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

Garden

      
       sandsandsandsandsandsand
       sandsandsandsandsandsand     
     sssandsandsandsandsandsandsandd
     ttsandsandsandsandsandsandsandi
     oosandsandsandsandsandsandsandr
     nnsandsandsandsandsandsandasndt
     eedsandsandsandsandsandsandsanddd
     wwisandsandsandsandsandsandsandii
     aarsandsandsandsandsandsandsandrr
     lltsandsandsandsandrocksandasndtt
     lldsandsandsandsandrocksandsanddd
     ssisandsandsandsandrockrocksandii
     ttrsandsandsandsandrockrocksandrr
     ootsandsandsandsandsandsandasndtt
     nnsandsandsandsandrocksandsandd
     eesandsandsandsandrocksandsandi
     wwsandsandsandsandsandsandsandr
     aasandsandsandsandsandsandasndt
     llgrasssandsandsandsandsandsand
     llgrasssandsandsandsandsandsand
     wallstonewallstonewallstonewall
     wallstonewallstonewallstonewall

How Age and Winter Lately

In some hurricane
with a troubled-cat name,
I'm scrying who will hear from me
a mindless tuneless whistle.
I've split the furniture
one patio set of my brain from another,
an old rail fence from the next desk.

It is the full moon
who assumes he know the forest,
even as his light lessens and is lost
over the course of narrowing crescents,
then returns chastened to wax
cracking into late autumn cold.
Leafless sycamores wave warning
in the ghostly snow of moonlight on earth.

Birches snapped three storms ago, we lost locusts
last year when the beech crown came down.
The owner of the pond took it with him
when he died about a month ago:
His daughter saw him walk on it the night he died.
I had to steal from Dali what sky I could paint.

Perception Into Intuition

This is not the whole story,
but more than food or phones,
geese in flight draw my eyes
away from the road, driving
to the cement block office
or some lush deciduous park,
its cold, moss-split stream falling
over the clef and staff of sedimentary stone.

And the moraine is not a whole story,
with granite and lime to one side,
black composite asphalt
coating the oak and ivy lined loop
up to the stick-built home,
where we reluctantly take firm steps
to ease the children 
from time's periphery into being people,
as distractive and astonishing
as if they'd taken flight.

In the picture book of our tale,
you’d see photons chip away at my skin
and know how the insulating details escaped
into a leaf-filtered sitting room,
the dust of inattention drifted in jackets
over chair backs and a week's stacked mail,
and, eyes glancing across my shoulder,
you'd noticed a drawing of goose down.

I incorrectly recall my life
as the life of the moon's atmosphere,
my empty night now packed with chlorophyll day,
the slantless unimpeded sunlight
burning into Taghkanik Hills, and if asked
will swear I had taken a cool morning cruise,
along which I thought only of love and
how to tell when love needs a teller.

Personal Ritual Sacrifice

Coyote-footed night swirls in
on swift dry clicks of oak leaves
dancing for the mustard sunset.

There's no telling what
I'm prepared to do with the vacant field,
fenced against lopers and trotters,
now navigated best by bats.

White tails will graze long after dawn tomorrow,
and rust-banded woolly bear caterpillars
flow into winter on sap's slowing tide.

I'll tell you the devices
of the spell I've etched in creek water,
if you promise to panic,
burn me at the stake, noon.

An Economy of Souls

Setting aside what you may think,

this water evaporating from their west

to precipitate over your east coast, you drink,

and bathe in what rises from their south sea

to course through your north mountain feeders.

 

Just so, as they there hunger, we grow weak;

when you have no home, he feels such cold;

she sleeps in fever, and you dream our demons.

Each wears the other's surplus clothes.

The shot and unburied bodies blot against our skin.

 

Understand: we breathe the same,

the same particles of air, as each breathes.

No distance stands between us, no difference. 

I plead for passage, you are my path past death,

to heaven, as I am yours.

I Am the Only Means of Escape

On this planet where starlight turns pink,
I capture a fleet Kelley's lily and amber rose,
a butterfly bush, burned and bright,
under the green frond-fringed bluebell sky.

Each mud or brown moss step differs
for distance against the evaporated canvas
of heat and fog in long morning air.

Soon an alien August sun
brooks low enough, bounding glare,
to toll the further tread into autumn,
hinting that least winter gray night
is warmer than weak light.

I advance on the fastening frost,
my red maples turn brilliant crimson,
sweet birches golden yellow,
sourwoods turn brick red,
all the yellow buckeyes orange.

Vance, Keeper of Earthquakes

My buddy Vance is a pipe-fitter.
He'll hang a handrail, yeah,
but he's certified to sweat 
copper, silver and stainless.

Vance got a gig across the state line
from Leatherstocking
on the north PA shale shelf
running gas rig hydraulic drills.

The family stays back at Catskill
so he takes his time off at the tavern.
Like migrant pay, he says, isn't it,
while the pockets are pumped out,

the kids make it into middle school
and Vance smokes seven dollar-
a-pack shit cigarettes real slow
since there's no rush to retire.

We expect some Elmira coroner
will open Vance up eventually,
either his heart or lungs gone,
and find the destruction of Dimock.

In Fog We Keen

In fog we keen to passing flax sails
stretched across the shoulders of a gale,
though wheeling tern and gull cry
with our same sea-washed throats,
reason slit insensate as coral slices sodden skin.

We only know the shallow world by spasmed reach,
where turtles are swift beasts,
where slicked green feeds the spark of trevally,
and granite crevice clamps on ballast sunk
unclaimed by half-beings, we hoarders of need.

Were your seafarers cast aside?
Perhaps we wanted those untended fires in the wind;
wanted more the roaring angels of wind,
who arrive by spar and cloth; or further,
the purpose of those angels, destination.

Variation on a Theme

                               - after W. S. Merwin

Thank you for the spare hair
holding the sword and the hard
hat reminder held crown height
for the corners of cinder block
or gypsum board from where
I have walked hiccupping grace
for the lawn cut away from the stone path
that creeps into the copse détente
of cherry and fir and the rotted poplar
feeding the irrepressible beasts
thank you for the festooning
laundry that starts in gift boxes goes
to rumpled poses and carries my daily crumbs
the invisible burbling code of bone
marrow become fluid blood
guiding my hands to tea
for the tea as heater tea as healer
the lingual turn from loud cantina crowd
to crow blatant on the road

This Bird, Some Time, That Road

Just west of Tuxedo,
Wildcat Mountain weathers
midsummer with dry brook beds,
our line of cars driving wily past
Indian Kill Lake peels a few locals
off to Pumpkin Hill Road
and the rest roll down to Warwick,
weaving deceleration.

Shoulder-side, a green racer escapes
ess-wise to the nearby
jagged granite wall.

Something happens, not grand:
a solid ripple rolls bright green
through the pond where the May
goslings needed no help hatching,
the grounded tercel feeds on
a frankly red and stringy squirrel,
bland, sufficient as the reedy
crane dipped knee-deep in bracken,
calm as the white kitten
sitting like a teed ball on the lawn.

A killdeer plover struts stiffly
across her widow's walk of river stone,
no fooling now.

At Hood River, chaparral heat shoos
rattle snakes into the cool streets.
I see an owl settle  where
some restless rodent didn't,
the rattlers too hot to hunt.
I am here to find an old man,
whom I will pull with the horn of my beak
through the bones of my feet
to fill my future skin and skull.

Not So Much Your Suicide

Winter grit gets kicked inside and
glitters at the open door's edge
where my shadow passes your death,

its truth how I hold the turned handle,
strip off this thin denim
and flinching, narrowed hood,

face unfurling before the rowed
pots of soaking cut begonias and
the estimable days they'll have.

I am dismayed more by belligerent
Spring, clinging first to the fresh earth,
where I'll fight for my next foot steps,

my weight of lessening consequence.