And When the Moon

And when the moon

floated from the oaks

we were young again.

Relevance

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Under an angle of evening

human slights come into focus.

A red-shouldered hawk

screams as she swims

over cut hay.

They set with the sun.

Turkeyfoot Ars Poetica

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The evening is subtle and the songs are soft,

birdsong and windsong, and thoughts are songs too,

the lines of a poem are songs, silent music

you hear in your heart and your breathing,

a melody behind your eyes only you know,

quiet notes on a scale meant only for you,

birds on the wires that no one else sees

the same way you do, for the score is your life

and your being, and that's the intent, words

strung together meaning more than their meaning,

for we each are our own aberration

blown this way and that by our times

like parallel contrails in sunset,

and what is more lovely and fine?

Into the Woods After the News

Walking with my head down into the woods,

The news the news the news the news,

Walking into the woods in first light,

Hands empty, poetry in my pocket,

Into the woods and its close distances

Shining with cloud and awakening birds,

Gossamer across my face,

Pant legs weighted with dew,

Mind emptying into the ferns,

Spirit rising into the mist,

Living my life at this moment

As if i had all the time in the world,

Walking deeper into the woods.

The Berry Patch

I like to think the bear was first

with her hunger and her humid strength,

but she'd not wade in from the road,

the path i took through timothy

when rain had ended and a deer fly,

barred-winged menace,

bit me on the elbow bone.


So not a bear, but surely

some other neighbor hungry

for the riches of the berry patch.

Oh, let that be the little mystery,

another thing i like. I feast,

and now another itch to scratch.

Tilted Toward the Sun

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Tilted toward the sun,

the intensity of living

under the cloud cover

driving us to search

for purpose, meaning, legacy,

we begin at last to understand,

considering the vanishments,

the isolated now is what we have,

and how we treat each other,

and dogs and birds and grass,

whirling through enormous night,

the quality of that, and gone.

Future Past

Reminders of fall as the summer begins,

Time not a stream but a tide,

A yellow leaf in a vortex of green,

New blackbirds in pointillist whorl,

Her scent still there in a scarf in a drawer,

Time not a stream but a tide.

Tactile

Ants on a leaf

touching antennae.

The heart aches

for what is missing.

Lords of the Landscape

Five farms i ride through most evenings,

miles from the main road, passing

a few farmers busy with farming,

exchanging salutes as i pedal by,

sunlight low across banded fields

and flush against red barns

and old-fashioned, two-story,

steep-roofed farm houses,

flooding their porches with gold,

bordered with dahlias, cats on their sides,

cows in the broad green pastures

after milking, lifting their heads

as I go, farms part of the hills,

abandoned or working still known

by the old names, mostly German

in these ancient rock-strewn mountains,

what had been ten now become five,

yet here is where they are still born and bred,

the men and women who save the country.

Long may they flourish, longer survive.

'Good Winter'

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What happens is from now,

and I'll be here

in the shadow

of the earth at sundown,

the path covered with snow

and trackless,

awaiting your return

as you lift away.

—when Bon Iver played on Pandora in the middle of the night