December in the Last Quarter

Outside the wind is blustery, steady, serious.

I hear it, I remember

That if I don’t, I‘ll miss it.

I think about how hard I’ve been trying,

So long, diligent, worrying

About everything, and now

I choose my life,

It isn’t going to be just sitting here

In the garden, on the icy winter paths

Fussing about the dailiness,

To finally, tethers loosed,

Breathe in beginning spring,

Though the old place is like a best friend:

If I go off for a bit,

I’ll still come home to this haven.

In the late winter my sister and I

Will be traveling again.

We do well together in the car

And it’s time for us to wander some,

Sort out this last season.

I don’t think there

Are many lessons one can learn and share

Except that the road says

Where have you been?

The path says, yeh,

Where have you been?

These questions pop up like thorns,

In the space created when there aren’t

Decades remaining.

Anyway, insights don’t come often.

Wind, voices of the sailing currents,

Rattling, gentling the brighter air, the snowy roar, the still,

These things will not come again.

Aho

Wait

Outside in unsettled early winter dark

The hunters return to their pickups

Parked sideways along now-brittle corn rows.

They’ve been hunting, while

Dogs sit on my feet when they hear the gunshots.

I would sit on someone’s feet too, but

This is the ritual

As fall beckons into winter,

Up here, out there, and

Not sure, of course, but

Didn’t some of us already know this?

We just sit back and thank our gifts of age,

Try not to get hijacked by all these

Urgencies coming at us.

Can someone tell me

Why I am disturbed?

I saw the sky and watched

As the west claimed the sunset line

And I wondered if

At least the horizon might stay the same.

Now, Bobby works his fields,
As darkness

Precludes the hunt.

The headlamps of his combine shine

Into my kitchen,

The late cutting

Somehow a comfort.

Thinking and giving up to feeling,

I decide to hold on to

The things I understand.

The wind comes up,

This season bolts in fits and starts

Into what it knows, and I realize,

These things are not about the struggle

They are about the light.

Rothko

On waking:
Dream still fertile,
Two planes in one
Endless landscape,
Colors of soil and moss
And that is all. 

Do I have the right
To tell another to live?
The waiting eternal
Comforts us.
I believe this.

Defining, I look out
At ancient,
Sanctified ground,
Where beyond, in grey daylight,
Blue jays flit,
Bolts primary
Against russet-red maple,
Jeweled green-dressed trees
Yet to change
Behind the red
Barn roofs below,
Season's decay golden
In the garden,
The aboriginal dying
Returned to

Soil, moss.

Season

Autumn winds

Don't know quite how 

They want

To blow, and actually 

They don't 

Blow as much as

Start and stop, trying

To ascertain the 

Velocity

Of the season oncoming,

But of course no one really

Knows in these strange
Times, and anyway 

Even if we listen to these

Winds, we can't figure out 

If they are hammer, howl, 

Pass-on-through or 

Float back into

The gentle of the snow

Soon to come,

The question is 

Just when 

And truth is now

That no one knows. 

Good Night from South Bend

            September 23

Across morning's early fall fields

Where summer-sleek cattle

Fold themselves down onto

The turning earth

Sea gulls swoop under

Lowering grey clouds

Full of waiting rain

In the distance I see

The Amish farmer, clad in

Black work clothes,

His straw hat near-gold in

An unexpected shaft of sunlight

That disappears back into

The vast roil of nimbus as

Quickly as he does,

Ducking into his barn,

Shouldering harness

Ephemera, all of it,

Passing whole in my

Sidelong glance,

Wending west, going home.

Coming Home

           

            For Aunt Gretchen

Behind the old dream,

Arriving autumn sun drops early

Behind maples and the orange Octobers.

Driving home from town,

The halo lingers, sun slanting in behind

The western ridges, and

Across the road into the village.

The canopy is up-lit gold,

Branches bending across

The two lanes, like

A trip into the fairy world.

Far away old longings waft,

Slight breezes in the

Change of seasons, and

The homeostasis settles.

Not that it is the right or happy

Place, but it

Is the known, and

Breathing deep and quiet

In the pulsing night

The what might have been

And what might be

Is as alive

As anything, is

Not confined to

Any present, and enduring.

I hum an indistinct tune,

Recalling what she said to me

As I departed home, for home:

Listen to yourself, she said.

I search for sleep, filing 

Tomorrow’s tasks, and weary; and

Suddenly it all

Makes perfect sense.

Many Ways of Landscape

Trusting that the
Cache of iterations
Takes shape
Finally after time
And tears,

The landscape:
Heart
Contour
Texture
Scent
Longing
Remembrance

Writing on it,
I begin to
Reassemble.