Mt. Union

Come closer and listen

Watching the theaters of evening

With the lowering sun at our backs

We could rest on this hilltop

Growing smaller and farther away

Forever

Instant Coffee

Counter shadows

from a higher plane,

the sill, the field, the past,

unexpectedly,

the smell of morning coffee

with the children still asleep,

our modest aspirations

just beyond our reach,

yet it was we,

and it was home,

and it was family.

Intellect alone

is bloodless company.

The Weather at Eighty

Rain in the distance

drawing nearer

one ridge at a time

Another friend has died

we've seen enough of rain

pooling in the fields

Rain in the distance

drawing nearer

one friend at a time.

Click Bait

June sundown in Upper Turkeyfoot

Nothing

     for TikTok today,

Nothing

     for facebook or Reels,

No double-jointed shenanigans,

No faceplants, no ballbusters,

Just the red fox

     slipping into the weeds,

Just the long-legged turkey

     fleeing into the barn,

     scattering cats,

Just the big red sun

     dropping into the trees,

Just my own echo

     when I call in the dog,

Just me again

     with you on my mind.     

Gravity

Everything,

we've learned,

falls apart.

Forgive us then,

if near the end,

we fall in love.

Each Other

Hale-Bopp, 1997

 

You saw it too  

 the comet  

its double tail  

even in daylight  

We've never said so  

to each other  

but it's almost enough  

the could-have-been  

How We Do

Fox with a wing in its teeth

vanishes into the fescue.

There goes its white-tipped tail.

Moments later

it's like it never happened.

Ride on.

Unconditional Love

I pinned my laundry to the line

and stood in the storm-watch wind,

luffed and transported

into Grandma's backyard

under buffeting sheets

and Grandpa's workshirts,

blue arms waving,

"Carl" winking in an oval,

Grandma leaning out the kitchen window

in the smell of baked cherries,

waving me in with a smile,

the long arms of my workshirts

rising and falling in the wind.

Vista

Cash Valley and The Narrows, MD, as seen from PA

Stopped by the long view

and by the silence

when the wind drops

we are reminded

that the quality of life

depends on the value

we place in each minute

and that the sacred

lies in the ordinary.

Existing

Rolling back, 6/2/25

 

We were wary of the past

But now we are different

Beautiful moments

Can grow out of listlessness

Pausing at sunset

We felt the earth roll

Everything a little slower

All of us free to change

Artists

Here on the dirt

Under a trammeled sky

Suffering sanity in solitude

Working to leave

A record of raptures

Against the prospect

Of ultimate combustion

Souls like contrails

Scattering over what remains

The beauty of fire

Civilizing the ground.

The Omnipotence of Dreams

1.

Just you

Just me

As we sometimes imagine.

2.

The risk of exploring

One's private reality

Is that you might not

Find your way back.

Perfecto®

In the freedom

                    of the woods

An aging eccentric               

                    effaced by time

                    in black leather

Wears his Perfecto®

                    without explanation

                    for the night in it

Condensing his lines

                    without the necessity

                    of making sense

As if the dark language of love

                    were still in use

                    and native speakers

Took notice when even the owls

                    went silent.

—The Schott Perfecto® is an iconic American motorcycle jacket banned for a time in the fifties as a symbol of rebelliousness, still made today in the USA, and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as important to American fashion.

Dead Calm

Dead calm in the garden

after the night's wild storm,

poppies frayed in the darkness,

and the power out again.

I check my phone— still no reply.

I've taken friendship for granted.

Now all is blind silence.

—With three lines and a title by Carmen Boullosa,

translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee.

Heaven

I awake late

Warm and safe

You are here

Dissolution

And then it was over

powerfully

close lightning

shaking the ground

and we were changed

this strange empty freedom

the shiftings of the sky

the joy of surviving

the calm

of nowhere to be

content to wait

for a darkness to lean on.

Husbandman's Dream

 

You drifted in

through a broken window

and leaned against me,

changing my balance,

and I fell among hooves.

Burning Space and Time

In the long teeth of the woods

At the threshold of the last mystery,

I have made a tribe of myself

out of my true affections,

widely scattered on the hillside,

burning space and time.

In this separate wilderness of age,

where the old libidinous beasts

pretend to be tamed,

how shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

By birdsong and weather,

walking the old farm road

into the long teeth of the woods,

thinking of those who fell along the way,

clouds take me by the hand.

I'm passing through, my will intact,

every stem and stone precious,

not done yet with change,

and can scarcely wait

for tomorrow.

—a cento of lines from Stanley Kunitz's (1905-2006) Passing Through:

The Later Poems, New and Selected, W.W. Norton, 1995

Dandelions

Once we were golden

And kissed by bees.

What plans we had—

Maybe salad, maybe wine.

Those were the days.

Pray to the wind.

Just After

Listen,

the storm that stopped me

has passed,

listen,

the doves are calling,

calling,

a tower of cloud

stands in the south

unmoving above the valley

that brims with mist,

the air

sweetened by lightning

and the silence just after,

the field at my feet

bejeweled,

points of light

in the resting rain,

stopped

in a washed world,

i think of you,

ongoing,

things as they were

where no storm has passed—

here, things as they are,

washed and gleaming,

the doves calling,

listen,

in the distance,

the soft thunder

of one heart,

far off.

 

Canticle

 

Our lives

are as real

as yours

Sang the hylas

in the pond

As in the west

the day cooled

to ashes

—after Charles Simic's My Life is as Real as Yours

Woodsmoke

Sugar maples blooming in a reluctant spring

A curl of smoke

over the house

on the last cold night

of a hesitant spring,

an offering of sorts

in starlight,

the simplest things

iridescent with meaning

given exile enough.

Caught in the Rip at Eighty

Swan Beach, NC

No use

To fight

The current.

Try not

To panic

As lovers

Grow small

And faint.

Sense of Place

Heirloom European pear

All night

the idling engine of the wind

pushes against the house,

the seasons changing.

I wish I could hear more

in the dark,

my grandfather's cough,

my daughter's sigh,

the chatter of juncos

flying north.

Come morning,

wide shadows of the clouds

sweep across the field.

I open the windows,

put in the screens.

But nothing is finished.

Listen, it's modern times everywhere,

officials criss-crossing the sky,

hostages to power and wealth.

I'm glad I'm not important

and can walk around in the yard,

maybe sit with the dog

under the old pear tree,

hollow, but ready to bloom.

Maybe, come evening

we'll set up a chair

down by the road

and watch the deer

stepping out of the woods,

cautious and quiet in the hollow,

hungry and peaceful 

in the shadow of the earth.

—after Lorenzo Thomas' Displacement

Without Condition

So deep

Into the dimensions of April

They are never coming back,

Those few

Who loved you most.

Snow on the violets.

Inland Gale

The anodized air

the torment of the hemlocks

the torrent of the horizontal rain

breaking like surf off the corrugated roof

beating the ground to stones at the drip line

only the dirt road bending away

gleams as if nothing's the matter

the more I reflect on things

the more I am sure of nothing

The Sun Itself

click to enlarge

My shadow long

among the longer shadows

of the maples and the oaks,

we know each other well,

good company for fifty years

on this mountain slope,

the great budding crowns

softly breathing,

sunlight lifting from the valley.

You should be here.

The sun itself,

low among the trunks,

an urchin of refraction,

its fiery spines

radiating through the mist,

silent and descending.

On such an evening 

I dare to imagine

two minds, one sun,

nuclear fusion.

You should be here.

Apothegm

After April rain

Take it from one

Who does not

Whatever else

You have lost

If you have each other

You have it all.

The Same

\

We've known for a long time

in something close to silence

in something close to wisdom

Aloft

something we've learned not to say

guardians of solitude

protectors of each other

in the charm of magnetic fields

respectful in our ways.

The mind holds many truths

we've learned not to name

in something close to wisdom

in something close to silence

in something close to tragedy

we feel the same.

—photo edited from the public domain

A Child's Poem

My father has died.

I sleep through the night

with the sheet over my head.

I am not afraid,

I just learned to sleep that way.

In my nightmare

my father is still alive.

 —after Nassar Rabah's "The War Is Over" translated from the Arabic by Wiam El Tamami

Chasing the Rabbit

I'm here to stay

on this mountain slope,

white again when I awoke, but nothing lasts,

the furnace in the cellar chanting like a monk,

Pandora on the nightstand

playing Dolphin Dreams,

the sea a long way off.

I'm here to stay,

the hood of night

lifts over me,

the shadow of the earth

rises at my back,

the world goes dark,

goes blue on black.

I'm here to stay

in the blue on black,

what joyful lives I've lived

with those who've come and gone,

how many storms, how many rains,

the barn, the shed are falling in,

I'm here to stay with what remains.

The dog is finished with her run

and joins me in the wreckage of the field

to watch the clouds expand.

My run, too, is at an end, or just about.

We chased the rabbit and came back.

We're here to stay

in the blue on black.

Up?

I never tire

of looking at the sky

with doubtful

expectation.

Becoming Music

 

What tragic shapes

We have become

In the wreckage

Of the rural dark

What harmonies of grief

Moments of Heaven

 

Black coffee in a tin cup

on a board porch in the March woods

with crows announcing the end of winter,

I'm thinking heaven can exist on the earth

a few moments at a time, rocking

in my great grandmother's mission rocker

included free with a new cook stove

she bought for the family farm,

my great grandfather off in the oil fields

drilling another dry hole, dreaming of wealth,

not yet defeated, maybe still thinking,

as Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1842,

Heaven is to come, because this can't be it.

But it can, it can be, it can be black coffee

in a tin cup on a board porch

for a few minutes in March.

No such luck. Tidioute, PA, c. 1860s

(from a family album)

I Have A Strained Relationship

I have a strained relationship

With sleep

Sometimes in dreams

I sense your touch

But always

When I wake

You're never here

March of the Insomniacs

 

Here comes the day again,

creeping out of the west woods,

creeping yellow across fallow fields,

devouring the shallow snow as it comes,

scaring off the night

that hides in the old farmhouse

as a chill in the cellar stones,

that hides in the mind of the sleepless

as a reckoning

with the failures of a life

marching mute

through the goldenrod bones.

Then

 

I wish I'd known your name

To call for help in the night

And heard your soft footsteps

Coming and going in the dark

What Remains

Central Park carousel, NYC

When the worst happens,

silence arrives.

We sat in the park

in our out-of-town coats,

her brother, her mother, and me,

without, without a word.

It was spring in New York,

cold, cold and bright,

the gears of the carousel

still wrapped for winter,

the painted wooden horses

motionless on their poles,

frozen in mid-gallop.

Silence, silence was the whole story.

—first lines by Jane Hirschfield

Keep On Keeping On

(Solo Practice University photo)

Prow

into the wind

little boat

no land in sight

—After Simic. Title from Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue

Code

Now that there is no light,

Take a good look around.

We've been arranged in rows,

All zeros and ones,

Frozen in a moment 

That shall remain fixed,

Opaque,

And yet to be named.

Some call it reform,

Some call it revenge,

Some call it sabotage.

A Reckoning

Bigstock

Ovewhelmed by flu

The earth was pulling me in

God was gravity

 

Getting Through

Daybreak, late February

 

A cold rain coming

In a season of decline

Slush in your shoes

Seascape

4WD country, Swan Beach, Outer Banks, NC

           

I loved you,

and you loved him,

and he loved her,

and on and on it goes,

pelagic, ever soon.

And so I leaned upon the wind

and looked for reciprocity

and saw it on the rising swells,

the golden apples of the sun,

the silver apples of the moon.

—last two lines from Yeats

Archaic Morning

After a long night

I heard outside my window

The planets singing

 

Meteors

Arm-in-arm we walked

Flaring on the frozen field

Great for a moment

—after On The Frozen Field by Galway Kinnell

Thousand

A thousand meanings

In the scripture of landscape

The dog leads the way

Winter Hill

On the snow-chalked hill

In the dusk we heard the train

The valley's refrain

 

The Older Poets

(Marzia Bertelli photo)

The older poets

move me the most

nearing the end of their days

in a different kind of weather

closer to the basics of living

the flight of the crow

the warmth of the sun

the touch of the beloved

accepting long silences

the errors and estrangements

each to each to each

accepting the losses

at peace with regret

they have much to teach.

After Clarity

Depth,

then give me the depth

of the stark winter woods,

and give me the depth of the day,

and then in ourselves,

in the you and the me,

give us the depth of the sea.