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.