Finding Home II

Old round silver ball, the
Moon steadies this nighttime
So I can think about how
Everything just keeps
On, down river banks, across
The plains and
If I look, on
The paths through
Old places still there
From when I
Was small,

My sight first opened then
To clouds above the prairies, just
Beyond my mother’s black eyes,
Later to remember
Satins of willow branches
Dad’s Setter so graceful it
Seemed he could fly, and
Other constants of the
Grasslands, beauty’s home, like
My mother’s orchards
And winter

As a vision floats fulsome
In the western moonlit sky,
Memory slips back to
That shallow valley,
I was nurtured there in
Switchgrass, bluestem,
Wind and cherry trees.

Unfinding Words

You need to know

I can’t take care

Of you since 

This moon out here in my 

Small paradise 

Over these lakes reflects back

A bare, an aching yearning 

That will never go away, 

Won’t leave me room to breathe,

Much less join you in your quest,

Uncertain, filed as ghostly

And unsure, because of course, it is

When I think back, parting

The imagined veil, 

A caution and a gift into the 

Newness of what I only now

Remember that 

I feared as unexamined 

All resolves into some other 

Fulsome universe,

The fragments and the sense

Of it teasing into 

Some new whole.
Oh! The gemstones that
I near
Left out
Live brilliant,
All is well.

Reaching

Autumn out there now

Yellow leaves and brown underfoot

Whirligigs from the maples

Floating across the red rooftop 

To where we sat on the patio

Stunned by sky

A bit of homeostasis for no

Real reason whatsoever. 

Not much else matters. 

Moon

There's a light in the sky

Tonight 

Harvest moon,

Gold enough, harrowing silver

I never thought which way 

Or how often the moon

Rises before she claims western nights

But she arrives, on her schedule

And for this moon, tonight, I'm watching 

Her traverse south, from her low

Eastern perch, in the cornfield 

Across the road 

And but for the clouds now, 

I may watch how heaven changes

Into the western 

Morning. 

I think

If I am wakeful, I'll see

Her slip away as sun comes up,

That slip of light 

Abiding. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vUSYlotulU8

Reposting My Blind Eye

Blind Eye

In Exeter, the apples lay rotting on the garden path,

As gentle Devon summered in a late last bluest sky,

And man-tall hedgerows that lined

The brown-mapped roads up on the moor

Began to show their russets and their goldens 

As the light began to die

Earlier and earlier, the thorny hawthorns bare,

The maple, oak and dogwood leaves floating down

To hedges’ grassy banks,

Leaving holly and primroses to brave the coming wind,

To color through the gray.

The chill was there that long past fall,

A marker of an unseen pulse, a throb of

Strife, not hers, she thought, but from the

Rovers on the quai, the travelers’ dogs all running wild,

Or hearty shouts of revelers closing down

The pub at 2 AM in Wonford Road.

She didn’t want to know.

She closed her eyes, and didn’t see the world was spinning

Way too fast; her garden bloomed through early frost,

She carried on; the blind eye turned to

Balm enough no matter present tense:

On the trellis by the terraced beds, the bramble and the ivy twined,

She should have seen the signs.

Ah, well; all that was long ago, the choirs stilled, the

Gateways closed, the spring of making new again

Choked by betrayal’s rust; corrosive lies,

And long into the future that came awake in that bad

Dream, the beauty of that year turned to dust and formlessness.

In dormancy all things repair; they sleep into another time,

And so she did; the decades cloaked in silence as she moved

Through past and memory, stoked indifference, turned

Away, resolved to find some relic, some retrieval from the ash.

Who knows just where forgiveness lives; who tells one how to do it?

But forgive she did, with wisdom earned, eyes seeing all around,

And now she sees another turn, another of life’s seasons:

Her spring was dashed, and summer too; all that is gone

Forever now, a waste of her, a waste of time, time ungifted witlessly,

And no recoup, no recompense, though

Steeliness and wholeness won,

And she is seeing where she’s been; the hedgerow bare,

The thorns to keep the wild ones out,

But the holly’s red, the primrose blooming,

For she is autumn now.

Far Out There

So, is now when we're supposed to 

Be saying goodbyes, but we don't 

Know it? 

We talk among ourselves about

This listlessness, the ennui

We don't have the language 

About it yet.

Powerful, though, the fields

Around us as we navigate 

If we find the quiet within

Enough to breathe and 

Reassemble