A Different Kind of Narrative

Winter. Outside it’s beautiful, a dusting of snow & intense, subtle colors of December sky at twilight. Inside, a much different time for us this year. Thirteen months ago we didn’t know if P would even have an eye. He does. It’s not the color of his beautiful biologically gifted green, but it’s beautiful. He doesn’t see, but he retains the glory of color, shadow & space, tho reorganized in the uniqueness of his condition. There is no end in *sight* yet, but we’ve learned about how one sees what is really there, what doesn’t matter, & what, perhaps, shouldn’t be seen. A few weeks ago a huge wind brought down some large branches from one of our towering firs. I’ve been taking cuttings from the felled limb, bringing them inside, to serve for a bit longer, alive, still pungent. I started thinking about my dad, who was never bewitched by glorious little white lights, no matter the coaxing of our mother, & in fact the Christmas he died my sister & I put up a tree for him outside on the upstairs porch off his room, & we dressed it with colored lights. Tonight I adorned the kitchen mantle with greens from the felled fir, & colored lights, for you, Dad. And now, here our little tree, undecorated with the ornaments I love, the baubles & handmade things the children made, the nostalgic things that connect us back in time to memory & tradition & all that. Last year a tree was out of the question, but one dreadful night returning from Syracuse, filled with fears, prayers, all the things that bind trouble to reality, as I came down our road & took the turn by the creek where one glimpses the back of our house, I saw - behold - the twinkling white lights of a Christmas tree. Sarah & Robert came in, & in addition to taking care of mister Colby, birdie, & BillyBob our funny little goat all this terrible time, they knew we should have a tree. I burst into tears, & when P saw it, he burst into tears as well. So now we have a Christmas tree, beautiful in its simplicity and resonant with memory and gratitude, still awaiting the dressing that we cherish. P put the lights on. He said it wasn’t easy, because he saw multiples. Tomorrow I’ll bring all our memories round. I’ll decorate the tree.

Nothing changes. 

A World One Night

The women sit around a fire. 

They pull their shawls against the chill

The firelight warms their faces. 

In the near-distance, coyotes

Howl around their prey, 

Yipping dinner,

And overhead, beyond 

The crackle and the pop of fire,

Stars twinkle. 

There is mother, and 

The really old grandmother sits

Her sharp eyes seeing

Clusters of the Milky Way 

Moving through the Cosmos

Infinitesimal silvered dusts, 

Each mote a first breath, each a last

The sister sits with quiet, 

And there are others, they too 

Appear contemplative, staring into 

The ritual and comfort of the golden,

In this case, fire, the golden fire

But often golden sunset

Preceded by those holy

Pinks from the early 

Morning 

East

Digressing back, 

Some of them, the women,

Seem little more 

Than miasma, 

Though all reach for grail forgotten 

As the world veered 

Out of tilts,

The lessons of the grandmothers 

Ignored, discarded beyond memory; 

The price of negligence so dear,

The reckoning assured,

They know they’ll be the ones 

To settle up

On judgment day

They sit around the fire pit

Where the grass won’t grow

In between the gardens around

The barns and the rimming green

That surrounds the weeping formal, 

A garden of tears,

Their own tears 

Salting that patch of ground

Where life no longer thrives

At least for now

They know that love is not enough

Sometimes giving way,

Bending in an agony 

That only time and will can soothe,

And no guarantees at that 

Maybe all they seek

Is the logic of the mystery, 

Answers sparking as they’re calling to 

Ghosts of just what might have been,

What was, or to the whys that linger, 

Pointing deep to the no matters that 

Don’t matter anymore

And therein, truth indwelling 

The alpha and omega

Some things will never change, even 

As they ever grow and flicker

Embers for the coming flames.

Ether

Maybe this is the point of it

Trying to get to the end

Of whatever it is

And on the way find

These memories

Some not easy born

Dissolutions 

Strife and despair 

Memories are,

They are 

What is real,

And when they’re
So sometimes 

Beautiful

When they’re
Mostly 

Steady and forgiving 

Kind and generous

Leavened with compassion

They abide and

That’s the point 

Of it all, 

The ether of the
Truth. 

This Day

Cutting hydrangea in the 

Dark of the night sky, 

No light but 

Moonlight

They’re drying into late autumn

And how beautiful they are on the

Eve of my birthday. 

Peter brings me cut flowers 

And then I think

To also cut some holly

Brilliant 

Berries 

Red and disappearing as I turn

This way and that from and 

Into moonlight,

My fingers feeling the rough bark

Making my way to the place

Each stem grows away from

The branch before I clip

Tomorrow when the sky grows light

I’ll harvest more from this 

Bounteous patch of life that we tend, 

That we love, careful to give thanks,

And I might keep clipping, and 

Clipping, cutting and bringing in

Until the whole house is 

Filled with magic 

As the living, once living, 

Drying

Dying 

Take over every space,

Desiccating 

Petal and tendril, 

Still-supple living stem, her leaves

Crawling into the 

Corners and crevices, hooking

Into peeling plaster and uneven 

Floorboards—

Isn’t that the way life goes on,

Everywhere? 

Blooming, growing, surprising, 

Yearning, reaching, praying, balancing,

Accepting, praising and always, if we 

Give in, 

Lifting into light? 

Harvest Moon

I would like him to

Think, without thinking,

She smells like earth

The scent she always wears

I have all I can handle right now

And it’s powerful,

An Orenda, 

Everything is fine. 

Love

Washed in an early autumn rain, these 
Tears hot then 
Cold, coursing slick like old sorrows 
Arrowing down my cheeks into the 
Heart of my emotions, 

Flooding my way as I pick through 

What the whole cloth of my

Life feels like,

Rents and all, 

The fabric is stretched and 

Fraying, but it holds

Still, what will never resolve, because

Is doesn’t resolve, settles:

Tacit

Protected and

Preserved,

Honored,

A fine way through, although 

Not easy

I toss and turn the word over and over,

I let it settle, knitting into my

Bones, my

Breath and sinew, 

Tacit. 

Seeking resolution,

Because breath compels, 

Because the heart beats,

Time after time I 

Find I just don’t want anyone else 

And, I don’t want to be anywhere else.  

Here, in some hard-fought 

Fulsomeness, hard-won honesty, which is 

A powerful place to be, 

Scary and demanding,

I slip into a universe of tension 

I won’t relinquish,

Summoning steadiness, for the why of it

I’ll never know,

It just

Is.

JR6dnAjjOTE

It’s Just the Rain

I’ve been fallow, 

Lost in the angers, fears, un-understandables...

The own creative mine of me sleeping, 

Stunted and afraid. 

But as I flipped through a magazine tonight 

With unseeing eyes,

On a page, a rush of words,

Poesy, 

Perhaps reminding me some 

Way to better balance. 

Even a hard rain, though, 

Like in this moment, once

Familiar in the way of comfort

Now frightens me. 

And what is happening is 

Everywhere unimaginable 

Now, 

I do not know what to do 

With this

And so, and

So I will just let it be. 

He was a Friend of Mine

Where do you go?

Where do you go when things are

So outside comprehension? 

Maybe I just tend my garden,

Worry about my really old dog, but

He never stopped.

He tended. Thank you Frank.

Tend, actually, that’s all I can do. 

C’est sufficant

RIP and you rise. 

In memoriam Frank LaMere

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JR6dnAjjOTE

Chamaecyparis

I sit on the small concrete bench

Under the trumpet vine in the 

Evergreen garden, 

The chamaecyparis 

Bending into my frame, as I look out

Up north into the darkening sky. 

The trumpet vine is old, winding, sinuous 

Old and laden with that 

Coral orangeness about to pop

There are fireflies in this peaceful place

Although there’s 

No way can I capture them.

Suffice it to write

These fireflies winking 

Are the gift in the chaos. 

I snap a photo 

Looking east toward the back of my house

Over the top of the arbor vitae hedge surrounding

This old garden,

It’s flat, no light from my house.

Sometimes it’s a rough passage

Between here and a house unlit,

Or maybe I mean lit,

The toll of the struggle pours into

These last days,

And I’m just determined,

Maybe, no, praying for balance. 

 

Sometime

I’ve been sitting outside 

Working outside, we have,

But oh Lord, the black flies,

And just now persistent 

This summer. 

The other night I started to think

About unthinkable. 

I’ve been here before. 

When I think about this all

I remember crossing the bar 

In Astoria, with uncle Jack

A bar harbor pilot on the Columbia.

He took us deep sea fishing. 

A wild mile wide, that bar into the ocean.

Once a bit ago

When trying to get my balance 

I thought about crossing the Rubicon.

The shorthand of beautiful languages, oh

Those poets of human passages, 

Their words settle around my shoulders, 

Whispering

Or maybe just the long sounds of night, shhh

Listen now, memory so vivid, and

The further I go with my stories

The more things seem to knit

Together,

And there will most likely

Come a time when the good things

About the old ways rise like a sweet mist

To bring us back, changed and in tact. 

https://youtu.be/SY1V0Y7hscw

Orchard

In June 
I promised myself I would figure out
Where to plant more cherry trees
Not weeping cherry, but
Cherry pie cherry trees.
Now I remember what I was thinking about.

When we were little 
We’d pick cherries in the long bright dusk 
In the orchard our mother planted on Nebraska’s windy plains, her sturdy 
Cherry trees, and when we had enough
She baked pies for us

No pink-peach solstice light this year. 
It is strange. It’s beautiful but strange. 
The land is changing. 
It is lush, but somehow a little 
Drier than you might imagine. 

Now and then,
I feel the lightest drops of rain
Sitting outside, 
In this moment, moments perhaps,
The scented life, 
The life of pond, the life of here   
Is balanced
And there are fireflies. 

I have figured out where
I will plant cherry pie cherry trees, 
Far from memory’s 
Plains in gentle twilight, 
Here, in Seneca’s soft hills,
I leave you my orchard. 

July 20, 1969

Things I Want to Tell You

I didn’t know how 

I needed this,

Outside, 

The three-quarter moon through

Clouds obscuring the Milky Way, moving 

Through the maples along the southwest, 

And looking up through the pergola

Make up enough magic to settle me. 

Bullfrogs and 

A few fireflies,

Colby came outside with me,

Gone out there to his dogness,

He circled back 

And just checked in. 

The patio is close to

Home and edge, and I

Can’t ask for more. 

Tu me manques.

Pond Night and Chorale

Good Christ

They’re loud, the frogs,
Basso profundo, they set up

A mighty warfare 

At the pond tonight, and 

All the little minions
Too, chiming in,

Brave alto warblings,

Such life everywhere around

Right here, bit of balance,

Eyes close to violet swoon, tho,

Lavender petunias, lifting off into
This sponge-painted sky.

Surrounded by Stars

Last evening, after dinner, 

We walked around this living place

We followed the light from the

Setting sun, where now and then 

It haunts

Through some low, brittle 

Evergreen branches 

Aged hardy into 

A sort of frame in a particular 

Spot in the alleé

Back behind the barns.

Anyway, I said

I can’t tramp there right now,

And when she got just past

The burrow, massive roots

Curling mysterious under a ghosted

Long gone tree, and deep

Organic in the slanting-sunset-

Shafted passage demarking, 

For the sake of maps and 

Deeds and so forth, 

The property line’s long double stretch 

Of old firs and pines, 

She paused 

On soft rust needles, 

On mossy scrub, and  

Because it was the twilight hour

The sun just so, and 

Glinting low, I saw its gold

Through that pungent aperture and 

In the dim she rather 

Vanished down the alleé, 

Until she passed by my watching and 

Then as if in slow motion, turned to west, 

To gaze upon

The fields beyond

When of a sudden 

The sun caught the claret ruby red

In her wine glass, perfect axis

Flashing 

Clear and claret, ruby, red

I will not forget that

All is well and good

Here in these sane, 

Giving, gifting pastures

Windbreaks and growing berms

Tonight the palest

Shadow on moon-silvered

Gathering cirrus harkens 

More rain coming soon. 

Tonight we speak of other

Energies and allow as how we

Err to not allow them in.

This night, though, promise, 

Everlasting beauty, and homeostasis.

Some things are simply

Bedrock

Composting into balance, and 

Although nothing is easy now, 

I am clear-eyed, 

Looking through 

The claret of it all. 

The Great Unknown of This

Big grey cloud stretching 

Across the western sky

Heading north 

Like a huge mammoth of

The deep

I fancy it heading for 

The St Lawrence then

To Terra Nova

Moving swiftly as to remind

That all things change as

They set sail

For better,

For dream,

For home

For new

The sextant sparks the sailor’s way,

And while it all,

Always, leads to 

An end,

How much better it is to know that 

The oft-unsteadied hand

Can reach and dare. 

Nothing is guaranteed 

Sometimes I rail and weep for 

Days and days 

And finally stop.

Relaxing, shrugging into

Calm, and waking into my 

Moonless inner landscape, 

The silver shimmers.

There it all makes sense. 

Being Here

Sitting tonight outside

On a tattered winter-struck patio

Not yet rescued by broom 

And potted things

I’ve mowed the long hardy grasses, weeds 

Twice now in this long

Recalcitrant spring

I’ve noticed many bluebirds

Fewer robins

And this afternoon spotted

My first little brown toad of the season

Hopping away from the 

Frightening sounds of my mower

And truly, watching, as I carefully turned 

Away from her hideout in

A clump of unruliness around

The smoke bush back by the barn. 

The sun is descending and small grey 

Scattered cumulo stratus nimbus fill the 

Western sky behind the firs that keep

The dust from from Bobby’s plowing from 

My windows, opened

Momentarily to admit spring cleansing before

I close them up

For an unseasonably chilly night

The dip in the back 

Opening amongst long, tall

Stands of spruce and fir,

My alleé I call it there, though just an 

Unkempt magic land of burrows, 

Rotting stuff, rust chuff 

From ancient evergreens

Carpeting a path, well-known 

By generations of animals, and 

Through this window 

Bits of peach and gold from the

Disappearing day cast

A blaze 

Nonpareil 

An instant that 

Beckons belief

My hands are cold and

It’s time for dinner. 

May 18, 2019

Mother’s Day

The blood can catch up, 

The Hurley stubborn in me

Don’t want to go anywhere

Don’t want to go no mo 

This old fabric of land 

Here rent

With memory 

What we could never know

Except that it comes alive, the

Place just blooms, 

The air, the light and the

Dirt shifting

Thinking to temper obdurate,

Some kind of self taps at 

The wild, taps on the window

Look, see this vastness

Loves seem to bloom

From deep down into those

Sighs, long those shadows, and all 

So beautiful in

The sun

May 7, 2019

Accident

Working on a theory

Borned from some trauma,

Most immediately that of

Accident and bad luck

Becoming as bad as bad dream 

As an unwelcome life of it all

Took root,

Defining

Day, night and all the in-between moments

Of fear, doubt, what now and

So forth. 

The thought occurred to me as 

I took a photo of myself as I do

Most everyday, in perhaps a vain

Moment hoping to capture a small

Shrinking of a scary hematoma on my

Forehead,

And I tried to think of another word 

For it that wouldn’t be so jarring,

But there isn’t one.

I started to think about stepping 

Back and away,

As I more or less have done 

I too fight to save Mother Earth

And the people I love the most are so
Clear in their relentlessness

But I did step back, step away,

I had to, for whatever reason, a 

Near-miss, though perhaps I’ll heal

If I am mindful and do as I am told. 

Talking with a friend who let go

The disillusionment of comraderie

She, bleeding hope and passion and

A justice maybe just beyond,  

She said she had to turn away, for now

Or for how long, actually she didn’t say. 

It’s not just about the struggle

Some of us sometimes

Must turn to face another in another light,

The one that glows in the pit of 

Stomach, heart, essence, 

And so stepping quietly amid

The shards of betrayal and avarice

Dissonance and the flat hollow note 

Of someone else’s torque, 

We leave to find in witness and

Introspection a ground as vibrant

And authentic as any solidarity,

Only solitary

I felt this, briefly swirling in the static,

And with a grateful heart, I 

Vowed to try to share that there

Is power and vital balance when

All is said as best one can before the ring 

Is tossed to stars and hope, holding breath and 

Praying for the unseen hands stretched 

To take it up for a time, knitting the 

Intention into belief that something

Bigger waits for bigger breath.