PNC Park, Pittsburgh.

Up

Evening

All the long evening

The wind chanted prayers.

It's Not Too Late

Wild asters rising in rain.

Never beg the wind for mercy.

Wild asters and such,

Tall goldenrod and such,

Once all your stems have snapped

Produce new shoots. It's not too late.

–Adapted Zen poem by Ko Un, translated by Allen Ginsberg.

Woodland Mists

Enlarge by clicking.

The woodland thickens when our backs are turned,

We look away and leaves appear, green flesh.

Among the trees the days are long

Yet seasons are so short among ourselves.

It seems just weeks ago we all were flesh together.

Now we are mist, so many

Who have not finished what we had to say.

–with lines adapted from Louise Glück.

Falling in Bluets

Focus instead

on the empty spaces

the teacher said

look deeper

beyond the show

to find the beauty

and the terror

of the unknowable.

Landlubber

Soundside

The wind tilts the ocean against the hard coast,

stirs up the surf to boil and rips,

empties the sound from the back of the bar,

and blows one man's heart back into the woods

where Maypoles are blooming in the shade of new leaves

in the southwestern mountains of green Pennsylvania.

Seeing What's There

Duck, NC, mid-bar.

Maritime forest, unique in the world,

Cleared to build units for rent by the beach.

 Easy to turn our backs on what's gone;

Loss is part of our landscape.

At the Edge

Christmas trees tied together to help the wind and water build a dune.

Alive alone at the edge of the sea

everything becomes a line of poetry,

sharp white birds in hovering flight

spearing flashes in the dark swells,

the surf like a mad dog testing

its chain, lunging and held back,

and you at the edge alone with memory,

away from a world driven by desire,

wanting nothing, not lonely, content.

You are. You are not.

You live by incantation.

The Fight Against Nothing

Removed from the distractions of the way we live now

One confronts the great mystery of existence,

The being and the ceasing to be, and one concludes

The only weapons we have against oblivion

Are human imagination, philosophy, religion, and art.


Get busy, then, one vows.

Fabulous Wreckage

Still life miles long at the tideline,

Fabulous wreckage.


Written well your memoir

might have such perspective


Before the next storm

scrubs the beach bare.