Friday, January 29, 2021

Harbinger   


















A heart, blurred
Urgent, becoming winged
Alights the chilled haze
And descends

You are the visited
And turn from a task
Unresolved

There is secret conversation

Of new melody and
Sweet remembrance.
The umber woods
Bent and motionless
Overhear

Nothing is sacred


Thursday, April 28, 2016

48






















bring the funk, the
masked man said, the camera
and your black box of
cryptic lenses

bring your list of birds, he said (
adjusting the light) the whole
endless tally, so that we might
weigh the years

bring more than you know

sort through it later

bring

he said, all you can carry of
drink, witness, abandon
drive north

sing

there are warblers here, in the spruce
blown beyond their sun, scattered
among dark-eyed juncos 

they'll be dead by morning


Thursday, April 7, 2016

47






















quiet a while, or not so
with my footsteps and
those long acres beyond
up, through bare trees and
the dog leading, black
with red around her soft
buckled throat

a deer scull, placed
as an offering, a stone
by a stream imagining
altars, I suppose

probably placed there
by a child or a weathered
bird watcher, because
why not and doesn’t it
seem right to raise the dead

above, and changing
the April sky tugs tomorrow
across the afternoon















Tuesday, June 10, 2014

46

























beyond the mist
lamp-yellow and new
three willows

three years since
and gone still
you will answer, at times
a delicate question
with such an appearance

where are you now?

beyond the mist
lamp-yellow

and you left us, why?

three willows, lit with young leaves
glowing through a slow white morning
and the kingfisher, low
above the shallow
chattering

there is something worth hunting
on the other side

Friday, February 28, 2014

45















poets are a blight
doing nothing
earning less
passing off assonance
as walls built, or posing 
the calloused, but worldly
gardener  (a vain hedge clipper
) all the while begging each new
flight of topiary nonsense
to speak life and make good
the bowed, selfish shapes
dividing the true road from
those warm yellow
windows


Tuesday, January 14, 2014

44


























gone away,

there are walls
through the woods
where pasture yawned

the soft echo of a different green
lingers in hay fern and moss

gone away, love

the barn between the giant maples
reduced to this square
where the floor was poured too well

the loft, vanished between
those velvet fingers of loss

gone away, love, but

there are walls
running from the brook
to the old road

and so often, when walking here
I mean to sing your name

gone away, love, but still 
I mean to sing