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| 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?
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| 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
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| JO'B |
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| JO'B |
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| 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
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| 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.
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| JO'B |
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.
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| Houstonia (JO'B) |
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.
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| Waiting out the storm. (JO'B) |
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.
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| JO'B |
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
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| JO'B |
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"
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| JO'B |
We've missed each other
This time through, yet
How pretty to think
One of us will go on ahead
And wait.
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| JO'B |
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
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| Rooftop on Delancey Street n Lower Manhattan, 2005. (JO'B) |
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| From the public domain |
