Recitation

Because for 20 years I worked the evening shift,

Sunset over my own land will always be a treat,

Neighbors home from work and the road empty,

Me at the top of the field with songbirds flying over

Headed for their roots as the light disappears behind the last ridge,

Fireflies rising out of the deep weeds,

The stars showing themselves in their places,

The veil of day lifting from infinity,

Witness to the recitation of silence.

. . .

Opening the Mail

October, 1974.

The pictures fell out of the envelope,

Time stopped again, and nothing had changed,

Again she was three, and her weight I felt in my arms,

And again she was gone, and nothing had changed.



"Thought you'd want these," my brother had written,

And I do, though it's happened again, the ambush of grief,

Years since her dying, and nothing has changed,

The world has moved on,

The earth has circled and circled the sun,

Everything's different, and nothing has changed.



I no longer know how to say it,

Keats' "true voice of feeling," what is it?

What can be written, what phrases co-joined?

This is only a man's common sorrow

Here in the world of all of us,

The place where, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all.


. . .

–upon reading Larkin, with analytical comment by Christopher Ricks.

Alien and Unattainable

The alien Daucus carota

We study and we try,

Doing and redoing,

Decades of practice and polishing,

We strive until we bleed

Our full productive years,

Yet the best that we can make

Fails even to come close

To the easy elegance of weeds.

. . .

Engineers

Silk from a spider's abdomen

Stronger for its vital purpose

(and less temporal)

Than the riveted bridge,

Built to carry one train at a time,

And never as a home.

On the Verge

On the verge of being overrun

And loving it, pictures of a simple life:

The garden hose,

Coiled on its rack against the shed;

The idle truck,

Burdock growing through its rusting struts;

A mutual respect:

I do as litte damage as I can,

and nature keeps her distance.

Honest Work

Rooftop

The maple snapped by the microburst,

Suffering for the opulence of its crown,

To lie across the cabin roof

Will warm me once again

When snow piles up against the pane.

. . .

Suspension

please click to enlarge

High summer, a photograph, a poem –

All capable of suspension:

The power goes off in a storm

As I read, and when it comes back on,

I know the clock to be slow, as if literal proof 

I had been suspended for awhile,

A spectacular thing, and the dream of poetry,

To cut a hole in time.

–with two lines adapted from an essay by Mary Ruefle

Independence

Poem for the Fourth

Praise the Common Earth

An ordinary day of unfamiliar heat,

A common blue dragonfly where we expect to see it,

Patrolling the air above the pond,

Thick with the usual cattails and lilly pads,

The customary tadpoles fleeing from the shallows

To the safety of the turgid depths at our approach,

And a ripple there of something we can only feel,

All of it routine, and as far as we can tell,

Existing nowhere else in the ordinary universe.

. . .

Origin

Trees over water,

Dreams cooling in the temperate shade,

Coalescence of the barely visible,

Something of value shimmers

On the surface of the deep.