New Poems July 2010

1.

You can see they found a peace in laboring

The bull straight out of Rousseau

Charlotte nearsighted

Not indifferent and yet

Losing count of her piglets

Lost underfoot remorsefully

Poesy epileptic and with a

Slowly diminishing world view

Two Socks given a free ride (never ridden)

Like reincarnation

By Man-O-War and an anonymous mare

Rescued and yet dead in foaling

The valley is quilted into paddock squares

And fares well a world that

Otherwise would have past unmourned.

2.

There must have been a hundred starlings

(Try counting them in their leap-frog

Jousting, breast-butting, tipsiness

On a new mown lawn --)

Was it the freshly opened sand baths

To wash the fleas from their feathers

Or some feast of ants or beetles?

The bed of thyme, close cropped,

(The cemetery carpet in July

Across the Adirondacks)

Perhaps a perfume, an underwing aroma –

The edge of the yard holds a special

Attraction, their fleets in squadrons

Perform acrobatic turns, landing under ferns

With a hopping touchdown.

And one more curious than all the others

Edges toward the kitchen window

Toward the guarded work of washing the breakfast dishes

And shows the deep purple of the speckled tail feathers

And the small, intense gaze of a yellow eye cocked upward.

3.

Looking up I catch two yellow cabbage moths

Playing tag in the sun with figure eights

Infinitely woven in three dimensions of

The airy pasture.

Earlier, taking down the shed

Barnwood a hundred years brittle

And shrieking with the nails’ extraction,

I uncovered a garter snake in a tight spot

Perhaps plotting to shed her skin,

The gossamer remains of earlier moltings

Line other seams in the carpentry.

And in the background, all day long,

Out of sight is the chatter of swallows.

Sparrows, chic-a-dees, the sudden drumming

Of the pileated; softer snare of the flicker

And the wind in a million leaves.

4.

I am not certain I can

Get there from here

The journey has taken more turns

Than the itinerary projected

And cannot be reversed;

But perhaps there is yet

One of those old carriage trails

Never paved,

Perhaps a streambed in the spring wash,

That will take me around the summit

To the valley on the other side

Where I see myself sitting on a screened porch

With a pad and pen in my hand,

Everyman, trying to sort out what might have been

From what is; to ascertain and assay

The value of the dross.