Some Winter

Coming home from town tonight
I was chasing flame
Watching sky blooming into
Something hard to explain,
Looking at it as a farmer might,
Snow still deep and crunchy,
Judging pond recharge
In spring, thinking about the water table,
Thinking about my garden,
Glancing at the road now and then,
More then than now, hitting ruts of slush
And fading into the center on old
Byways so familiar that I knew when
To watch for deer, and with
A startle, I more or less woke up.
Twilight,
Winter,
Watch for deer,
And there they were, eyes orange in
My headlights as sky began to fade to
Pastels settling behind bare stands
Of woods, there they were, alert, in
Evening-blued fields, pawing through
Snow, ready to dart at any time.
You can’t do this, I said to myself,
Don’t be so inattentive, and so
I traveled the last five miles to home
Feeling cheated, feeling virtuous.

A Small Marinating

Light out

Light on the snow,

Moon watched last night 

As creatures moved 

across my landscape

This morning, looking

I saw deer tracks, familiar 

From winters past, and then

Three-striding with a long 

Snow gash. I said, an

Injured cloven-hooved 

And P said, no, a rabbit.

You should see them pop 

Up in the headlights

When I pull in. 

Anyway, amazing, those

Who live clear in my landscape.

They are here, fully effervescent 

Fully present from time to time.

In this realm, some of them.

Some of them already in the next

I stop to wonder where this kind of

View comes from.

And in the cosmic startle of 

Understanding, I see...

All this from the lean, rich 

Prairie, 

Fuel for a life, planted

For the taking, and with 

No knowing whatsoever, I’ve

Been planting too, 

Bringing life as I know it, as it’s mine,

To this canvas, to 

This home. 

Absence of Oxygen

~ Berthoud, August 2017

Returning from one 

Of many well-loved places, 

Along the latitude of 

Touchstones and triggers,

Space to raise my gaze,

I began to understand

That I'm the maker of my

Realities, about

The truths of where I've been

And where I'm going,

Because, I thought,

There is long life ahead for me,

As well as miles,

Or maybe I should say,

Whatever life lies ahead for me

Is long enough so I have time 

For my realities.

It's time to be my blooming

And delve into my telling 

And I'm not fretting 

About any of it, as long 

As I listen to myself. 

In those days of driving

The grasses grew longer

Everywhere, or maybe that was 

Just a way of seeing, a vantage point;

Although somehow eternal there 

The sweep of prairie's

Tall grass, hard grass,

Broom and wheat, 

Sage, and rioting

Bundles of tumbleweed

Against impossible light,

The long shadows behind me

The mountains, I found 

Myself in farewell to places,

Dreams and memories.

Moving then, as tethers loosened 

I thought that finally it might be true,

Be possible for me to fly

On memory’s wings, on

Dreams that wouldn’t die. 

All of this redounding now, 

Flashing whole in this nano-second’s

Absence of oxygen,  

Exhaling, sighing as I slip away to sleep

I come into repose.

And you are there.

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.