December in the Last Quarter

Outside the wind is blustery, steady, serious.

I hear it, I remember

That if I don’t, I‘ll miss it.

I think about how hard I’ve been trying,

So long, diligent, worrying

About everything, and now

I choose my life,

It isn’t going to be just sitting here

In the garden, on the icy winter paths

Fussing about the dailiness,

To finally, tethers loosed,

Breathe in beginning spring,

Though the old place is like a best friend:

If I go off for a bit,

I’ll still come home to this haven.

In the late winter my sister and I

Will be traveling again.

We do well together in the car

And it’s time for us to wander some,

Sort out this last season.

I don’t think there

Are many lessons one can learn and share

Except that the road says

Where have you been?

The path says, yeh,

Where have you been?

These questions pop up like thorns,

In the space created when there aren’t

Decades remaining.

Anyway, insights don’t come often.

Wind, voices of the sailing currents,

Rattling, gentling the brighter air, the snowy roar, the still,

These things will not come again.

Aho

Wait

Outside in unsettled early winter dark

The hunters return to their pickups

Parked sideways along now-brittle corn rows.

They’ve been hunting, while

Dogs sit on my feet when they hear the gunshots.

I would sit on someone’s feet too, but

This is the ritual

As fall beckons into winter,

Up here, out there, and

Not sure, of course, but

Didn’t some of us already know this?

We just sit back and thank our gifts of age,

Try not to get hijacked by all these

Urgencies coming at us.

Can someone tell me

Why I am disturbed?

I saw the sky and watched

As the west claimed the sunset line

And I wondered if

At least the horizon might stay the same.

Now, Bobby works his fields,
As darkness

Precludes the hunt.

The headlamps of his combine shine

Into my kitchen,

The late cutting

Somehow a comfort.

Thinking and giving up to feeling,

I decide to hold on to

The things I understand.

The wind comes up,

This season bolts in fits and starts

Into what it knows, and I realize,

These things are not about the struggle

They are about the light.

Rothko

On waking:
Dream still fertile,
Two planes in one
Endless landscape,
Colors of soil and moss
And that is all. 

Do I have the right
To tell another to live?
The waiting eternal
Comforts us.
I believe this.

Defining, I look out
At ancient,
Sanctified ground,
Where beyond, in grey daylight,
Blue jays flit,
Bolts primary
Against russet-red maple,
Jeweled green-dressed trees
Yet to change
Behind the red
Barn roofs below,
Season's decay golden
In the garden,
The aboriginal dying
Returned to

Soil, moss.

Season

Autumn winds

Don't know quite how 

They want

To blow, and actually 

They don't 

Blow as much as

Start and stop, trying

To ascertain the 

Velocity

Of the season oncoming,

But of course no one really

Knows in these strange
Times, and anyway 

Even if we listen to these

Winds, we can't figure out 

If they are hammer, howl, 

Pass-on-through or 

Float back into

The gentle of the snow

Soon to come,

The question is 

Just when 

And truth is now

That no one knows. 

Good Night from South Bend

            September 23

Across morning's early fall fields

Where summer-sleek cattle

Fold themselves down onto

The turning earth

Sea gulls swoop under

Lowering grey clouds

Full of waiting rain

In the distance I see

The Amish farmer, clad in

Black work clothes,

His straw hat near-gold in

An unexpected shaft of sunlight

That disappears back into

The vast roil of nimbus as

Quickly as he does,

Ducking into his barn,

Shouldering harness

Ephemera, all of it,

Passing whole in my

Sidelong glance,

Wending west, going home.

Coming Home

           

            For Aunt Gretchen

Behind the old dream,

Arriving autumn sun drops early

Behind maples and the orange Octobers.

Driving home from town,

The halo lingers, sun slanting in behind

The western ridges, and

Across the road into the village.

The canopy is up-lit gold,

Branches bending across

The two lanes, like

A trip into the fairy world.

Far away old longings waft,

Slight breezes in the

Change of seasons, and

The homeostasis settles.

Not that it is the right or happy

Place, but it

Is the known, and

Breathing deep and quiet

In the pulsing night

The what might have been

And what might be

Is as alive

As anything, is

Not confined to

Any present, and enduring.

I hum an indistinct tune,

Recalling what she said to me

As I departed home, for home:

Listen to yourself, she said.

I search for sleep, filing 

Tomorrow’s tasks, and weary; and

Suddenly it all

Makes perfect sense.

Many Ways of Landscape

Trusting that the
Cache of iterations
Takes shape
Finally after time
And tears,

The landscape:
Heart
Contour
Texture
Scent
Longing
Remembrance

Writing on it,
I begin to
Reassemble.

Protect

She talks me down from
The angry tree; remember,
She says,
Seneca is our female
Self, rich and nourishing.

Remember to take
What We Protect
And channel it into
This stream of life,
Water is life, and
Mother nourishes.

Seneca reminds:
Ancient (weathers storm)
Deep (harbors dream)
Mighty (endures strife).

There, up there
The Dipper is faint
Perhaps just the way of the
Stars aligning

In the mostly dark sky
North north west
Nothing reveals
But a singular way forward

Lovely
Seneca Lake across the
Hector Backbone, while finding
Me, needing less than
The geography here

Just at my psychic home
On the western edge.

Balancing

Escaping the tyranny of the
Necessary fight
I come to sit outside

Here, in some larger grace
In this long twilight
I could not possibly engineer, and meanwhile
The shred of sun turns
To a tangerine slice

Tucked in the far spruce hedge.
I watch as the grey sky settles
And gazing, I remember the
Light

Light

Be the best
And closest to who
you can be

Let the odd bits be themselves
Enough and true,
Little whole worlds as

The mystery seems close;
Might just be when we
Say goodbye we
Think for an eternal moment
On those we love, and
How hard we tried
On the long rich trip.

Late July

This is all there is to making
Sense:
I walk out the back
Door
And I smell the lilies from the far
Back barn beds
And walking towards
The heady pull of
Life we don't script
We just hope and wait
I feel the expanding universe
Come to meet me,
I set my wine on the stone
Walls with
Lilies cloaking my shoulders
I look at the colors of the
Perfect world
And despite the truth I know
The balance blooms and
I am calm,
Replenished for the struggle.

Grace

I glance at heart-beating sky,
Pansies giving up evening scent to sunset's peach.

Last spring we tore away the
Cottonwoods invading pond's banks,
Our Edenic glade opening then to
Raw, the earth, stones,
And survival roots.

Now, you know, distress fades
Into deep knowing, and
In the near new distance
A feeling opens without demanding logic.

Color rises into the western ether
And night closes, so soon
Ago the solstice, and
Dreams and currents,
Sweetness
Float
Un-tethered, the

Streaks beyond the forest
Going to pink, and settling, quiet,
Over Seneca's valley.

Snapshot

Go! I say,
My voice breathy, urgent,
Rounding the corner
Coming down from the night-dark hills,
Sending up a word
To God about
The small
Animals
Darting in my
High beams,
Their eyes like little
Landing lights
On some upstate
Back road
Runway
Home

Motherland

Move away just a bit:
Watch while you
Find yourself where your heart
Tells you you're
Going.

Tides roil,
Skies change strangely,
Looking for future
You'll never see,
All that's left
Is
Your heart
Looking for the way out

Sunday Night

What have you retained,

Looking at early spring lace, trees 

Against sunsetted sky?

You search for odd, old connections,

Those you assumed when the world behaved.

There is horizon and

The gift of view;

Not even speaking metaphorically,

It feels almost undiscovered,

This reliable newness, comfort of a season giving way,

Tho’ it has always been so.

Tonight, and in last nights,

A new world arrives,

Birthed from winter;

Promised by winter

It has been coming, in fits and starts.

Like her people, the new

Earth and her sojourners

Can't keep from trying:

Rising Earth, we bloom and strive.