Poems from 2011

I am stilled at last

I am stilled at last
For the moment at least.
I have no urge to descend
The mountain or even to round the bend.

I could and do watch
The dawn awakened hummingbird
Tongue the bee balm florets,
And am still on the deck
When dusk brings squadrons
Of dragonflies to surveille the yard.

The light has changed throughout the day
First rain then steam in the hay
Bees of various genre and buzzes
Rival the whispering leaves as loudest noises.

And I find the 900 of woodscape
Enough to keep me seated, in place.

Fall 2011

Hummingbirds

1.
It is tinnitus in another register
The hum has air in it
And the bee balm vibrates
And the heart beats wildly
In sympathy
To search for the sweet nectar of life
In the lips of red blossoms
To let your wings sing
So your tongue can test the liquor
To contest with aerial acrobatics
Your claim to this lode
Yet share it with the bumblebee
Who poses no threat to the deepest
Pools that only your long tongue and
Throbbing thrust can reach.

2.
Two days of rain
Have re-blossomed the thyme
Brought dragonflies back to the yard
Opened small golden hops
And bold red clover.

The point of impact
A leaf, the sandy lawn, the metal door,
Each sounds its own timbre of percussion
Until we hear only the rain
And not what it covers over
The pilot light, the clock ticking,
The melancholy of the thrush.

Dawns opposite
The silence of the dew blankets green lens,
And the warble of wren, the doves cooing
The engine of the hummingbird’s wing
Draw us out of the curious dreams
An elephant birth, a bicycle marathon,
With scenery so detailed as to compete
With the leafy border of the yard
To be convincing.

Cobble Creek, July 2011


Experimenting with Retirement

It begins with a certain demolition
Taking apart a lifetimes construct
Climbing down off the shoulders of giants
Using ladders like stilts of declension
Finding Archimedes’ fulcrum on every curve
Of the crowbar and pulling, against friction,
Grateful the carpenter was right-handed
And tasting chagrin in reversing time,
A resistance across generation screeches
As nails are torn out of wormed wood
Knots small fists and high pitched
Carpenter ants telling their own history
Of streams below the surface, hieroglyphics
Layer by layer, shingle, tarpaper, sheathing,
Rafters cradling the soft pink flesh of insulation
Gypsum chalks like bones calcified;
Each with its own synapse of iron
Spiked, nail, threaded screw, tack
Separated back into a hardware store of rust.
Some youthful energy with large biceps,
Sweat-sheened sun drinking thick-wristed
Pioneer who cut this acre into an oval
Fell and lumbered native timber
Judged south with the assurance of a sailor
And built the house that would hold his children
Is now a ghost being released to Valhalla
The last framing piled, burn or barn,
And the long hidden barren reborn.

Cobble Creek, June 2011

Brothers

The year of waking each day
To his failing health,
No slow decline,
His rising fear,
Is what separates us I suspect,
Not the nine years between our births,
And a middle brother.
He is the repository of mother’s stoicism
A word too abstract for yet another nursing
To an early end in her long life.
He is, as it were, half-fathered
And yet fully matured in that long goodbye.
He weeps and will kiss his brother on the lips,
I a bond he knows in his gut and heart.

Summer 2011

The Waning of These Days
After Robert Haas

A month of adjusting my posture
To account for the slow journey of the sun
Rising a few leaves further south each day
And dappling askance through the window
On the pages of The Apple Trees at Olema.

The morning breeze in the quaking aspen
Whip and toss the light like the fork and egg
In making the day’s omelet, the farmhouse window
Still molten in its variability refracts
The early light toward the yellow green end of the spectrum
A tinge of red from the barn’s weathered walls
And the rusted tin of its steep roof.

The poet’s voice catalogues a menagerie,
In Iowa or California or Arizona
On of those newer states that ends in an a,
But in the Adirondacks of New York
The ringing in my ears and the wind in the trees
Have an edge that keeps saying these dawns
Are not the last, but the crack of a limb
The creaks and bang of a door unlatched,
The smell of percolating coffee in the kitchen,
Should wake you to the waning of these days.

Summer 2011

Reflection

Among the earliest, the first?, poems
Were of sculptures and paintings,
Rodin’s Burgomeisters in chains,
Political intersections with art
But now I feel I would like
More to focus on form and color
Painting’s paths to immortality,
Sitting as an ageing, agent of art
Digesting what the hounds do with the heart.

Summer 2011

Orpheus at the Gate.

How so much more dirt
Comes out of the hole
Than the amateur’s mind’s eye
Would estimate based on dimensions
Tells tales of the underworld
The ancients understood well.

There is no air there.

The rocks are held tight
By worn roughage.

Water as rain drainage
Packs in the dross and durst
Like forcing air out of a suitcase
By sitting on it while pulling
The zipper around its track.

Imagine the absence of light
Just a few centimeters down,

There is no air there.

The dream comes with better tools
And the muscles do not tire,
The compost darkens and lightens
The loam, it steams and falls apart, and
Opening to the understory of an ancient well.

Summer 2011

Sangre de Toro Toast
For Harry Brunger

If we could conjure up the ghost
Of your recent departure here
With our reverie, our revelry
This reveille of laughter, gentle
With what we share and what we each
Hold as our own memory, we would.

But too noble for such haunting
Is the gentle soul now soothed with sleep
Which once smiled on our youthful
Innocence and ambition from beneath
The umbrella pines of Mt. Lebanon,
Once took our fevered company into
A brief nap after meza below the menara.
And often led us through a Socratic rap
With a Mandarin tone to the closing rising question.

Wisdom aged the sage more than years
Now in parting, more laughter than tears.

August 2011

Tinnitus Redux

The morning’s opalescent moon
Is a milky invitation to the rising sun
Pearled and sloughing now away
From perfect healing around the cinder of iron
That set an irritant in orbit of the earth.

---

Perhaps the tinnitus is a call of the wild
The cricket and hummingbird
The bumblebee and mosquito
Each absorb a segment of the vibration
And the underlying ringing is
The harmony.

---

The glaze of dew on the raspberry leaf
Has the glisten of a slug trail
The quick silver of mercury
Escaped the thermometer and beyond
Recovery.

---

Too many to number
The dragonflies weave a complex
Yet invisible trap of maneuver
Over the fresh cut acre
The blue of midnight if they stood still,
They have the capacity to hover but use it
Rarely.

Summer 2011


Then There is That

A species division,
She turns in to the conversation,
(So comfortable in her camel cashmere
That fits like skin, a winter coat,
And so complements her blond bobbed blue eyed
Complexion perfected public face
That even with nothing revealed,
No molded fit, just bathrobe looseness,
One can still imagine her absently
Brushing sand off a tanned thigh, a
Curved calf in the leisure of a Cape Cod beach).

She turns in to the conversation,
With a miniature clone carrying a doll,
An American Girl by every sign.
Starched, plaid with a red ground
White lace, gloves even and tam,
Like Russian dolls in three dimensions
Mother, daughter, diploidic doll
All in generation leaping costume.

She turns in to the conversation,
With the seriousness of so many choices,
Hot chocolate, ice cream sundae,
Cake, cookie, coffee, tea crumpet, scone,
Making a memory so intentionally that
Its residue slips subconsciously into
Even those slipping by with the crossing
Light, the silhouetted figure in white
Bulbs saying safe, come, go.

Chicago, Michigan at Watertower, 2011

Long Ago and Far Away 1967-68

Passing back into and through history
Like a dream with its little errors
The campus brings back memories
Embedding history in its only residuaries
The mind, the book, the now tall oak trees.

Wooster, May 2011



Archipelago O’Keefe
Micrological Amorphorology
Strata Lebanoni

Loose cotton boles
Floating on the serum
Of air as clear as
Heavy water H3O pure
Water white as
Fresh snow.

What function of
Landscape gives
This faux river
Its boundaries
Cutting at odd angles
Across the patchwork
Of cropland islanded
Into jigsaws of some
Puzzle dropped in pieces
To float like lying carpets
On Saskatchewan snowmelt
Downstream streaming
Over the edge like a
Half melon in a Holbein still life
Optically hanging off a table
A farmer’s grass runway
A fallow field, corn rows
And from up here we see
It is this new river feeds
That sky of cumulusa

Airborne, June 2011

Mt. Rainer

Easier to see
How hard it is to hide
On a sunny day.

July 2011








Change of Pace

The bumble bees on the hydrangea heads
Remind me of the Chinese in San Francisco
Using the labyrinth of Grace Cathedral
As a marathon course.
They move with that same short gait,
An intensity of breath,
Wings, arms, legs a blur of momentum,
True to some pattern of perambulation
That would be missed at a slower pace.
The mounds of purple beaded blossoms,
Bounded by shamrock pinks,
Vibrate as though tune struck forks.
Perhaps the race is with the rain
And to the swift as they say
But I will take the sights, and work
More slowly.

Spring 2011, Stony Point

Dogwood | Battalion Drive

1.
The fruit bodies armed like armadillos
With plates in seamed orbs
On green pale stems, now shed
Their four wings nun like
Ivory cassocks wilting to almond
Fallen into the red sandstone
Chips of mock mulch like
Lingerie dropped by the bedside.

2.
You can almost hear the circles
Of the sprinkler as it runs
A xylophone of dogwoods leaves
And know it is not rain;
The rising sun-red eastern sky
And the clear dry whistle of the train
Say the red fruits ripen with the will
Of an unseen gardener and sun.


June 2011 and September 2011

Gaia and Lakshimi

As if to mock
The addiction
Gaia and Lakshimi
Lift the lubricant
Of consumption to
The surface, feed the heart
Stoke the stomach
Knowing the human
Will never satiate
But rather eat itself
To death.

NYT, Energy 10/26/2011