Machicolation

Tracks of a white-footed mouse

Machines overhead

shake the ground,

rattle the door in

its frame, force us

outside for a look,

lost to our fate but

wanting a glimpse

of what comes,

as the mouse

stops to look

at the hawk,

as the deer turns

to look at the gun.

Coming of Age

We are not as we were,

Each passage

A shattering.

This is how we pray:

Protect the sparrow

That sings in the ash,

Protect our grief

As memory.

We are not as we were.

-

Tornado Warning

Sky wild with error and moaning on the wooded hills,

Vapors of the expiring earth dwarfing the acts of men

Stopped in the sucking mud of their stripped fields

Awed in the cannonades of wind that shake their bones

Exiled now from the sun and driven to their cellarholes

By blasts of ice and the black roar that builds behind the ridge,

Reduced to fear and faith in the strength of their minds.

-

Receiver

Snow again

As I stood

By the nest.

The day became

Something else

And I listened

For the words

Long enough

To be filled.

-

Helps Us to Focus

Solidago in ruin

Fulvous and exposed

In this snow-starved winter

The field is ten acres of art

Waiting to be framed,

Our small interference

Revealing the genius

Of line texture and tone

(There all along)

If we know when to stop.

-

The Examined Life

Click to expand horizon.

The trees and I stood on the hill

With the even wind from the west,

Still enough and here enough

To be taken as landscape

By the resident crows in the snag,

Gurgling calmly pinnacled.

Sheaves of sunlight leaned

Against heaven over the valley.

The dogs slept on their sides

In the flattened grasses.

Nothing else happened.

I'd call it a lucrative day.

The Wanderings

Wind against water, realms in collision,

Yours against mine, ours against theirs.


Give us the world if Thou wilt,

But grant us an asylum for our affections.

–Last stanza based on the epigraph of Yeats' "The Wanderings of Oisin"

And Again. And Again.

Click to enmesh.

Glossed and brilliant in the short-lived sun

We bow to each other, a tangle of our kind

Daring to be what we are

In our season and time.

–  Listening to Nick Drake's "Saturday Sun"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXLWH2IAEN0

The Things We Live Among

You may click to enlarge.

In the abstract we

were always wrong

you about me

me about you

guilty and blameless

feeling too much

though the things

we live among

are right

and to see them

is to know.

-

Anew

And so it can be said, we are falling in love with the world

Anew, with the ice on the pane and the fire in our minds,

With the scent of the mist and the taste of the past,

With the strength of our hands and the weight of tomorrow,

And so it can be said, all the way to heaven is heaven.

–Final clause by Catherine of Sienna, in a state of ecstasy, circa 1370.