As Long As You Can

A day disconnected would help you,

away from the screen and the cell,

feet in the thaw under sky,

no human voice in the wind,

no engine but your own heart

beating where it lies,

thoughts as high as the hawk

that you watch as long as you can.




-

Foreknowledge

Sugar snow in blasts

streaking the black palisades

at the field's edge,

trees knocking their crowns

together clatter and sway,

dogs on the porch boards

circle and wait,

the dark settles in

intending to stay.

-

Meander

Yeats wore a ring

with a hawk and a butterfly

lest he forget

the difference between

the straight flight

of logic and the crooked

flight of intuition,

"For wisdom is a butterfly

and not a gloomy

bird of prey."

– from "Meditations in a Time of Civil War," 1928.

Channel

Walking the treeline,

air and sun equally sharp,

surrounded by patterns

in the pattern of life,

surrounded by weather

in the storms of existence,

moved by the elements,

directed by wind

and by intuition,

walking with the grain.

-

From the Japanese

I may live on until

I long for this time

In which I am so unhappy,

And remember it fondly.

–– 900 years old. Fukiwara No Kiyosuke.

The Self Is No Mystery

one writes in the presence of something

moving close to fear



the 'little' adventurous words

a mountain     the clouds     a sky

are taxonomy I believe

in the world

because it is

impossible



the self is no mystery, the mystery is

that there is something for us to stand on.

–– a sampling of the brilliance of George Oppen.

After the Stampede

Stable open-grained

against the lean of rain,

tomb of shadows,

trampled clay,

remnants of a life 

where horses steamed,

snow upon their backs,

rotting straps, fallen tack,

the rest in slow collapse.

-

Acceptance

Rain becomes ice becomes rain

in February's  hard swings,

clouds pouring over the hill,

the quick locusts in chorus

raising their song to the sky,

the world mostly wind,

and the wind seeks us out;

we are breaking,

we are broken,

watch the wind scatter life,

we are cold, we are hopeful,

we are finished with strife.

-

Ephemerida

You can have your brittle palms

Rattling in the wind off the gulf.

Give us sunlight in the ice.

Are we not warm-blooded?

Give us frigid silence in the woods.

Give us devils spinning on the fields.

Give us the assurance of our own tracks

Connecting us to where we've been.

Give us stinging wind and pounding hearts,

Living harder, transitory, thirsting and aware.

–Along the Great Allegheny Passage near Connellsville.

Image courtesy of Elisa Mayes,
Photo by Jeff Helsel

Unspoken

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.

A man moving through the woods thinking by feeling.

The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below.

The music hurrying sometimes, but always returning to quiet.

There is somehow a pleasure in the loss.

Never again. Never bodied again. Again the never.

A humming beauty in the silence.

The having been. Having had. And the man

knowing all of him will come to an end.

–lines from Jack Gilbert's "After Love."