Day with Clouds and Trees

The day towers over me,

downwardly mobile and peaceful,

threatened only, as far as I know,

by a weak chance of lightning

later this evening, free for now

to stand on the hill like the trees,

lenghtening my shadow,

making a slight noise.

.

Colloquial

Philaenus spumarius' self-made bubbles

When I engage with the world,

Inspiration surrounds me.

When I study the close-at-hand,

The familiar becomes strange,

And the common day brims with surprise.

.

Clean Cornfield

Engineered seed

designed to grow

in treated ground

does just that,

and we are pleased

with our dominion

over the earth,

fooling ourselves.

.

Pollenators

Some are meant to be hexagonal,

Shoulder-to-shoulder

In the galactic spiral,

Some are meant to probe

Eruptions at the edge,

Knee-deep in volatile creation,

Seed-makers, risk-takers,

hungry, lusty, and in peril.

Tilling the Ground We're Given

A line of work is a line of sweat

Sweet and with no substitution.


A line of verse is a line of blood

Sweet and with no resolution.

.

Overlooking the Texas Eastern Transmission natural gas pipeline through Upper Turkeyfoot.

I try not to think far into the future.

I take good care of each day.

–Kohei Itami, 77, survivor of the 2011 Japan tsunami.

.

In the Perfume of Blackberry Blooms

Looking east at sunset,

Birdsong, frogchime, cloudshine,

Sky enough to be as we really are:

Magicians, wizards, adventurers, travelers

Without leaving the field;

We are the current final version,

Wanting to be air, wanting to be ashes

Upon ashes, our last chemistry

Deepening as roots into ourselves,

Rising as flowers and thorns,

Anguishing no more forever.

Upon Hearing the News of What Is to Come

First the lease, then the stakes, then the screaming saws,

And the woods will fall in ten thousand groans,

Then the drill and the trucks and the slapping chains...

Too much, too much, and only the beginning.

Look away.

Beauty is irrelevant to profit.


The wild God of the world is intemperate and savage,

You do not know him, you communal people,

Or you have forgotten him; beautiful and wild,

The hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

At night they shall remember quiet and fly in a dream,

And the dawns will ruin it.







                              –second stanza composed of lines from Robinson Jeffers' "Hurt Hawks."

Answer

You who read and consider,

You who pause under the trees

Long enough to feel their sway

And marry it with your own,

Moving as the great limbs move

In the rising wind as the rain nears,

Poets to come, answer what I am for,

I but advance a moment only to wheel

And hurry back into the darkness.

–with three lines by the Good Grey Poet

Contours

Shaped by the forces of the universe,

Your path conforms to the contours of the earth.

You live your life as if it's real.






–with a line by Leonard Cohen.