Unlearning Alone

I couldn't have known the dog
had become blind until
set down on a dark bed

he'd walk right off the edge,
tremble and piss in a spasm's fit,
needing to be dead

but unable to get there.
Supposing it was the dog's own
darkness means there is something

more, perhaps another darkness.
Paper to write a sentence,
a table for the paper,

and outside the wooden walls,
the tables and chairs trace
their ancestors to the trees:

yes, the itch to cut is there, too,
the splitting that becomes science,
the climb which leads to flight.

There must be forests-
continents on planets
full of forests-

of what we'll build
into the furniture of love,
this pulpy inseparability

slowly grown and holding heat,
the rain rising up to a sky
so big it's both dark and light.

Unfinished Meditation on Standard Physics

Some particles simply will not walk back, timeward.

B meson decay is misbehaving in France, 

K mesons at Caltech routinely violate charge symmetry

or parity symmetry, like tiny unruly telenomic machines.

I drove my great horsepower engine 

over Robert Moses Causeway,

crossing the slender bays to meet the shore, 

the bridges rise and roll in a particular pulse, 

a stubbed toe throb of wave over wave. 

Here, I slap at the sand in my shorts and sandals, 

under the crash and roar of the gigantic ocean

and the heated beating of sourceless coconut oil.

Now, I solve for shut eye solitude,

grinning with gull screech and tinny radio.

I suppose gravitational waves pulse this whole globe;

suppose, too, the solution to a math calculation 

depends on when and where that happens,

minutely, less than minutely:

Somewhere a wave breaks in zero time.

Planting Moon

I am walking a small dog who seems eager to go, hell, anywhere.

It's an April evening and windy, 

the dog spooks at what ever sound the world has:

leaves flitting across the road, 

hollow growls from far backyards,

two boys dueling with whiffle bats.

Up against the nearly full moon, six birds are playing circles.

I want to call them hawks, 

squinting, believe they could be eagles, 

then wonder if they are turkey vultures.

Night is taking the berry red stems, lemon colored buds,

one red wing blackbird predicting the next

a hundred meters away.

These are the lyric and chorus 

in a rolling landscape song of the Taconic Hills.

Turkey Dressing

The oven, unreliable, is heated
to three-hundred thirty degrees, 
but in the past you've burned cookie batches,
so the roasting turkey will likely be done too soon.

Choose a pyrex pan that will hold a pound of something,
and without measuring
smear the pan with butter-coated fingers.
Quickly wipe your finger tips
through a folded tea towel several times.

Yesterday, you bought a dozen oysters,
a can of sliced water chestnuts,
a bag of sweet onion, a celery head
and probably-over-priced bread crumbs.

As a child, you would put too much butter on toast.
Set aside the memory and that amount of butter.
Hold two onions whose galaxy shape
makes them excellent spinning tops,
and spin them on the counter until they tilt.
Dice first the last to fall, then the next.

Snap off four ribs of celery and rinse:
this will take time, the ribs overlap along the stalk,
hiding the heart and stiff with resistance.
You must turn off the tap to hear
each celery string sing as it breaks.
Rub your thumb against the white stem
in a slow stream of cold water,
watching the nail bed turn dark pink.
Dice.
In the butter with the onion, in a large skillet, sweat.

A word on heat and attention:
high heat will require constant stirring,
lower heat allows you to crouch down
and answer the dog's inquisitive eyes;
to rise in two-minute intervals and shake the skillet;
to describe to the dog, as best you can, the taste of caramel.

You'll add water and yet more butter
once the vegetables are translucent:
the water should be insufficient, the butter ridiculous. 
Become increasingly resigned, until the mixture boils.
The coated glass dish now holds cubed bread to its brim,
to which you will add the vegetable suspension,
chopped water chestnuts and oysters.  Oh.

Remember back to a time
before you started this dish, its preparation,
that long interlude caring for celery, the sweating.
You would have taken a wet paper bag from the refrigerator.
In the bag rest filthy, spiny oysters in their sea smell, and they are alive.
Before even heating the skillet, above, assemble:

    (2) gloves, gray canvas
    (1) bristle brush
    (1) strong, dull, possibly sacrificial knife

Wearing gloves roughened in the garden,
brush the oyster shells with gusto, under running water
to flush the brown accretions in each niche and slit.
Turn the shells over and over to find the hinge
and examine the black stoniness that washes to blue.
Become relieved in your naive plan for the coming struggle.

Each mollusk demands muscle,
ligaments fighting against the pry of the knife. 
Once you feel a slow easing between shells,
match that change in pressure as the blade
finds what is empty in an oyster. 
During the next eleven battles, will this emptiness into being.

Now the turkey is resting by the flatware.
Place the stuffed pan on the lower oven rack
and doubt for forty-five seconds:
Consider the possible seasonings,
the oyster liquor now thick with onion,
and how dry the bread is:
quickly grab a clean ceramic coffee cup,
splash it half full with cold water,
and toss that in the stuffing, against your doubt.

Close the oven door slowly
and wash the cutting board and knives in hot soapy water.
After the potatoes are mashed, the corn steamed,
around fifty minutes, return to serve.

True Joy

We're about one thousand miles
closer to Florida, the oranges
are twenty cents cheaper
and cold at the grocery store.

I've had to dig hard into the skin,
sniff the citrus mist, sneeze it back out,
get to the sink and slop
my dripping wrists just to eat this

damned delicious fruit.
True joy is a serious thing.
Autumn changes the Reedy
and the scent of its sluice through town.

Cubism is No Longer Necessary

The vermin-perforated mansions
along Old Post Road overlook
our crooked white wood barns,
where we've held close our hay rolls,
sheaves, pigs and pea hens.

We've kept up the ten inch plank sheds
as swallow shelters, shadow boxes
for the aching cows who pluck
down from the slate stuck hills,

and the two or three boarded horses
where there were virtually thousands
penned by fence rails, dilapidated now
around these actual driven withers.

The Odd Kite

You are the red diamond hanging
in the smoky air outside a cafe in Prishtina, Kosovo,
or sticks and blue tissue quickly fallen
into a litter strewn field in Calais.

You are the edge of the world
the way the world's next infant is new,
paper fish bursting into crooked toothed smirks,
shred by bicycle blown hair, shivering moon-like
over bus rides across the East River.

You rise in shrugs to meet sameness,
in arched brows about the alien,
flow like the distribution of value
into pike and perch and plover,

how the geese range through my life
pulling at strands of cloud, at willow,
the smell of corn cooking across the lawn.

G Minor

Since even smoke has a shadow,
the dreamt step is uphill
and wept drops wear a journal
through stone and silt
to the obliterating ocean,

do not allow the beast to be torn from your eyes,
the terrible thing that protects you from the world,
that screams its own beauty, wants to be loosed
and to loose you.

Do not see the world as it is,
a cataract of prettiness, spiny and raw,
the first lovely and naked pain,
how the sky clouding the far hills
becomes the small brown tail of each rough sparrow.

I Have Fewer Names for Things

After a deep and heavy snow,
the exposed red maple leaves
continue to brown and crumble
around our three rough thuja trunks.

My confused grasses craze
across the lawn, sprout then
dry out, try again against
a high sun on this chilled May morning.

I've placed what I think
are slate stones in the azalea bed
with the blooms - are they lavender? lilac?
Plain pale purple is what they are.

But I am truly stumped by the mosses,
almost alien under the north
shadow of the house,
just unmoved green stuff.

Without their magical name
I am powerless.  The day advances
between the rock's carpet
and the rock's flakes.

The World Assaults Itself

This world assaults itself
with growth and death.
All dawns, all dusks
mindless, as one does.

Newtown, CT

Assume a fruit stone
to stand for the massive absence
between the shore of the Housatonic
and this kitchen window.

There's a haunting red garage door
around the corner, lit by night light.
Between there and here,

a demolished house and a razed school,
emptied to its spirits:
those seeds, the innumerable futures
that are now spaces.

Come September, we'll ask,
"Did we go swimming,
and finish the iced tea?

"Did we find fire flies
thick among green cherry leaves
wrapping the edge of the garden
as the night air wrapped our bare arms?"

Will

When you die
I will not marry any of our friends
or move to an enclave in Tempe.
I will buy a Cadillac
and bump its ignorant fenders
against parking lot light poles.
My eye sight will fail
and whole golden rod fields will blur
into daffodils, into chrysanthemums
though I will be standing still.
When you die I will set out the deep fryer
and waffle iron, both crock pots, the jar twister,
can opener, sauce pan and skillet,
like words along the sentence of the kitchen counter,
and I'll prepare the story of nourishment and of loss.
I will be old, even if you die tomorrow,
age faster than the zested limes
deflating in the afternoon sun.
I will dry my anger in small batches,
like you do with slivered almonds
on cookie sheets.
I will fold my sadness slowly into cinnamon.
And one day, after a last
cup of tea with your constant angel,
I'll dismiss him at the front door
with a burnt orange coat
and watch from the porch
as the crows lift him into your sky.

A Species of Relief

Winter is when I find Taghkanic Lake
through leafless alder and oak
or coyote bounding solo
over the cold morning road
while those far homes set hillside
birth dense white, wood burned faith.

There is a species of relief
that is snow on the roof,
sweat on a wool scratched back,
when, part of the body of the bed,
the sky chooses copper
and we begin to talk horizons.

Toward an Art of Change

Mount Katahdin is damp pines at the trail head
where Halloween dawn is lost in cloud cover
and even as my first steps leave the print of my last
I don’t feel like I have begun anything at all.

I am another walker on the forest floor,
the far hills of Maine follow as the vague moon follows,
reminding that I'll measure my days by shadow
and my distance in nothing less than days.

This morning the beeches are bare, the forest hollowed out
across the next swale into the far hazy rise.
If there is a stream to cross, there are a thousand streams,
this one a creek or kill, this one a rill.

I.M. Pei uses limestone to play with approach
and his Miho appears born from the Shiga Mountains,
yet the reception hall at the Louvre is violent
and in it we are damp bone bags to be disgorged.

You will not find yourself in the back hall of the café,
suddenly sauntering under a Le Brun ceiling.
Master Pei shouts sharply if we wander from the path:
there is that Paris; here is this bell jar; only then art.

The galleries are diagrams of acceptable difference:
    your three inches of height, not your 50 pounds of mass;
    your ays, not your arrs;
    your infant, not your daughter or your son;
    your confession, not your absolution.

Working Within piano

I want the radio host to be right
about the importance of sleep
but find myself alive to every nerve jump,
rubbing at ink in my fingerprints while
leaves rustle under a cat padding
just outside the garage door,
a crackling I hear as fried potatos,
hard eggs and toast.

From boiler to washer or radiator,
the hot water ticks as I sometimes
imagine my money ticks
through imagined banks
to flatly make-believe accountants
crediting a year's gone groceries.

I will work the cello within piano
under the violin's lines, back of the house
like I'm rowing or cooking them brunch,
planning future measures, planning
to stop standing so much in the future,
planning to stop the future,
and in the cooling gloam,
a crucial quail song tolls
between that fog effected foxhound bark
and this unbidden tone in the mind.

Entering the Landscape

Corn going to seed steals yellow sun
from the brow of marigold  
and a quilt of silvery lupine.

Across the August afternoon runs 
a humid belly of roiled rain, 
then the tick and pop of hail as ponds pond.

East of Kline Kill, a mown field
grows and will whiten with the next snow,
months away but sure again:
it's yet midsummer.

Littered into this road cut excavation
like the rusted Schlitz cans or rhus vernix,
I have thrown myself into the trees
that now can scream green no louder.

Peripherally Mindful

In the pool open truly
to the yard, sky,
I skim a wind's flippancy of
fir and white pine needles,
a million red maple leaves draped
like tiny apprentices to the past,
one lime-bright locust frond.

What I know of chlorine
makes basic adjustments
to future algae, green and black,
beetles abide, bloated frogs 
tire, turn and float.

The Round Clouds

In dusk as blue as deeply cut muscle,
the clouds that bear her falling body
are round and unrepeating, the way
Botticelli’s colors sounded to Respighi,
whole tones calando.

Humid June air swells between
a million small red maple leaves
when she seems most still,
at night, declining among
the venerable people of the skies.

Sunday

Fly, morning light, from your sycamore escorts,
wash the slate clouds white and ignite
teeming leaves along the marionette willow limbs.

Soon enough, through the darkened barn door,
you'll swell the sweetened hay swaths
to scent our hewn cathedral,

but first, warm this wedge of turf,
put to plough and dug with dung,
ready to bear corn kernels.

How Could I Lose Sight of Beauty?

dangly heron luft
over the northbound freeway
blue brushes on white

a Samba Pa Ti
in ten second note sustain
holds our swaying steps

fabric silhouette
of Queen Ann's Lace wallpaper
taupe against scarlett

loom fingers tap tap
plaited grain through yesterday
today tomorrow