https://youtu.be/T2Kn3j7o2yY

Arriving

Looking west, she saw 

Hito, coming through the 

Garden

Only it was late, 

Quarter moon just

Enough light, 

Foxes with their odd, mating voices, 

And earlier 

Choraling frogs and hummingbirds,

The opening up

Joyful, such hard work into

The salvation of outside 

Peach sky but for a few moments

And then

Grey sailing ships. 

On an Old Tapestry

There comes a time when

You stop trying to explain things.

How can you, when
You don’t even know yourself?

Looking at an old textile 

I think, something there,

As she was stitching said 

Pay no attention to 

Provenance, for that is
For the future, and 

Need not be contemplated.

This woman in another century,  

Stitching into an unknown

Simply didn’t think 

Like that, 

Her musings long ago, as she took 

Her careful stitches: 

“I wonder, are they roses?”

In my own world centuries on 

I really can’t say,

The fabric takes on roses

Although I think they’re 

Peonies. 

Maybe I’m too loosely

Constructed in these strange days,

When nothing makes much sense.

I rearrange these old roses, thinking 

Old peonies, while through the years her 

Stitchery whispers to me, so silent: 

Watch, lean in,

Listen, see the colors.

The fabric’s frayed from ageless age,

A provenance of sorts arriving after all,

In a way I am meant to note:

Knit and stitch all things together

And they will come into

To be.

A Night Between the Lakes

Outage,

Frustrating 

I’m already at some psychic 

Limit

Leave me

Alone 

Then, all right? Now

Night dark beautiful

No power on our rural road

No power we can see

And isn’t that a stunning word

To employ, power, when I 

Wish for leveling, for balance? 

Realities collide

What I wish, what is,

Shows essence in the midst

Of frustration, and

Meanwhile the utility trucks prowl our

Road, reassuring somehow, 

Simply just their prosaic quest 

How pure and beautiful this dark

Forcing contemplation

Forcing surrender

Only a few moments really, these eleven hours, 

Perhaps more, but never mind, 

In the greater scheme I’ll never know, I 

Shall humble into dark, join 

Myself into

One bolt of nothingness 

And everything

When the children were little 

We walked the night

Listening to the indigenous 

Creatures of that dark cover, 

Mindful of meadow and pond,

We learned to suspend insistence

And give in to 

The vision of the moment’s night. 

Never could I have imagined 

That lesson coming home

In my fulsome fury about

A simple power outage

But here we are, and it is so 

And I overwhelm myself with
The deep lightlessness of 

Grateful. 

My mind stirs,

Straying into the brackets 

Of my life.

Earlier I fought to photograph 

This storm, its changing light, but 

Could not get it right 

When all I needed to do

Was feel the winds change 

Trust the corridors of derecho 

And gale, and let words find
My elemental learning

Tonight I understand 

From the young guys in the trucks 

That everything went out and down

Over on Seneca in this day’s late
Afternoon,
And so here

Atop the pause 

Descending from the Hector Backbone
Down toward Cayuga 

The world just had to stop.

The power’s come back on now.