart barn,

By rains and by winds

Beaten beautiful

Over three lifetimes,

Lovely in abandonment.

We hope for as much

From one.

Walking Laurel Ridge

Walking Laurel Ridge

already late enough so soon

the twilight cold and quiet

the path to the cabin

strewn with branches and briars

as deeper you stride

into this delicate balance

leaving behind what you must

the voices receding

as you wait for weak stars

little by little

to burn through thin clouds.

—after Mary Oliver's The Journey

A Further Shore

In halcyon days.

 "Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here"

—Seamus Heaney

* * *

In the dead of winter I dream

of the deserted off-season beach

in the palmy decades before the pandemic

when we felt immortal and believed

in a love that allowed us

our separate solitudes,

when we believed in a future

that was endless, and ours,

when we believed

in miracles.

Common Epiphany

At the cabin.

Scribbling by candlelight late in life,

hoping for one true line

as night, blue and deep,

floods the empty woods

and the trees gather 'round—

Awaiting a sign

that loss is not the great lesson at last,

when the dog appears on the porch boards,

happy to see me,

fogging the storm door glass—

I follow her home.

This Time in Madison

 

The police are working

to establish a motive.

Shadows lengthen in the field.

Darkness comes early these days,

making it harder to recognize faces.

I wish I had known your name sooner.

—after the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School, 12/15/24, with a line by Charles Simic.

Conjurers

From the public domain

In a world where the ochre moon,

before it hid behind the barn,

entered the kitchen through the window

and lay quivering in Roxy's water bowl,

Why why in such a world

would you find our joy unlikely

and difficult to conjure?

Era

          

Looking back on the house

In the twilight of the year

I see the children still.

So long as I stay

It never ended.

December Thaw

After rain

dissolved the snow

the moon rose through bare trees

but the first and final poem

was the sun.

No One Else

It was evening.

He kept quiet.

The moon rose so bright

He could see the path

Under the trees.

The Bluriness of the Pleiades

 

So much love seemed a bad omen.

We were quiet in the mountains,

each feeling we'd betrayed the other

from the start. We understood

we were hurtling into space

at eighteen miles a second, clouds

of atoms charged and polarized,

each alone in the abyss,

sad for each other, wanting

nothing more than twilight.

You wore your summer dress.

We signed our names with all our strength

and went home in two directions.

No way to mourn except

hold on for one more breath.

For a long time I sat in darkness.

Moonlight touched your chair.

          —A cento composed of lines from D. Nurkse's A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, Knopf, 2022.

Second Sleep

The plow's been past

I heard it in the dark before first light

then I went back to sleep

being free of obligations and appointments,

being old enough, up late enough, alone enough

to slip back into a dream

and hope it's not the one

of deadline missed, or public shame, or breathless flight.

So I got up and fixed the fire

then back to the warmth of my own existence

opening the gate

for the dream of caring.

Sleeping late shortens the day

I know but I don't mind.

Sometimes when night falls

it contains you.