Reassurance

Steady, camerado,

Landed in a strange Eden

Strewn with the discomfited.

Keeping pace through the trees,

No matter how exotic,

It's still the same moon.

A Mindful Turbulence

photo by Barbara Ann Bell

A younger man in winter

I would dream an evening

Of midges and long grass,

Now in mellowed silence

I can hear the ocean roar

Snow and foam across the beach,

Having come to the conclusion

The end of art is peace.

Winter Hill

Powder snakes across the crust,

Corn stubble curving over the hill,

The merge and the fade of distance,

Of memory, of forgetting,

Darkened once by hemlock and beech,

Chestnuts so thick in the stones

Invaders walked their horses

Lest they stumble and fall.

Some of us never left,

Mastering still that hard art.

Back Way to Middlecreek

Not the new wind,

Not the old beech leaves

rattling at the edge of the plowed road.

Not the yellow posting

Against human legs

Nailed to the dozing oak.

Not even the revved engines

Of snowmobiles

Tearing up the air and the dusk.

No. But in a still moment,

Echoing through the watershed valleys

Netting the bristled, snowy hills,

The red-crested drummer,

Dreamer of eggs.

—Following a form found in Heaney's "Fieldwork."

On the Year's Coldest Day: Geranium

  

I suffer love

I suffer its lack

For all that it's caused

I won't take it back.

You Can't Remember

  

You can't remember, after what's happened

Keeps happening, that place again,

It's all unreal, the bright warm air,

A dream that couldn't save you now,

No one would care to hear about it,

It would be heaven

Far away, dark and no music,

Not even a girl there.

— Extracted from a poem by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, 1896-1988.

Prescience

The night before the snow began

I saw her running in the yard,

Elbows out, backlit braids aflying,

Happy and determined and convinced

She could rise up through the trees,

Sail across the moon in silhouette,

Float back down to her earthly home

 And tell me all about it.

The night before the snow began she did.

Staying Home

Deeper than surfaces

The staying home

Expected nowhere

In the glittering cold

The drumming of pileates

Muffled by laden wind

The hearing intermittent

The music perpetual

Staying home

Deeper than surfaces.

Barn Dance

Against a barn empty of the big lives,

Museum for still machinery and adzed beams,

The dry smell of the past, the slotted sunlight,

 A monument to work, to will, and to necessity;

But maybe that's not right, that first line.

Is the life of a bull chained by his nose any larger

Than that of a white-footed mouse running free in the chaff?

Spectral Line

Night sits up in the hollows

As the ridges roll back from the sun,

Beautiful how beautiful beautiful ––

Comments on blooming surfaces,

Sentiment sitting up as well

Before intellect, like a cold wind in my ear,

Reminds me where I'm standing,

On an interstate natural gas pipeline

Freshly 'hogged by hirelings

Of the world's most powerful industry,

Built for war, maintained for profit,

And me just a dreamer down the road,

Looking for a pretty picture,

Feeling the buzz under my bootsoles

Of 600 million cubic feet per day

That shakes me more each sunset.

circa 1943

Pilgrim of One Place

There is peace in the close-at-hand,

In snowmelt running clear in the ditch,

In the music of wind under the eaves,

In a bird's nest filled with leaves,

In wires curved like a freehand for miles

Sagging under a burden of doves,

For a grief which i hardly ever speak,

A white bird inside me as i sleep.

—with an image based in a Heaney poem

and shaped by the here-and-now.

Cuneiform

Warmed snow as tablet

Pressed by the radiance

Of light and of color,

Touch of the sun

And stroke of its absence,

Heat of dark forms

Deep to the base,

Molecular stylus

Of spin increate.