Everafter

jo'b   

               

Light gains the value of rareness               

Seen through a darker lens               

Where I am now               

What I had then               
         

Love Story

From the public domain   

                    I came for you,

                    all leather and chrome and rumble,

                    and stole you away,

                    twisting the handle for speed,

                    your arms around me, hugging my back,

                    leaning together into the curves,

                    wild with the wind in our mouths,

                    powering over the hills and into the sky,

                    mad to be wreckage forever.

—with lines by James Dickey

To One Who Also Waits

JO'B   

                    Pause in your flight,

                    Turn yourself into the wind,

                    Damselfly on a metronone,

                    Daybreak, nightfall, daybreak, nightfall,

                    Lover of the night,

                    Mark time in the light of the sun,

                    Eyes closed in the rattle of wings,

                    Take flight in the dark,

                    With lanterns strung over the fields,

                    Pulsing,

                    You are not alone.

 

Early and Late

JO'B. 

Doves call in the half-light.               

                    It's not a poem,               

                    the poet said,               

                    Without an ache in it.               

          Nor is it a life.               

Looking Across the Valley

Laurel Hill Creek Valley

 

For a long time i stood in light rain looking across the valley,

listening to the sound of the creek deep in the valley

rushing over stones smoothed by the creek

rushing through the valley for a long time.

The creek flowed on without returning,

this was the one creek of night and day,

and i was unable to resist

looking across the valley for a long time.

Evening folded into itself and night rose behind me,

spreading its cloak over the valley

where for a long time the creek rushed over smooth stones

and even a long time was not long enough.

— after and with lines by W.S.Merwin

Red

Peony  

 

I looked too long

And lost my balance

Of course it was spring

Deep into the peony I fell

And never made it back

My beautiful ruin

To Drink from the Spring

Early 19th Century water source.  (JO'B)

                            To drink from the spring they drank from          

                                           when their walls were logs          

                            to clear the field          

                                           and plow to the edge of the forest          

                            to die in winter          

                            with the snow          

blowing through the broken window          

                           To write in a pure language          

of stone and ash and silt          

                                           to read in candlelight          

                                           to lie down in asters          

                                           to drink shadows          

—with lines after Tomaz Salaman.    

Dark Iris

JO'B    

                          Dark iris of the could-have-been,

                          a love we can't decode

                          and never dared to touch,

                          disturb the rain,

                          upset the order of its cells, 

                          disrupt the spinning universe,

                          never to recover —

                          so much we'll never know,

                          

                          but we pretend.

 

Notes to Self on a Cold Day in May

JO'B. 

Slower, deeper, each breath,

yours and the earth's.

Who do you think you are?

Don't love your life too much,

Mary Oliver wrote,

and vanished into the world.

Aural

JO'B

 

  

   Under the green canopy

   of my 82nd spring,

   Each morning

   more silent

   than the last,

   One dream

   flows into

   the next,

   And then no one,

   and then Tao.

Timelapse

JO'B  

                                                   A certain elegance

                                                   still standing,

                                                   stoic with purpose

                                                   and faith in one's self,

                                                   waiting for the miracle to come

                                                   as the trees overtake us,     

                                                   our graceful surrender,     

                                                   our gorgeous collapse

                                                   enriching the ground     

                                                   where we fall.   

Moonlight Wanderer

JO'B

 

         

I wasn't lonely              

Until you spoke my name              

And now I wonder              

Love in a Time of Covid

JOB

Did you get what you wanted at last,

Convinced all that was fiction at best,

Madness perhaps, a selective contagion,

Virulent to the maimed and the quick?

Blessed be the bi-polar,

Their heaven is upon us.

Do you pretend

You are not molten at the core?

Arc

JO'B. 

                                                       Late in a ride,

                                                       Late in a day,

                                                       Late in a life,

                                                       A deepening sense

                                                       Of gratitude.

"Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about

to begin, only to realize it's almost over." -- Oliver Sacks

Given the Chance

JO'B  

Stop pushing through

A field of dandelions

Releasing in the wind,

Bow down, and watch

Achenes take flight.

All is not lost just yet.

The earth will heal herself

If the young take up the fight.

 

JO'B  

 

On the Anniversary of My Daughter's Death

Blue cohosh                           (JO'B)

  
                    

                    In the slow, slow unwinding

                    of the year's slowest month,

                    alone in the dripping woods

                    with the blue cohosh rising,

                    how do I sing you

                    the phrases of the moon?

                    Does tomorrow exist

                    as the rain down the glass?

                    Can the fire in the grate

                    absolve us of the future?

                    I listen for hours trying to learn

                    the language of water and flame.

                    Cast beyond the verge,

                    it's all we can do to cry out

                    to one another in the dark,

                    like bats hunting moths

                    in windowlight after a storm,

                    the universe hung in the trees.

 —first published April 28. 2015

Acceptance

JO'B.   

          Let's sit awhile

          and watch the storm come

          Giving in 

          to the influence of wind and rain

          With faith

          in the natural course of things

          even as it overtakes us.

We Cannot Keep

JO'B  

                                                  We lose what we love.

                                                  Peace, then,

                                                  To the broken-hearted,

                                                  Forgiveness, then,

                                                  To the undeserving.

                                                  Listen to the wind,

                                                  Stand in the rain,

                                                  And to us all

                                                  An easy drift

                                                  Beyond the end of change.

 

Finitude 6.85

JO'B   

                                                       Averages

                                                       dropped him

                                                       into a chasm

                                                       of expectancy

Thoreau's April

Houstonia  (JO'B)

Many guns are firing

and bells are ringing

The sun

takes a higher course

Many turtles

have their heads out

Pure and simple bluets

spot the world

—from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, April 24, 1853 

Dawn Among Bones

 

               From peach to tangerine fading

               to daylight sky behind the bones

               of mountain ashes once the hope

               of one who watched his children

               grow and go beyond these fields

               now testament to blight and infestation

               bones returning to the ground

               in the place they lived and never left—

               his own. 

               Birdsong less and less.

Waiting Out the Storm

Waiting out the storm.  (JO'B)

                    Waiting out the storm in the open doorway

                    of a neighbor's barn, gusts of shattering rain

                    tell me I have the right to be silent,

                    But I want you to know

                    I remember everything

                    when everything changed,

                    And I will go again when the strong, sweet sun

                    pushes into the time I ride through

                    in this always vanishing world.

Come Closer and Listen

JO'B

I wish I had known                             

to call for help                             

in the dark                             

I wish I had known                             

you would come                             

—repurposing a line by Charles Simic

And Yet Tomorrow

JO'B

                 Under the layers of evening

                 I hear the creek in the valley

                 And the river in me

                 Sorrow sings the sweetest strain

                 And yet the south wind blows

                 And yet tomorrow

                 The sun may warm my back

                 I'll wait

                  

Three Oh Five

JO'B

                      Come closer

                      my friends of the dark

                      the notepad the pen

                      the small circle of light

                      the second hand's slow sweep

                      the book on its stand

                      a sentence or two strong enough

                      to repeat in a whisper

                      as if you could hear it

                      my face faint on the pane

                      against the fathomless night

—after Charles Simic's "Nothing Else"

The Next Front

JO'B

              Weathered enough to know

                        We've missed each other

                                  This time through, yet

                                             How pretty to think

                                                      One of us will go on ahead

                                              And wait.

Just After

JO'B

"I do not know which to prefer," Wallace Stevens wrote. 

"The beauty of inflections. Or the beauty of innuendos.

The blackbird whistling. Or just after." 

———

An easy rain has ended

The wind lies down upon the pond and sleeps

Embers of sunset reflecting there

The questionnaire had asked

Are you ever lonely?

Chorus frogs begin to sing

When I am very still

Pure clear ringing notes

A floating world

Monochrome

JO'B

Blackbirds singing          

As color drains from the west          

I had promised myself          

More solitude          

A Bridge for Kelly

Rooftop on Delancey Street n Lower Manhattan, 2005.  (JO'B)

On a rooftop

At the center of her world

In a city of exceptions,

Above the rough edge of Chinatown,

A wordless poem of the heart,

The falling man of the HVAC,

 A depth of bridge to Williamsburg,

Became her woods and valleys in the light,

Became her constellations in the night,

She found her peers,

Artists and writers and musicians,

Gentle, complex thinkers,

Laughers, quick to care,

And they found her,

Far too near the end

Of the last American Renaissance.

Delancey Street, New York City, 2005.  (JO'B)

Equinoctial

Returning

To the close-at-hand

We find

An ordered universe

And we drift

In that balance            

American Fire

From the public domain

Screams of the mothers             

echo through these hills             

not so far away             

from the women searching             

through the rubble of a school             

for their murdered daughters             

finding them             

not so far away             

from this field full of robins             

in this naked scenery of March            

suddenly drying in a pitiless wind             

soon to burn             

lovesick for awhile if we're lucky             

soon to burn             

—After a Tomahawk missile struck Shajaareh Tayyabeh Primary School 

in Minab, Iran, at the beginning of "Trump's War" on February 28, 2026

Waiting Out the Storm

JO'B

A cold rain blows in              

Chilled in an abandoned barn              

Sheltering with ghosts              

The Longevity of the Local

JO'B

 

Still standing

in evening shadows

Night pours in

through broken windows

Built to last

on the ground we grew on

Memory's Hill

JO'B

                    The trees are streaked with rain,

                    Ribbons of sky ripple in the ditches,

                    I move through the visible world

                    No longer expecting someone present,

                    The people I have loved

                    Lined up over memory's hill

                    Stretching back into the mist,

                    And it's enough to know

                    Most of them loved me back,

                    Once upon a time.

Hindsight

JO'B

 

The subtle tones               

intrigue me most,               

would that I had been so.               

Nightwalker

keep on                           

my soul                           

no other light                           

 

A Life in the Mountains

from the public domain

A diffusion of rain.          

I walk the woods without shadows.          

The war goes on.          

I live among deer.          

I wondered if sparrows no longer twittered.          

Then I realized I was going deaf.          

I wrote a poem of three lines.          

That was all I had to say.          

I must finish the chicken coop.          

They're knocking plates off the table.          

The body grows weaker.          

But gazing at the mountains stays the same.          

Thirty years since I've seen you.          

And I still see your tail lights going over the hill.          

The mind moves as slowly as a cloud.          

But a cloud moves on.          

                              —adapted from The Life of Tu Fu (712-770,AD), gleaned from his poems and translated by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 2024.