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.