Missing

Look how full the pond is, Jade,

You can stand at the end of the dock 

As you watch for fish, they’ll be close to

The gleaming still surface with the

Sun soon bathing the greening land, 

Dragonflies flitting and new scents 

Catching your nose, 

Just now I saw our big blue heron

Lift off from the banks as Colby 

Trotted slowly around the other side

He’s an old dog now

I imagine he was looking for you, 

Maybe felt you, heard you calling,

As did I, but he’s all right. 

I stand outside for a moment, 

Wind in my hair,

Recalling how you

Always settled that one early spring day,

When season’s changing finally bursts

Relentless winter’s stops and starts, all

Giving in to spring, 

Wading in the shallows of the pond, then 

Your belly on the warming ground, 

You summoned the essential wonder 

Your brindled coat with liver ticking 

Glossy, smooth as 

Satin and your amber eyes 

Seeing all, and looking back at me.

Matinicus with Anne, April 2007

There is too much incoming need, 

So I start looking at old photos

Years of many springs, and I come
Across a photo of Anne in
Her muck boots striding on an
Island road

I recognize that stretch
And her steady pace

I am trying to find

That place around here that 

I thought about

Last summer maybe, in a poem

Maybe in my heart, I

Can’t recall, but where I am going to 

Plant more cherry trees

Soon Spring

It took me a long time to get 

Back here, back home

It helps that the sky is bright from
This moon

One way or the other,

As I sat here tonight

Recentering into what I can’t quite say,

I saw what I’d been doing, 

Casting away, reimagining and

Figuring out this new way forward

Whatever it is, and

A little tweak of light sparked

From the back, beyond the main barn

Night vision kicked in

As hints of color

Emerged in the bright black

Lit night sky, 

Spring coming on, and as I 

Thought about this place

My sweet old girl

Ticked through the air

She has started coming 

Around now and then

And I paused to think about her,

Perhaps I scratched her ears, and 

Raising my eyes to the

Skies through the back window

There they all were, flying big

As life in their green gold years

Beautiful in that light, our fat sheep, 

Our goats, their black tipped ears,

Dogs leaping into the pond

Racing to catch a thrown stick

Flying into the field from the open doors
Of the barn’s threshing floor,

Trotting the property line in goodbye

I am wrapped in miasma, 

The animate residue 

Of this old farm, from which

I lift and I let go,

Carrying who and what

I won’t relinquish into the

What will be will be 

It was the most extraordinary moment 

Of souls alive 

The ones that stayed

And others, flooding into 

My calming heart

Finding that its steady beat

Is theirs, with mine, 

Is ours.

March 21, 2019

Untethered

I don’t know what to do.

That’s a start 

Someone says there are these

Kinds of days and nights

Nothing making sense

So I suppose I can let them exist in their

Service of the way things go, although 

No longer much time,

Still time enough, I suppose, 

I have all I need. 

The wind comes up, something in

These gray years

I understand

It blows the scatter of ice 

Against old glass

Scatter from my other worlds 

untitled alright

Just so clear 

Just the clear shapes

Uncomplicated and spare

From a bedroom window

I’d forgotten about

And especially 

In winter 

Oh the chaos

And I say,

Steady, you,

And in the eve of explosion into

Stars 

I sit in the window

In the dark of a night

Day followed a day, days, nights, 

Only my elemental allowed

To be

And then I call time-out.

Outside a swath of the dark baby blue

Sky (when all below is white, barn rooftops white

The ground all white 

My gardens deep in white under

This night sky,

Roads white), it

Rolls gentle along the horizon, 

Sky with earth swelling into one another

Traversing barns and firs, alleys of evergreen, fields

I think homeostasis

I will probably sleep

Somewhere very deep tonight

Recovering in my landscape

Tu me manques

Winter 

Remembering

Not easy recalling when dream state

And landscape merge, 

Navigating visceral as another 

Foreign land appears

Between the dreamed and actual, 

Some third state of being,

Yet another way of seeing,

A transitory candle in a winter wind

Lit and buffeted by unimagined unknown 

Grays, and snow 

Pale in a once rose-tinged sky 

Lighting the way home,

The sweep of wind erasing hints 

Of anything 

Until the changing day drops

Deep onto the hills and fields along

The lakes and between them

All the blue, the twilight light,

Breathless blue, translucent, dense,

Eliminating delineation 

And I had been thinking to myself

Take this photo, try to take this photo,

This one, this, until I said, 

I can’t, 

And I told myself,

Remember.

Reflection

Everything is uneasy

There would be something 

Wrong otherwise, so I listen

And I listen to myself 

The fulcrum is his

Blindness

I don’t know yet what that means

And yet, so much I apprehend comes 

Quite alive 

In this: in this darkness everywhere, 

It is an odd convenience that

A crisis comes that we must face, 
Because it is 

Easier to locate the pain of it, 

The blind eye, the damaged port, 

The fearful, rutted roads across 

Salvation’s elusive fields (although 

this doesn’t matter in this lifetime), 

Than face another loss, that one

We can’t describe, although perhaps

It really does not matter. 

What is it that we see in this maelstrom 

Of dark matter, what is it that 

We are not seeing? 

Bewildered. 

Do we see a thing? 

Do we understand the defining 

Tick-tock 

On the clock that will never lose 

One nanosecond

Over this or any other conflagration? 

Do we even matter?

We’ve a glimpse perhaps of goodness, 
Though, a hope that lives and thrives as in the 

Butterfly’s breathless

Seconds, its seconds into life and time, 

And into some vast that 

We will never know

So I say, enact into your human 

Script, although there are 

Stars that beckon 

If you only stop to wander in them, 

Let yourself navigate across the 
Fulsome sky, you know, the one 

There for our taking 

We just have to let it be, 

We are all, the two of us,

The all of us, the 

Bone and breath and sinew of us

The heft and weak and waft of us

The matter of a glorious whole, 

Frail and open, stubborned into

Contrary, fighting for the light and wind, 

Moving through this moment 

Sailing pure, sailing perfect, sailing
Incomplete and fierce, and do you see?

Sailing into the 

Unknown land where 

We find there is no choice 

But to throw our spark of life, 

We now cast off 

For all that’s holy,  

Into the opening space. 

~ December 30, 2018