Isolative

By ice

isolated.

Limit leads

to discovery

in poetry

as in music.

Beauty in

all things

is brevity.

-

In Solution

farm dissolving in snowfall,

crystals in drifts where slats

slow the wind, land

in drifts ridge to ridge,

yearning in drifts under gables,

man dissolving in snowfall.

-

wet snow in the doldrums

eight on eight on eight

bowed in the raveling night

a strong spine it takes

to keep the head up

at January's bleak finish

-

January Oak

Last graspers,

survivors of zero,

clutched hands

of the slow dusks,

riddled pennants

of the vanished

golden fleet,

palimpsests to

the damp feasts

in the loud dark,

to the swarm

of procreation,

the old watching

the blind young

buds come of age,

imagining their sheen

in sunlight, not

without longing.

–

Sub-Zero Wind

strops the plowline,

rattling the weedbones;

kneedeep in rivershade,

keep moving, keep moving,

strive for a hold in the treeline



or lose your grip

on this tilting world and

float free of the glittering earth,

crystal mote in the void.

–

Snowshoeing the GAP

The Great
Allegheny
Passage



Rhythmic flex of muscle and brain,

pulse of leg and lung, heartsong,

with our breath before us, sunstung,

lightslapped, wanting more,

burning in a land of ice,

riverflash, windrush, armed

with desire, faith in this once.

–as always, click to enlarge.

Hawk

Nothing at the feeder all morning.

On the path I learn why,

A brilliance under overcast,

And though I never saw it strike,

I felt the curve and the piercing,

The lethal silent speed

Of the wobbling Earth,

Left to its own devices,

Finding its balance.

-

Sabbath

Winter is the sabbath of the year. Let us slow our pace, give up the contest, put aside our worry over sums, cease our struggle for approval, and let the weaker light fill us with an easy warmth, insulated by peace. What we find then in the heart is true, an introduction to ourselves.

-

Reprieve

An hour's sun softens the ice,

Wet snow fills my shoes,

Transformations surround me,

Great forces of the universe

At work under these very eaves;

What binds the spinning galaxies

Shapes the drop of melt,

The pine inverted there as it falls,

Lens of a deeper realm.

-

Ghosted

Again awake,

feeling the lack,

mute insistence

of what stirs not,

souls in the trees,

looking back.

–

Commodity

Slope of woods and fields free from motive,

Runoff clean and filtered by clean earth,

Spring emerging from stacked stones


Flows clear under the dirt road,

Loves its way through the woods

Of abandoned farms all the way


To the creek where black-backed

Trout hover in formation,

Waiting on a blessing from above.

–

Commemoration

A moment of silence is never enough.

Give me an hour, a day, a life,

Let me risk to be alone with my own thoughts,

Motionless on a hilltop with my head in the sky,

Removed from the clash of enterprise,

Expansive, cherishing quiet, sailing,

The wind in my heart, and in my ears

A rush of words from those who loved me.

–