Finding Cranes

Last night, an old friend said

She thought she and another old friend

Would go out finding cranes.

I imagine, remembering that.

We go to a rutted road along the river

It is not a farm road,

Nor a river road.

It hugs the Platte,

Overlooks a very old cottonwood that

Was downed in a storm,

And lashed not to sky

But to earth

And over time enough

Jutted a perch over the

River,

Where the

Children toddled and looked at the

Wide world there.

As years moved on

We went to watch for the cranes

When they came back

In the chilled and stubbled spring

Sometimes still frozen.

Maybe we never realized

They went away.

In some ways, they really do not go away.

The thickets on the river bank, young cottonwood,

Maybe chokecherry,

Tufty grass, and tiny blue wild daisies

And sky enough to settle

All these years on

Remember me

To then.

We had to listen, and be still

Sometimes to almost hold our frosty breaths

We had to hope we’d find the spot they

Found

The cranes,

Their darkening skies returning

Finding home

Keeping Light

Straying toward light at late day's end,

Room warm, suffused,

The intensity of lowering illumination on the book's page

Making the words impossible to see

And the images, looking up, 

Impossible to apprehend in their blinding fade

Mostly

The man sleeps, exhausted,

On the small chaise,

Working unmitigated hours and

Not really knowing what the next chapters might be.

His snoring tells me

He is away, 

Returned to whatever unclaimed 

Pinnacles and unsettled battles in the 

Woodlands and swampy marshes

His wild mind discovers in this, his other 

World, his far, chaotic realm,

And I gaze on the vulnerable him,

Trying to remember love and passion,

And finding just some deep repose 

Of knowing:

Pity and regard in the twisted crosshairs of long enduring,

Shredded with hope and leavened by

The magic light.