Soon New Year

In this Christmas house

They sprawl everywhere

Long legs, new-blooming selves, 

Prescient words, questions, as 

Their freshest lives and undefinable 

Tethers reach and grow, 

When they and we understand that now 

They move into who they are

While their parents watch, achieving

Distance and their nana remembers her

Grown-up children those

Many long-ago Christmases

The wood floors have snowy 

Paw prints, boot-tracks,

Picking up the flotsam

From the unswept porch and countless 

Ins and outs, pick up coffee, don’t 

Forget the fennel and before you 

Go off to the market, can you bring

In the firewood? 

The dogs go in and out,

With this one or on that errand

Glory be, there are nine

Of them, best dogs.

Someone puts another log on the

Fire in the Dead Parents Room

As the magic music of my Christmases

Past calms and locates me in my

Season here. It fills our old house 

And we all, in the family camaraderie 

Of trying to stay warm 

In this unimaginable cold

That no old house has had to 

Endure for too

Long, to say nothing of its humans

And the ancient others,

Burst in our ways into an emerging

And rather fulsome 

Wholeness that comforts me. 

They bookend me. They move into

And I move on, 

Opening new-birthed 

Winter horizons 

Mine, I guess,

Anyway, speaking for myself, 

A necessary kind of light comes 

Somehow, to my surprise, and 

I open my eyes wider in awareness 

And tell myself now, listen, it’s 

Time for sleep.

Comment

All is well when I order the

Flying monkeys and deviltries

That haunt me in these strange days

Of doing the best I can

To take a rest

For the fight 

To come. I might not even 

Be here, but if we all

Put our truths out to one another

I think some better days for us

Might be a-borning. 

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