Resolving

On a night in the time of

Christmas, we sit after midnight in 

A room surrounded by the 

Belongings of our dead, 

And oh there is comfort

And the fire flickers messages

That all of those we know 

And cherish and pray for

See, in their fires.

Still,

There is no 

Special message, save in

This one, in this ending year:

My relatives, I pray for you,

I think upon your lives, and mine,

I join your hopes and your praying

And I too build my fires, 

And I too watch, as in this 

Eternal, everlasting flicker,

Pulling us all back to 

Essential,

Goodness and mercy,

Striving all the days of our lives,

We arrive here, 

Here in this 

New Year.

Solstice Eve

So I came out tonight to sit in this 

Christmassed conservatory, 

The tree near-perfect but for bare spots,

We all grow and have our bare spots.

Paper whites blooming here, and 

Summer stragglers building to next spring,

Rosemary in pots,

Hibiscus

And jasmine maybe, bougainvillea 

That I brought in for winter.

And out here, in a small pot

A peacock's feather and a very small 

Painting, from Haiti,

In the painting the children are

Playing with swords. 

Our friend brought us these things.

He wrote history about Haiti, fiction,

Voudon, and 

About France.

And I put the peacock feather

Into the small pot,

With tall curly twigs

I've kept because they're so pretty

And a year or two later, lo, the twigs

Had small, pale mossy leaves on them

Airborne, quite literally, no 

Living medium except air's alchemy

Nurturing organics of the earth that every

Spring time bloom,

And so ten years on, I will not 

Change much, or mess with this

Infinitesimal grand plan thriving 

In a certain light

In a certain place in this old

Farmhouse, knowing,

Finally, as I do here in this mystery 

That I am but a nanosecond, 

Just passing through.

December Sadness

I walk away and I think a little bit,

I think about the horrid

State of affairs in the world and 

How I cry and pray

How I try to hold

Whatever my constellation is

Together 

I find myself in this strange, urgent prayer,

And not necessarily suddenly, but 

All of a sudden something else 

Joins that supplicating reverie, 

And becomes

As alive as all the other transcendent pleas: 

Walk through my door.

Say hello, say goodbye, I really

Don't care; just

Walk through my door.

The dark grows longer 

Even as the light begs

Embracing. 

I struggle as best I can, but 

The closer I get to mortality,

The more I feel the 

Longing setting in.

Tomorrow I'll fume about

The dogs, the slick roads 

Really reasonable and stressful things,

Knowing somehow 

I'm hijacked.

The Calm Before the Storm

Some nice weather moving in tonight.

I let go my worry while I keep to prayers, 

For everywhere else I turn a 

Blizzard, now tornado,

Blizzard, as I mentioned,

But here the splattering rain.

Reserving the 

Right to complain, 

Because when it doesn't go well and 

Wind blows against the house,

Hard rain comes through the ceiling,

Snowdrifts darken the windows and 

The progress to the barn

I am become disoriented. 

Shall I let the elements create here? 

After all, I'm just passing through,

Or can I just complain?

Right now, sure steady rain,

A hint of wind, manifesting

On the metal roofs, as 

I sit here listening, feeling

The this of wind and rain, an 

Ancient dance

Over and through the land and heaven.

I peer out my back windows, deep into 

The forest's inky night 

Across the Finger Lakes 

And beyond, beyond my vision or 

Any hint of one single thing but sky, 

Hundreds of miles way outside my 

Ken give way to cities, speed limits, 

Signs and confusions I'll 

Encounter as I wend my way through 

Outcroppings on my way to home.

It is time to think about

Home. Other people may 

Describe it, but

When I start out, quietly

Backing out my drive,

Closing off the static, mindless chatter,

When I decide to figure out

What it is I cherish, save 

My flesh and blood,

It does come down to 

Home.

Now, define it in your private

Heart, your own solitary gaze towards 

Where you formed. Strip away the

Years, go home, and birth again from

Your decent ground of being,

The one you recognize when you see 

A familiar line of sky,

Glimpsed above some treetops, 

Your city block,

Your early sunrise in a 

Neighborhood that sleeps,

Your prairie, mountains, buttes, 

Your rivers,

Trusting without knowing 

That you're home for

All of us, for all of them, for

A nanosecond, maybe less, so 

Make it rich, verdant, fertile, fertile

Dirt enough to carry blooming 

Into all that we don't know.

The rain. It should be snowing now,

Snowing on December's verge,

But at my age, I don't 

Have much time 

Left for the art of

Making bargains.

An Early Homesick

Oh, young, 

We went 

Among the 

Cranes, each voice different

When we stopped talking 

And listened, and idling,

We'd hear their voices.

And dark the daylight sky,

With them

Those birds, 

Returning, thickening prairie's 

Endless horizon, and

Stopping that sky

With bird song,

Bird talk, ancient.

Gather, they said,

We come home. 

No Certainties

Outside the November light blues

The approaching dark, winter's

Short sapphire twilight punctuated by 

A streak of gold underlining 

The western sky, along the indistinct 

Horizon.

It is time to change the order now, 

More necessary as my

Time runs out; 

Time, contrarily the parabola's fixed point,

And as the universe reorders, I am moving, 

Wondering how the pictures in my

Head will come alive, where they'll 

Dovetail, full-circling into light

November wondering. 

Now

Sometimes 

I feel a little unstable, doing the stuff
That's right, 

I'm getting old, 

Rough, hoping for a
Rough beauty, so
I guess it's best to move
On into this
Kicking crying 

Screaming wondering

Where she was all those years
Place,
Find a visceral voice, 

Not sure,

Quite, how yet.

I do know that 

To realize and say,

Just say it,

Love it, and 

Do it is entirely up to

Each of us, all of us, knowing it's 

A long corner, long slow corner
To turn, and whether we make it

Can't be known.

Who cares, anyway, really, who dares?
Just feel this precious moment 

Leave a voice, a tear, a handprint on

This earth, her water and sky, 

We are gone in a heartbeat, 

Like water around rock.

Mni Wiconi

October Meditation on a Red Eye

Tonight I took the clips 

Out of my hair,

The clips that hold it 

Tidy and presentable,

I took them out and wound a band

To hold a ponytail for sleep.

I swept my fingers up 

To catch the strands,

And, just accidentally, in 

An errant movement in a

Familiar nighttime ritual I gouged 

Ring finger straight into left eye,

And before I could say, 

How very stupid,
The burst vein bloodied rich and deep, 

The flooded eye a fright.

I thought to myself, arch, deprecating,
Oh, your carelessness has 

Made quite a costume 

For this scary season coming on, tho 

I have long hated Halloween.

And yet, here comes the glowing fall,
Trees' leaves in final brilliance 

Before the skies grey into snow, 

And it's the season of my birth.

Tonight rain pummels hard upon the

Metal roof and roves its vents, 

Coming in unwanted here and there, 

But I don't care anymore,

I just move the paintings 

And the furniture, 

And otherwise the towels do.

It occurs to me, 

In the dark night-lit velvet of 

Our uncurtained bedroom, 

As I'm writing this

That there's no such thing as 

Perfection in this life. 

We bear our wounds and imperfections,

Our shelter seeps and creaks from

Time's demands,

And more often than not 

We learn too late how 

We've wasted the psychic gift of 

Rising far above the mundane glories
We think we need

To live a life worth living, 

Though serenity was waiting.

I'm approaching seventy. 

I have no framework for 

What this means, so far,

Save sorrow, fury, and 

The fear I'll be irrelevant.

But persistence and the force of 

The energy I've been given

Hammer hard on my resisting soul, 

Like this rain upon my roof:

I make a promise to myself 

That I'll search the snowy woods 

Of this last quarter, and 

Hold fast to the resplendent vision

That snows will guild 

The forests' branches and 

Sprinkle silver as the dusk descends

Into unending skies. 

And anyway, 

I can't go back,

I cannot turn away, and though 

I may not wish to understand,

I am the coming change.

A Small Lament

Perfect imperfect, awareness
Dawns uneasily and
It seems that the ancient
Script says dismiss
Though sometimes it says accept —
Perhaps more awaits an excavation

In the march, Alpha and Omega,
I stop to ask myself:
Did you really need all this
Time that compresses now,
Races to a finish that can't be
Comprehended, just to
Figure out that in the end
It's human nature to regret?

Meanwhile this nature seems to
Right itself into rhythms
So primordial,
So much older than I can
Ever be in my allotted speck that
October runs ruinous morning glories
Over hedges starved for rain
Earlier in this drought,
And honeysuckle climbs like it is
June in a bursting, watered summer

Oh, I know the frost is coming
Just as these blooms take off,
The frost is coming,
That frost I dreaded
And hoped would never
Come has come already and
Now is mine, and
Just as all these
Things arise to boom, and
Despite what colors burst
Atop my pergola and riot
In the autumn ditches,
Now, oh now,
I am turning older.

All Things Must Change

I step away from mayhem,

And the fear about what 

Lies ahead, 

I walk outside to look around, 

The hinges on the paddock gate

Are rusty, and two old goats 

Are waiting for their apples

In the lean summer's end,

Yet one that brought some bounty,

Butterfly bushes and bee balm still

Making presence known in the early 

Dimming twilight of approaching fall,

A few coral flowers on the trumpet vine.

I'll fix some dinner and think about 

What is coming on this winter,

I'll worry about friends on

Northern plains, and fret about the

Dying animals and loss of species,

About injustice and 

The heartlessness that

Too often eats the souls of those 

Who live among us, 

I'll pray because it helps and 

Makes me feel better.

Time to start the evening meal,

Chop garlic from the garden 

Into fine and sticky slivers

To sautée with onion, and 

Then decide, as I'm going along, 

What's next, because this is 

The way I've always done it. 

Prayer

I am acquainted with trauma,

And under this quiet, dark night sky,

I also understand that

There is a world

Of bravery, the beauty of

The unknowing knowing of 

Resistance, the stance that says

You can't do this anymore. 

It's not just the global, 

The beautiful stand on

Northern plains, and beyond, far

Out there those 

Waterways, the 

Far archipelagoes,

Far fjords, the

Far cry to world,

Far plea, 

It's also

Echoing grievances, 

Ancient things we hardly

Can find the words for,

Slights, and all that terrible

Bullying, 

And in the primal logic 

Here it all returns

To make a local stand.

We are human family,

We thrive, grieve,

We struggle and 

Are we,

Are we

Turning a corner?

I think, and I let go 

The weeping prayer, and

I cry out, please,

Yes.

Mni Wiconi

Reverie

Driving on the country road

I looked down and saw my

Teal blue pants and 

Atop, the turquoise of my tunic, 

A sudden shift and we were

Walking on the Mall

In another life,

Summer heat puffing up from pavement,

Slim navy teal blue skirt 

Floating about my legs, 

Turquoise shirt with pale russet 

Flowers, in retrospect peonies, 

I think,

Peonies, 

Short sleeves rolled up, cuffed, 

And collar slightly standing.

I wore sandals bought in Paris,

Fifteen years I wore them.

But none of this is necessary

Save to manifest when 

We were young, 

And improbable was possible, 

Color setting off the cascade

Of his arms, his energy and wit,

His red hair and his recklessness.

Driving on the country road 

Those days and months with him 

Collapsed into a second's pause 

On time's ever-shortening path:

There in the empty seat beside me,

In that tan plaid flannel shirt 

He loved to wear,

He sat, alive and present 

As anyone could be,

"Here beside you," he said to me,

And vanished into memory.

RIP David 1950-2007

Drought Summer

Outside the night drips
Un-rained rain, as I wait for
The promise of deluge,
Knowing that it
May come or it may not.

I come to see the perseids,
But the sky is filled with smokey
Galleons bearing sacred water,
Along with tufty nighttime clouds, and
Grey wisps, grey brush strokes in
Canopy's infinite, mysterious palate,
And I can't see many stars.

These clouds, though,
They float above me as I question,
Looking for the ages' answers,
They float above the singing
Bullfrogged pond,
Above my garden, where
The story is persistence,
Roots digging deep into our
Mother Earth, deep in search of water.

Today I mowed anticipating
Deluge and on a few brief
Occasions in my mowing reverie
Rain split the beating sun with large
Orbs glinting as they pelted me,
But I didn't run for any cover,
Rain the only necessary.

I thought, today, I've only
Mowed this place three times
In this stern exacting summer,
Drought says, I am
Harbinger if you're not
Careful, and so I stop to praise
The light in every sunset,
The glint of drop on leaf and bough,
The smell of relief when
Earth receives some blessed rain.

It's not so gorgeous this summer,
Truth be told, and though
I'm doing all I'm able to,
To care for what I have here, to
Care for what I love,
I have to excavate my deepest knowing,
And in the infinite comfort of
Believing that this all makes some
Connected sense, heart beating life
Thrumming one to one on the
Eternal way to All,
I find myself asking, with
Certainty fringed by hope and question,
Doesn't beauty always shine
In reality's relief?

Finding

Here the Dipper

Here the inexplicable sky

Here the bullfrogs

Here the fox,
Coyote,

Gulp, my brother frog

Sing, my tree frog sisters,

Praise, my starry Milky Way,

Spangling into my infinity,

My unknown.

Oh magnificent symphony,

This night, these stars, these

Far-off layers of lives elsewhere,

We are infinite; 

The bullfrogs say so,

And as I sit, spellbound in night,

Up there 

The stars shine into their 

Most perfect and 

Impossible.

The Family Visit

Down the road the dogs

Are yipping in the heat that finally

Gives in to dusk's respite, and above in

The great dome of heaven another

Jet heads towards Europe, across the

Maritimes, and then the vast Atlantic.

There's little traffic, though,

Here in these skies. Long ago

Someone taught me to read 

The angle of ascent, hear

The singular whirs of engines,

Watch the swoop of direction as 

Taking off, the pilots 

Change the headings, all 

Clues to destination.

Now in these days they made 

To come in the United States, 

This cauldron of unrest and strife,

Fear covering the land like nettles

And neighbor against neighbor, all

Common sense jettisoned to

The uncertainties that heat and dust 

And drought and apocalyptic rains call

From the unsettled knit of elements,

And after all, we're imperfect beings,

Which means we should be scared. 

Now in these days I make to prepare 

The home in the United States

For the ancestors' children's children

Who come because from the homeland

Long ago this is the place that called 

To some of them:

Opportunity, love, adventure,

Solace or escape. 

And there were those who stayed behind; 

I dare say some of these are stories 

We may never really know.

And anyway, 

What a gift they're bringing,

Our family, from across the roiled Atlantic,

They come because somewhere abroad

This place is beacon still. 

They come to bond with us and share 

Ourselves. 

They come with fresh eyes open,

They come because there still is time 

To have some impact  

In the slim shallows of what in life is 

Unexpected and unknown.

The way it's always been,

The way this story goes.

 

Adjusting Attitude

My old friend's old dog is dying.

The world beyond my small dirt patch

Spins so wildly I don't care 

To try to understand,

For now, and 

I forgot a special task,

Neglected to pay a past due bill, 

And sometimes sit, bewildered,

Wondering if it's just me

Or if the axis tilts a bit

In search of beauty's balance. 

A few spots of rain have greened 

The sere view outside my doors, while

Down the road my neighbor hays

His fields, and soon he will be baling.

There is respite in small moments.

I sit outside and listen to the bullfrogs,

And my old dog of fifteen years

Lopes across the straggly lawn to the 

Pond where bullfrogs call. I 

Watch an ordinary sunset start to slip 

And glow golden, fiery, 

Down behind the spruces that screen

My neighbor's fields, and 

Hummingbirds arrive with their little 

Motors revving at the 

Feeder Peter's tied with red ribbon.

In this minute, two, five or more,

I am aware of homeostasis, 

And in this moment I can say I'm 

Thankful:

All is well.

Birthday in a Drought Year

Night dry as ancestors' bones

Parched back into earth,

They return, the ancestors,

We all return in time,

After our sliver of shining light

Flickers and we go to stars.

I step outside to sniff the scent

Of linden, perfuming a thirsty 

Landscape; it comforts me and

In the velvet night I can't see 

The brown, once-green stretch now lit

By fireflies out towards the pond, 

It's very low.

But linden never fails to arrive with

Its reminder that for a few short weeks,

No matter what, 

I will be transported by its heady smell,

Balance in a world sometimes careening,

A few short weeks of balance 

And perfection.

In the nighttime sky the moon hangs 

Sceptered, and there's a hint of

Rain. Far across the rolling

Western miles,

My friend, dear of my teenaged heart,

Pinches herself and

Wonders how it can be

That this is the eve of her 

Seventieth birthday. 

It doesn't do that I tell her

That she's beautiful

And wise, that her gifts enrich 

Each soul whose path she crosses,

And she's struggling a little, though

I know she will arrive at her resolve and

Bloom into new glory 

In her own sweet time, just

As linden's gifts reappear and remind

That while roots go earth-bound deep, 

When seen through branches redolent of

Lime, berry and ambrosia, 

The sky glows ravishing anew.

I wonder when we start returning,

And when the body, rich and pulsing,

Flesh and blood, fears and dreams

Starts to turn to face a brighter light? 

For some of us, we've decades left; 

I think my wondrous friend 

Has decades left, and

No matter what, I am joyful for her,

Grateful for long years,

Our long connection.

Reckoning in a Country Garden

I've been here before,
In past years' ever-changing solstice light
A little unbalanced, I suppose
But I have always been moving
And maybe that's what
This still-point means: to understand
This life is always moving,
Always dreaming and awakening.

Perhaps it's less a reckoning,
More my vision about
The way things ought to be.
So I search for accord, and in
The solstice coming now,
Harvest of persistence, a
Pause in motion in a
Strange unfolding
I see there's much awaiting,
I see some things will change.

Last night I looked up at the sky,
And earlier I'd heard the
Voices of the wind while planting.
And in the winds through
Sere dry grass today, and
Rustling through my dry land garden,
Breeze comes cool
Across my cheek.

In this evening's late and unremitting heat
The sky begins to shift to magic light,
And a promise births:
I will keep my grateful going.

Not Quite June

I watched the sky grow dark

As it closed off some 

Old hang ups, 

Like, am I understood or good enough?

But really, what those others think is 

Not of my will or ken,

It is how they choose 

The order of this life.

I am flawed, as are we all, 

And rather than

Exhausting myself

On anything save what I love

I intend to watch the sky and stars

For signs I may have missed, and

Though I may not yet understand 

Just what it is that I am seeing, 

I am the better, moving

Into this, some strange new light,

And I must say, 

It's been awhile

Since I have seen horizon.

Blue Ridge in the long twilight

All of a sudden the light

gentles down

and stillness rises like a

soft hymn

from a ground laid with

long fence shadows

like lattice 

under red bud canopy.

How is it that time stops,

minutes no longer meted out?

Heartbeat slows to deepest calm

leaving space for ancient breath, for

here, creation deemed

perfection, and 

in a vast moment of 

homeostasis

I understand

the wanderer is home.

Once long ago

in the days before the flood

we stayed the hours to watch the moon 

rise giddy on the hillside,

though I am not really sure

that it was us.

We sat atop the fragrant mound,

the fireflies a magic show

I took your shirt from you that night

buried my face into the flannel, 

took your picture with my mind.

We loved each other then.

Decades on salvation blooms

from scented air, from shadows playing

on the mountains, 

the old hauntings still alive and

no one would understand why I 

fell so hard, not once but

twice; perhaps it was

those long twilights. 

Zephyr

The wind outside is steady, with

no bursts, no chop, and gentle tho 

I'm not quite sure 

what I should call its voice, 

then as I'm quiet, listening, 

the Zephyr comes to mind,

blowing constant and majestic 

from some jagged cleft between 

the ranges of my memory,

funneling a reach back 

to some far long ago.

Ice-cold cars, and 

berths so small as to be tiny,

linens slick and tight, and

dense wool blankets thin,

we thought we slept

but all the night the train rocked on 

and yellow street lamps strobed

under shades not fully drawn,

and we glimpsed the barren crossings 

In the non-existent towns 

on plateaus chiseled from the plains, 

and rising to the foothills 

and front range.

In a morning strange and

alien, we sat very still,

little children minding manners,

and waiting for our orange juice 

in glasses shaped like bells,

ate waffles, maple syrup

sticky on our chins

and then we sat away the afternoon

had peanut butter sandwiches, 

while the mountains and

the sky grew bigger 

in the dome car on 

the Zephyr to the coast. 

I don't know if memory really

matters much or serves a purpose 

unless it's grand or transformational, 

but this small picture burned

as bright and sweet as if we'd 

journeyed yesterday, and 

for that, I thank the wind.

A Farmhouse Easter

Back towards the pine woods, buff hills
Hold the winter, though it wasn't bad,
And though there was scant snow this year
Pond glistens full, recharging from
An earth not stressed for water,
At least not here

And to be sure, daffodils and tiny crocus
Dot the garden, where the ground lies
Disheveled from the creatures
Burrowing all the winter long.

We set the table with old silver
And platters from my mother,
Gone so long I strain to
Remember how she filled
Crystal vases with bright blossoms
Or fretted if the soufflé fell, or
Pursed her lips so not to laugh at my
Brothers' risqué stories.
It seemed then, in memory, that
Easter came with sun and spring,
Scent pungent as the
Loamy earth woke up,
And she was vibrant in those years
Long before she faced the end.

Now this Sunday late afternoon when
I gaze upon the buff hills rolling
Up to meet the dusk grey sky,
The faintest scrim of green seems
To veil my eyes -- in reverie, I cannot say,
Or perhaps it's simply just
The promise of the season,
And we are quiet all together,
Grateful for each other, and the past.

Sunlight long faded, shadows
Deepen in the dining room, we linger,
Feeling ghosts, unsummoned stories,
Some regrets.
I can't say I am unhappy,
I'm just floating on the stream that
Takes us all one day to
Far beyond that scrim,
Where why not say that there
Awaits the golden laughter,
Fragrant flowers, always springing
Easters, and my quixotic mother,
In chorus with a world made right
Because we kept on moving toward
The light beyond our ken.

In my daughter's weathered farmhouse
The kitchen smells of oranges and garlic
A low fire nips the chill and she
Pours a sparkling wine.
We settle in to tussle with the dogs,
And watch the night time gentle down,
Then say goodbye, and leaving then,
Another Easter slips away
Into the waiting blooming.

Yoghurt

Sitting in the sun

Eating vanilla yoghurt and blueberries

Creamy and elegant, liquid velvet,

Reading a letter from a friend. 

The yoghurt makes me think of

Cid's Market in Taos

Everything so fresh

And most home-grown.

Sit with this, I tell myself, 

And I pause 

Waiting for some 

Revelation to arrive.

He knows he's dying, 

She says in the letter,

And she says they are

Back to where they

Were in the 

Beginning

Along the Rio Grande and

The little streams and rivelets

Flowing from the mountains

Along the back dirt roads

To Arroyo Seco, I picture 

Banks and ditches 

Wearing yellow, spritzing

White and 

Purple things emerging

From the winter

We die the way we live,

I'll tell her, 

And,

You didn't choose this learning,

And then I remember our mother

Died this day, seventeen years

Gone now.

But every spring when I start to 

Work again in my garden, 

I find her there, and 

Think of her, 

And how there

Really isn't ever any end,

Just change, new shape,

A different physics in 

A universe where 

Stars realign

In season's heavens,

Full moons in processional

To the Equinox

And what is gone is 

Eternally reborn.

I know there are those who

Die and never give a peace 

To the ones

Who wait and dread

Because there 

Sometimes isn't one, 

They return to clay and dust 

But then arrive again, 

Because they

Will.

In my garden, my mother waits,

Sun dips behind high clouds

For a moment. 

There's no connection

To the yoghurt,

But I decide to tell my friend

All will be well

In time.