Redoux

It's hard,

Really hard to keep 

This train on the track.

Some days I don't do well at all

Trying to do this,

And if I give in

To reality,

I'd have to quit trying.

So I live on this 

Restless line,

Hope,

Praise singing from

Some sweet ordinary sky,

The bits of dust kicking 

Up on our country road

Suggesting possibility to reclaim

A spot on this wildly and not understood spinning globe.

If only the black flies 

Would cease

The space outside

At near-perfect dusk

Could seduce me into

Thinking 

I've been so wrong,

Maybe right at other times,

But nonetheless this insight 

Shakes me with this 

Psychic throttle: 

Woman, don't give

Up, and if you do, 

Make a fiction of it and don't forget to

Weave in the thank you bits. 

Meanwhile, hello 

Lovelies, you old lilies blooming now, I see 

You wait in perfect splendor

With some rhythm I'll never

Know, 

Magnificent in the splendid

Diffidence to these strange 

And crippling fights

These ferocious struggles

We think are life and death.

No, life 

Is fulsome in this outside refectory, this holy constant solace, 

And I missed this space, these 

Past few weeks of ancient growing glory 

Probably because of my own self, my failure to always 

keep

Ithaka in mind.

Now gratitude rises to 

Meet the road

Where someone wends his truck to far off home down into the next section;

The neighbors' kids shout their coming in; 

I hear them faint in my

Primordial settling of all this stuff,

And there is

Bird song mixed into

Twilight. 

 

Across the forest, 

Placid Seneca

Floats, miasma

Under still haze

Indifferent as I 

Fret and fuss into

This new stuff, determined 

To live my place, 

Be nourished.

Who will know if 

I quail in resolve

And vision? 

I listen to myself, the 

Answers I have 

Just guesses.

It doesn't matter if I

Succeed or fail. 

Main thing is, I say, I tried.

Heat

Heat is too high

In the house, 

The metrics of the change,

Dew point

And humidity, the stillness

Of the wind I'm trying to beckon

If this front moves through,

All insufficient logic for the

Misery of the body.

Enervating and

A bit cruel,

Unci Maka is just

Responding;

She is who She eternally is.

It is hellishly hot 

Before the 

Sunset on

This mid-northern clime 

July day;

We have water,

Wildness of weather,

Weeds, and

Not too much sun,

Though I wonder

If this is how they'll feel

When I am gone, for it 

Is bearable.

I do see all the beauty, 

Reordering what looks

Like chaos into the paradigm

I see coming.

If I can just get to the 

Other side, I'll be able

To tell them.

Horses

I was standing 

In the dim barn, watching as

The swallows swooped,

Diving under old rafters

And stirring up near-dusk.

From that

Frame I gazed out into the paddock

Boasting stands of

Queen Anne's Lace, old

Stumps persisting

With growing green shoots,

While beyond, in the pasture,

Sarah traded fly masks 

For hackamores, hitching 

Long leads to bring 

Compliant horses to

Graze in grass near the 

Spot where we were viewing 

The pinking sky, mammatus 

Forming and then dissipating

Into the soft dusk of 

Seneca's miraculous hills.

The horses would have none 

Of our sentimental scenario,

Balking at the paddock's threshold

Into the barn,

And thence into the night's

Oncoming recap of a sun-struck day.

Still, her slim communing,

Her own golden mane in

The picture as I watched 

Was more perfect than what

She envisioned:

The swallows swooping,

This daughter and her tawny 

Horses, seen through 

Queen Anne's Lace, 

Tinged by closing gold, 

Unconscious 

Of her pure perfection in my

Moment.  

Settling into Time

Lightening moves through,

Off to the northwest

Like vapors,

Pushing away a storm 

That is sometimes best to bypass.

I suppose

I can just tell myself my

Stories as I figure the way out.

Sky flickers and the night

Unsettles more, but softly. 

My friend said she's going to

Turn away for a while. 

In some cases that could be

A perfectly balanced thing

To do. In others 

Perhaps not as balanced

As it is the radical shift at 

Time's end. 

I don't think I can turn 

Away for a while, 

But I can turn and face

The rush of past, 

Gleam of future 

When it's barely there 

Anymore. 

I have to wonder,

Looking at photos and gardens and things,

What does beauty really mean?

Lately I've given up a great many

Assumptions.

I have so little time

To become aware

It doesn't really matter

I guess.

I untangle my hair

Like a night-gowned prairie

Woman, and 

Put it in a braid

For the night: I 

Imagine and remember and

Call back to my lovers.

Outside and in

The disarray is fevered 

And I think

It's the way life is

Sometimes

I imagine the yard and swaths

Of green blowing tall

Because unmowed, 

I see the gardens beautiful in 

Their blooming, changing seasons,

Filled now with need of weeding.

I imagine going back to lie 

In the long grasses of the

Plains. In reverie 

The house leans into deeper

Beauty's flaws, its disrepair

We see and cannot change, 

At least right now.

At least right now 

I'm like this place.

So Beautiful This Wind

There are people like me

Sitting in the edges of the wind

Wondering how we manifest 

What we know as the elders we are

Connected by nothing

But physics. 

Mechanical Lessons

God damn

The mower just refuses to be fixed 

I wanted light, setting sun, peace, rapprochement

Weeded gardens and weeds trimmed, all

To arrive tonight by my dint

Not so

But out there his peach teeshirt

Recedes toward the back plot

Waiting for vegetables in

This weather crap that we've messed up,

Thoughtless humans.

I'll not dwell on the meta

I'll just try to keep the beauty 

Of this tiny micro-bit up here in mind

Peach

Out there

Peeking through

The back spruce

We need the spruce

To keep out the dust

When Bobby ploughs. 

His teeshirt 

Out there 

Fades like magic into 

The sky hiding behind

Spruces, and I know that is 

The sunset

But hadn't seen how we blend and fade into 

The ethos, this beautiful 

Gaia. 

It is orange 

Behind blue

Spruce

And this light

This air

This breathing 

This unearthly panorama

Saves us,

Nurturing us 

As we extinguish 

The old. 

And meanwhile in 

The wind bringing in the front

We grow young

On this cusp of 

We are.

Moving into Balance

Down side of the ridge

The western sky bands 

Colors of an unsettled

Sunset. It was brilliant

Looking from the second floor back window.

I wonder how many souls

Miss extraordinary light 

As it wends

Its way to the other side.  

For now, the grey stratus, cirrus and nimbus

Lurk and call; 

There was an earlier diamond 

Of sky blue

And now the gun metal light

Gone the red and pink, while

Symphony score

Rises in a night that's

Trying to quiet;

Bullfrogs arrive. 

Scampering subsides.