Woman in a Meadow

Her balm the in-between, 

The interstitials

And somewhere out in the 

Great Plains and the divide, 

Great opening spaces, in

The small meadows she created

I find her

All the Light I Cannot See

Spent all day in the big outside

Mowing into the glory of the clover

Fretting about apple trees’ vigor,

Though they’re old, 

Making sure in my reveries

I kept respectful distance from the 

Pond’s banks 

No tilting in too far, and 

Surprise of 

Wiping tears away

Weeping 

For the kindness, the 

Constancy, and 

Understanding; 

I had to shade my eyes now and then

From a lowering sun, the 

Chords of knowing blinding

Into the precious new again, that 

Some things never change. 

Coming in

To cook up all that

Emotional

Psychic

Visceral

Logical 

Incoming,

I turn to dinner 

Yesterday my friend gave me a bounty of 

Butternut squash soup, 

She said, he doesn’t like it 

And if I had to guess 

I bet it comes from 

The church ladies; an 

Excellent base 

And then the riot:

Mine here, in no order—

Two evenings’ soups

Beets and pesto 

Cream, some honey and 

Black beans

Paprika, and some cheese

And snips of basil, parsleys from

my kitchen garden, 

My way of finding 

Balance 

Relief

 They’re all so safe

The safe ones

In my age and yearning

I cleave to trusting 

Why not, anyway? 

It’s exhausting, otherwise. 

It means, I know, that the 

Fringes and dressings of the circle

Get smaller,

Defining the warp and weave

Design and pattern 

Of my life 

Whereby the task was always, 

Unfolding, whether I would ever 

See it or not, 

To live the best way I’m

Wired, clinging to honesty

Admitting love and its mystery

In the ground that seasons shift

In the tactile of my time. 

Waiting for Solstice

Rising from the Heat 

And desperate for those skies

That bring the solstice

I make to make welcome 

Beloved friends. 

Sister, 

I just saw her, in mist 

Diaphanous

Lavender and blue

Miasma in the library

As I breathe in a cooling

Air, but still, 

Only if I’m

Still, symphony with 

Bullfrogs and I can see 

The Dipper  

From the patio. 

Years ago I saw her and told you about 

Her, you said, 

Diaphanous and

Blue, and I believe that’s when you 

Put up the mezuzah; it’s 

Come down but tucked into

This place

With her.  

And then 

My sister, you blessed all the

Doorways. 

In the time of Suffer

Mowing

Sanctuary

Salvation

Every blade of grass, 

Bloom, every 

Slide as I sog into

Unrelenting mud 

Every

Color, 

Wild and everywhere 

And all the smells so glorious

I watch for bunnies

Hop toads, blown branches 

Too thick for mower chop

Coherence 

Here We Are

I am in the garden, it’s all garden, I am mowing, I am cutting the pasture high; I am outside, on the porches, on the patio, planting pots, shoveling away winter detritus on the patio; I am walking to the barn and walking back to the barn gardens, I am at the pond. I am walking in the middle of the road at night. Night vision. Burgundy Farm, Capon Bridge. The children were little. 

There was a small hastily-painted sign above a screen door at camp, pointing to a nest tucked away: “Carolina wren nesting, 🪹 don’t disturb her.” The sign didn’t have to say, so come in another way. 

Today I was sweeping off the front porch again. It’s a formal porch. No one ever comes to the front door. At Christmas we hang a large Maine wreath, with a spot on it, on the front door. Every spring, I hang baskets on the front porch. I move concrete urns with old ferns out there. It takes a beating from the elements, though it is a deep beautiful in the snow, which shapes itself into onto and around the porch and its Greek columns. But it is not an unoccupied or unused front porch, and we know the life out there. Fucking squirrels chew thru everything everywhere they can. I sweep up piles of insulation, hubs pounds away at the holes in the porch ceiling & calls in the posse when he can’t reach. The little bastards get in through the cornices as well. 

Each corner, on the outside columns’ pediments, contains a small built environment, nests. Every year they’re there. It’s quiet in the front; mommas are vigilant but not alarmed; soon the fledglings are fine. By the time I hang baskets all is sorted out. This season, though, the rain, incessant rain, constant, deluge, unrelenting, and wind, not thunderstorm wind, but derecho wind. The fucking weasels got the hens 6 weeks ago. 

I digress, but it’s all related. 

Yesterday when I went to sweep off the front porch, amid the squirrels’ rampage I’ve barely kept up with, I noticed a tiny feathery just gossamer ghostly creature, the nest blown down probably the night before when some fearsome straight line winds came upon us as once in awhile in terrible storm they will, and I think barely, barely hatched. I knelt a bit and whispered to it. It was a something, it had had a beating heart. 

Tonight. I swept. Wept. The wisp of the bird was bigger. My knees wanted to crumple. And as I propped my head against the hand clutching the broom, just aside atop my eye, a movement. Another wee speck of life. The smallest moving bird leg I’ve ever seen or will ever see again. A nanosecond of movement in a puff of lightest grey. What do I do? Grateful I was not vigorous in my sweeping. 

Would the Burgundy campers bury them? Would they cry for them? Oh life. 

In Chilly Twilight

The birds are sorting themselves out, they’ve

Random conversations, and 

We, some of us, discuss 

Hummingbird territories

They revisit, we observe

Decide to come back

And today I learned a vixen can always take

Her kits to another den, in emergency, as if 

Here, under the barn is

Not right and I flashed on some 

Knots, gnarled, 

Some kind of architecture indigenous in a

Way I cannot know in 

My alleé, old evergreens and roots and 

Tangles, and I recall 

I see the

Dens

Beyond that bolt

About a vixen, though

I remember how 

I’ve seen 

From my bedroom in winter, 

For a few winters in my past 

Lumbering literally belly 

Swollen to her birthing

In snow up over her knees

To that den under ancient planks

 In the main barn

The determined mother

Flash of red against white snow 

As she’d skirt close and under the barn 

To where she’d always gone.

We spill out of winter and fight the rain

It’s spring, complaining into summer 

Our pace picks up 

And it is 

About the great commune 

Of territory. 

He tells me about that 

Water vein

As we plosh the staggering 

Water table

Bemoaning amid deep humid 

Bounteous green 

That vein, I believe that 

Runs into Boardman Creek, 

Which will grow I suspect

Nurture and rot things elsewhere

Beyond an old dwarf cherry tree

And watery, faltering passage thru

The arbor vitae hedge

On its course down to the bridge 

Whoever in wild dreams

Could rail about the water 

But here I do

While geology moves 

In her rhythms 

I remember an untended 

Pear and a

Hawthorne in the pasture that 

I leave 

Still and high, the bursting 

Ground there 

For the wilder things. 

Bullfrogs are fine, I note, 

Brushing aside anxious drift. 

I need to go in now

I feel like fiddling with dinner. 

After Hard Rain

Out here in the conservatory,

I sit in a kind of peace

Not being watched,

The blackness into the

Weatherby fields 

Deep and satisfying

And unmarred 

In a kind of miracle 

Into the west 

Seems my whole life I’ve been

Trying to just be who I am

A shame or maybe not that

I come to this sense this old

Remains to be seen. 

Endure

 I want to

Be pretty. 

I want to be 

Aware when peace descends 

In the midst of chaos 

I want to be my golden center 

In the palate of my landscape.

The further my eyes search 

Towards what I guess I 

Somewhere let go of, 

The calmer I am

Though

I may be going blind 

Probably just one eye.

This turns into a diary

Which it is not.

Sky, internal horizon, order and 

Balance

And I don’t much care to make too

Much effort anymore. 

Rain is endless, though.

I never thought I’d curse the 

Water

It’s a richness in a new iteration 

For me to integrate this 

Fallow ground into 

Its reason, as 

The less I go out looking for it the more it is what I want 

Raining

Pink begonias on porches here 

Waiting late spring’s summering, as 

Recalcitrant weather seeks to find balance.

At the pond, reassurance of 

Bullfrogs sounding basso & profundo; 

I see small brown hoppy toads, but 

I am frustrated because I can’t mow,

So I ruminate on paths, perhaps, and patches

Where wilding things persist, noticing 

A new way of being in to and of this place 

This property, out in that far pasture

Hawthorne and pear. 

Long the twilight to the southwest 

I listen to old prompts

From landscape and memory, 

When light dimmed before my prairie sense said it should

When night comes on before

My prairies senses say

It may, and behold 

The most intense pure 

Blue, no brilliance but the shadow

Just before the night comes in 

In the leaving to the west. 

Last Thing on My Mind

 https://youtu.be/KaRwthlUI-w

This Spring

 It is the end of March, 

Loam awaiting yet to ether the air

An unexpected swath of squalls 

Yesterday 

Hurt expectant in the spring, 

Lake snows, icy pellets 

White-outted my roads home 

From dealing with my vehicle 

At the dealer dealing with my vehicle. 

Driving, I felt the fury of that weather, 

Intrinsically beautiful, and 

Infuriating. 

As I’d been driving, I was trying to

Process spring, this particular one, 

I’d been searching for 

The sad answer to why the 

Huge limb, stalwart

Of an ornamental pear 

That I watched come down 

In some slow and awful majesty

Barely days ago just had to go.

In the slow motion of the moment, though,

Derecho, precise, I swear, 

It just went through

As I sat watching 

From the conservatory in 

The house with no power. 

I remembered from my growing 

Being keen to heeding warnings, and

Calming, doing best what 

I know how to do, 

Ready as can be, need be, and 

Powerless so bedrock 

Save my own. 

Soon it passed, that wind,

Eleven hours we’d no power. 

I was glad of course when lights came back, 

But I was in the storm. 

Yesterday we walked to the springing

Storm-disheveled back, barn gardens 

In their ancient knowing years appearing, 

And I near-crumpled to the 

Downed tree’s limb, 

Aghast and sorrowing 

When my friend said, 

Look. She’s budding. 

Capture

 On the eighth of March, 

The light, the day changing,  

I didn’t know what to do with myself 

There was snow on the red rooftops of the barns

When I woke early on the morning

And I thought

I need more sleep

And later on the March morning

When I really did wake to the

New day, 

The snow was gone

And in the afternoon

Hovering, the moon rising mysterious 

In the troubled 

Most-blue spring sky 

I was reassured, in my own deep

And my sigh carried me to

As ever and ever 

Shall be 

Landscape

Where can I go when the constraints, 

When there are constraints

But no space for constraints, 

Make me want to  

Run away

To anything

Anyone, any 

Possibility

Of braving 

The scariest leap I feel upon me 

To take into 

A universe not understood? 

Does it matter that I am old, a

Pilgrim cleaving to 

Ancient messages from 

Rivers and plains

Where understandings 

Grew and bloomed

Before age helped me 

In my stubborn recalcitrance 

Find my way

Into mystery

Now become comfort 

In the maelstrom? 

Protest

I can’t go anywhere for a day, 

Day or two

Unclear, 

The whims of February

But in this momentary stasis

I am flying on an aeroplane 

With that strange relief of perspective 

Knowing that all is out of my control

I begin my telling because this is a 

Terrifying beautiful beauty here, 

Everywhere

In ice, these days of grey then

Flour-sifting snow, then rain, 

Graupel, 

Sleet and 

Patterning ice

Mind you when I tell you this is new

The plains woman’s wiring, mine, telling

This is weather that is new. 

And we are deep in ice, then snow 

To ice that melts a bit, freezes, and then snow, 

And on. 

Denny came down to drag Peter’s truck

Spun out on ice

Taking hay to the goat barn

Back to a spot unblocking the long drive 

Toward the other barns and 

All feels settled for the moment. 

Everywhere there is nothing 

But rolling sheen, bluing into dark, 

Our land of ice pure and pristine right now

In the deep out there 

My head beginning to clear

In the heart

Though I’ve no idea 

What lies on the horizon. 

Responsorial

 Responsorial

Listen to yourself, dear, 

She’d say, 

Holding my hand,

Winds whipping whisps about 

In our hair

As I was leaving, 

Always leaving in the heat blowing

The dry sultries that settled like

Barely breathing mantles we shouldered in 

Those Great Plains summers

She always said that to me.

I want what I want. 

Look at yourself, I say to him, recalling

Timeless words, wisdoms shared, 

Becoming braver in the recall, and saying 

What I want with you 

More stability

More understanding

More space

I want all that 

And I want to love you in 

The ways of love. 

And also

But also, 

And I also

Want all that

That I have and will never 

Not want anymore,

And flying above and under the

Beyond, the past and future, 

I say to him, I will never crave more of 

The precious than what we have. 

Coda 

There were years before she saw 

That river again

Though she crossed too many to 

Remember

Save 

The Little Huerfano, an 

Unchained melody