Finding Home II

Old round silver ball, the
Moon steadies this nighttime
So I can think about how
Everything just keeps
On, down river banks, across
The plains and
If I look, on
The paths through
Old places still there
From when I
Was small,

My sight first opened then
To clouds above the prairies, just
Beyond my mother’s black eyes,
Later to remember
Satins of willow branches
Dad’s Setter so graceful it
Seemed he could fly, and
Other constants of the
Grasslands, beauty’s home, like
My mother’s orchards
And winter

As a vision floats fulsome
In the western moonlit sky,
Memory slips back to
That shallow valley,
I was nurtured there in
Switchgrass, bluestem,
Wind and cherry trees.

Unfinding Words

You need to know

I can’t take care

Of you since 

This moon out here in my 

Small paradise 

Over these lakes reflects back

A bare, an aching yearning 

That will never go away, 

Won’t leave me room to breathe,

Much less join you in your quest,

Uncertain, filed as ghostly

And unsure, because of course, it is

When I think back, parting

The imagined veil, 

A caution and a gift into the 

Newness of what I only now

Remember that 

I feared as unexamined 

All resolves into some other 

Fulsome universe,

The fragments and the sense

Of it teasing into 

Some new whole.
Oh! The gemstones that
I near
Left out
Live brilliant,
All is well.