Walking Until Dark

Cold, quiet

consolation,

the early dark,

going only

where my legs

will take me,

doubling back

on my own

frozen tracks

under a few

sharp stars.

Lingers

Please click to enlarge.

Two-fifty a.m.

Still the south at sunset

Cools behind the hill.


We are all swimmers

On a sea of sorrow.

The Happiness of Edzéard Bouffier

A still from the animated film "The Man Who Planted Trees."

He lost the habit of speech,

the man who planted trees,

working alone after loss —

so it is imagined, written, and drawn.

I believe it could happen,

doing your life's work in silence

and living alone,

yet you never can lose

the habit of thought,

which may not be speech,

 but it's language.

To watch the moving "The Man Who Planted Trees" (30 min.), click here.

Young Oaks

Praise the protected understory

where youth in scarlet reigns

even into early snows,

clinging fast as if the season

of death were a brief inconvenience.

We remember scarlet strength,

but we were lighter then,

and lived as if within forever.

—with a line from Updike's "Endpoint."

In Its Own Time

Leaves the wind

has ushered to

the cabin porch

i will not sweep

just yet.

Why not keep

as much of fall

as we can get?

As We Like It

In Pennsylvania then,

the past had settled in

to be the present.

Nothing greatly changed.

—from John Updike's "Endpoint."

Flight 2646

The curtain of day lifts in the cold woods

And night fills the void––

How it is

When my light flies away behind hills.

The Sky Is Not Enough

Another sunset of the dramatic sort this week,

Garish, the blooming light, it seems to me.

The sky can only give so much before

We fade at dusk for lack of loving touch.