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Stand still awhile

I tell myself

though it's easier

to turn.


Have you ever

stepped off

a merry-go-'round

with the horses

still rising ?

Then to the Knob

click to see a man on a walk

Then to the knob,

as the farmboys call it,

to look into the valley

where the creek runs

under blue haze,

the sun in my eyes,

the wind from the next ridge

luffing my shirt,

aware of my size

and my meaninglessness

in all things other than this,

my breathing in

and knowing it,

my breathing out

and knowing it;

myself,

my own master.

April 2020

Neck-deep in the ordinary,

with the wind going around me

under the crow-crossed, silver sky,

staring long enough

into the common beauty

of forsythia in bloom to feel

awe's inexplicable swaying,

considering the silence now,

and the silence to come.

Our Vanishing Unfinished Heaven

Was there something

you thought

you needed to do

one more time?

What small act

was it

you thought

didn’t matter?

—still in the thrall of Jane Hirshfield

Coma

   

I said          I knew

you were in there          and whole.


I said          I wouldn't

let them take you          away.


Regret is a tide.


At the top of the field          never again

will I leave you          alone.

Assimilation in a Pandemic

   

The news keeps coming

          with its one crooked

finger


          death   death   death   death   death


And one no longer turns at the call of her name,

and another forgets to lift his surprised eyebrow.


While here are the leopard frogs,

                    and the leopard frog descendants,

          eeking and leaping and wagging their slippery tails

inside the folds of the still living pond.

—an assimilation of Jane Hirshfield's "A Folding Screen"  

Reading with Jane

   

Phase of the moon

too easily forgotten

in the days of the cull

wet snow like a spew

lying as rain

flooding the stones

as coffins were stacked

and the market recovered

reading with Jane at the window

March near its end

surprised every time

love started and stopped

when so much continued

when so much did not.

–with lines by Jane Hirshfield

Decapiitism

We were getting ready to be gone,

singing the death of the earth,

chanting the system in flames,

what it does to us,

our otherness,

the contagion raising the cost

and the profit,

fewer,

fewer.

–with a few words from Nathaniel Mackey in "The Paris Review" #232