On His Birthday

I asked you what you wanted

For your birthday; it’s now arrived 

This early spring day, 

And you shed some tears

And said,

“I want my sight back,”

And that stymied me:

Now what? 

And then I began to think

Perhaps 

You do have sight.

I mean, this trauma has delivered

Insight and patience, 

Resilience embedded in 

The lessons of never quite knowing, 

The lessons that one really doesn’t want 

To have to learn,

The inchoate lessons that 

Emerge to keep one going.

Faith floats out there

On a heretofore unknown horizon

It’s not sharp or clear, and muddies 

Contours that already are not crisp,

But there waiting is a different promise

That one hopes to never realize

Because the price of such clarity

Is too dear to contemplate. 

So you just keep on

And you find 

I think, perhaps 

That thrive is a goal tinged

With the golden fog of hope,

And the slow dawn, the 

Process of a dawn that tells you that 

You are just fine. 

You see all 

You need to see. 

And you continue on. 

~ Peter, April 25

Missing

Look how full the pond is, Jade,

You can stand at the end of the dock 

As you watch for fish, they’ll be close to

The gleaming still surface with the

Sun soon bathing the greening land, 

Dragonflies flitting and new scents 

Catching your nose, 

Just now I saw our big blue heron

Lift off from the banks as Colby 

Trotted slowly around the other side

He’s an old dog now

I imagine he was looking for you, 

Maybe felt you, heard you calling,

As did I, but he’s all right. 

I stand outside for a moment, 

Wind in my hair,

Recalling how you

Always settled that one early spring day,

When season’s changing finally bursts

Relentless winter’s stops and starts, all

Giving in to spring, 

Wading in the shallows of the pond, then 

Your belly on the warming ground, 

You summoned the essential wonder 

Your brindled coat with liver ticking 

Glossy, smooth as 

Satin and your amber eyes 

Seeing all, and looking back at me.

Matinicus with Anne, April 2007

There is too much incoming need, 

So I start looking at old photos

Years of many springs, and I come
Across a photo of Anne in
Her muck boots striding on an
Island road

I recognize that stretch
And her steady pace

I am trying to find

That place around here that 

I thought about

Last summer maybe, in a poem

Maybe in my heart, I

Can’t recall, but where I am going to 

Plant more cherry trees

Soon Spring

It took me a long time to get 

Back here, back home

It helps that the sky is bright from
This moon

One way or the other,

As I sat here tonight

Recentering into what I can’t quite say,

I saw what I’d been doing, 

Casting away, reimagining and

Figuring out this new way forward

Whatever it is, and

A little tweak of light sparked

From the back, beyond the main barn

Night vision kicked in

As hints of color

Emerged in the bright black

Lit night sky, 

Spring coming on, and as I 

Thought about this place

My sweet old girl

Ticked through the air

She has started coming 

Around now and then

And I paused to think about her,

Perhaps I scratched her ears, and 

Raising my eyes to the

Skies through the back window

There they all were, flying big

As life in their green gold years

Beautiful in that light, our fat sheep, 

Our goats, their black tipped ears,

Dogs leaping into the pond

Racing to catch a thrown stick

Flying into the field from the open doors
Of the barn’s threshing floor,

Trotting the property line in goodbye

I am wrapped in miasma, 

The animate residue 

Of this old farm, from which

I lift and I let go,

Carrying who and what

I won’t relinquish into the

What will be will be 

It was the most extraordinary moment 

Of souls alive 

The ones that stayed

And others, flooding into 

My calming heart

Finding that its steady beat

Is theirs, with mine, 

Is ours.

March 21, 2019

Untethered

I don’t know what to do.

That’s a start 

Someone says there are these

Kinds of days and nights

Nothing making sense

So I suppose I can let them exist in their

Service of the way things go, although 

No longer much time,

Still time enough, I suppose, 

I have all I need. 

The wind comes up, something in

These gray years

I understand

It blows the scatter of ice 

Against old glass

Scatter from my other worlds 

untitled alright

Just so clear 

Just the clear shapes

Uncomplicated and spare

From a bedroom window

I’d forgotten about

And especially 

In winter 

Oh the chaos

And I say,

Steady, you,

And in the eve of explosion into

Stars 

I sit in the window

In the dark of a night

Day followed a day, days, nights, 

Only my elemental allowed

To be

And then I call time-out.

Outside a swath of the dark baby blue

Sky (when all below is white, barn rooftops white

The ground all white 

My gardens deep in white under

This night sky,

Roads white), it

Rolls gentle along the horizon, 

Sky with earth swelling into one another

Traversing barns and firs, alleys of evergreen, fields

I think homeostasis

I will probably sleep

Somewhere very deep tonight

Recovering in my landscape

Tu me manques

Winter 

Remembering

Not easy recalling when dream state

And landscape merge, 

Navigating visceral as another 

Foreign land appears

Between the dreamed and actual, 

Some third state of being,

Yet another way of seeing,

A transitory candle in a winter wind

Lit and buffeted by unimagined unknown 

Grays, and snow 

Pale in a once rose-tinged sky 

Lighting the way home,

The sweep of wind erasing hints 

Of anything 

Until the changing day drops

Deep onto the hills and fields along

The lakes and between them

All the blue, the twilight light,

Breathless blue, translucent, dense,

Eliminating delineation 

And I had been thinking to myself

Take this photo, try to take this photo,

This one, this, until I said, 

I can’t, 

And I told myself,

Remember.