Resolution and memory:
She refused to go outside on ice-covered pathways, snows lovely but not be be navigated,
She withered in the starts & stops of approaching spring,
Fretting in summertime about the growing,
And only
Settling into winter
After her red-orange autumns
Fade into
What carries from the prairie:
The incessant search
For great opening spaces, where
Love lives
Amid all balance.
Get in the ditch when the plains sky gets green
Let your night vision click in
Listen to the bullfrogs
Wave at the neighbors,
Be aware of your periphery.
Listen to yourself, dear,
Auntie said, maybe she spoke of love,
And trust your gut
And say thank you
For more fireflies this season
Always watch the sky
Smell the earth & air—
My iteration of how
I have to try to live,
My lessons, just blooming
More somehow, amid
A million other
Beautiful ones
I so want
To hear.
I search for a peaceful place
No one will find it for me
No one will define it for me
No one will deter me
I take in my place here
I take in my life,
Its colors and textures
And stepping away,
Into the great mystery
It is all of it
Just a peace
A piece
Air and shadow
That stay as we depart.
The Dipper
Orion’s Belt,
My frail self says, oh
No one will believe me in
My clarity, but
You have to believe me,
The sky with its incomprehensible points
Infinite sketches of
Ancient knowledge,
Their assessments & guides
And the frogs, they’re quiet.
It’s hot.
Dew point to be wrestled
With and all the rest
But no matter,
I tell you there is constancy
Wonder
And the comforting homeostasis
Of the momentary right
I don’t think that I can know
Only feel.
All is well?
Maybe?
Does a nanosecond count?
We ride into the future on the wings of
Present harbingers
Skyways, shifts of light, the ambience
Of a moment caught outside
One found in days of just escaping
I think we’d all best breathe in
Miracles, whenever, wherever and
I can smell the rain and
Loam breaths
Near-rise in miasma as I glance
Around, beyond
Beyond, and back to then and now.
Breathing in the outside
And listening to the thunder.
Got a message from the pre-heat-dome sky
Just now, as I alit for a moment
Pausing to feel
Not meaning to be trite
But doing what all old farmers do,
And turn my head, sniff the sky, search it too,
I was on the front porch, east to the lake.
The west wind came right up, blowing my greys
And as I came in to fix a bit of dinner,
The light from the west called me back to the
Door out into my gardens,
The soon-solstice sky that I saw and felt
Already coloring lush this vesper
Lovely, harbinger of solstice.
I arrive in the twilight
Watching night coming on
Things shape now into a
Newly-unknown reality.
Not a light on the patio
Save the lowered gleam of
My phone
Gunnar on the edges,
Going out onto patrol
As twilight gives way
Fireflies
Meanwhile,
Spare, barely noticed—
The hummingbirds have gone to bed
Bullfrogs quiet and sonorous—
A drop of rain
A drop of rain
A drop of rain
Gentle
On this bounty
I won’t ever tip us out
Of our little sailing moonshadow
Seems the rocky seas do
Rock us
Gently now.
