Tiptoe

I’ve lost myself in a wilderness

Not entirely of 

My own making though 

It does have roots in 

My sloth, laziness I guess,

My unwillingness

To push through agitations that rose up,

Rise up, burble up,

Fragments I seem unwilling to 

Lasso and beat into these barren, 

Unkempt and 

Fallow fields, these caverns

Missing 

Some chance to join the 

Rooted wilderness 

I love beyond expressing

But I’m lost to that rich, spare landscape

In these last unpresent months. 

Year. Years. I do not know. 

If I want to be kind to myself I say

That I’ve been marinating

Perhaps

Perhaps not

Perhaps wishes, lies, dreams, truths and 

Gazing across landscapes, into skies, 

Stirring ancient questions 

Are nothing more than indulgences

But I wish to find a fulcrum

I have been unable to put 

Plea and deep heart into a universe 

I no longer understand, 

If in fact I ever did, save now and then in 

Some infinitesimal starry, 

Momentary nexus that comes along 

Brushed when precious worlds 

Collapse together 

Still, my affair with words and spaces, 

Emptiness, color, change, the shapes

Of sound and love 

Float stymied and unmoored

In ordinary, endless days.

I do not know if she, I, I guess, can return; 

I’m not hoping 

For any continuity 

I am just being in some way brave

Admitting that if I cannot write 

I cannot imagine how I’ll breathe. 

In the fragile, loamy new days 

Portending spring, I try to take 

Some deeper breaths

I’ve been here in this 

Hilly hallowed hollow before.

Far away, now, I dare to feel 

The ringing bells. 

20 June

 On the eve of solstice I find

I am unable to stay inside,

My notion to prepare our dinner

At a reasonable time just floats away, and

Though my kitchen is flooded with

Late day light, 

It feels like a summons

To wander into a new season

And so I come back outside, and 

The light feels like joy

Recalibrating dinner intentions, 

Repast can wait

In recall of breathing through 

The vesper of these long twilights

On their ways to pink, peach, 

And the purple deep, I travel 

Far into vast salvation.

 

Night Feelings

Oh the sky, 

Looking out the window 

Into the dark before

Sleep, emotions admixed into 

Deepest weariness, 

And it is, in this hour

Barely into a coming new day

So light, unnerving because 

It is not the solstice yet come

That I give in to every scrap

Of unknowing, wherein lies the knowing

And I tell myself that

The roadmap is tucked away somewhere 

In the constellations of my mind

Maybe in my heart, although 

I’m not too sure about that.

I’m  so tired, and not even 

Too sure about why

But as my old boat floats out to sea

I wonder, could you ever 

Come with me? 

May 24, 1:15 AM 

Finger Lakes Spring

I sit outside on the front porch

Once in a while, on a late-lit afternoon

I come here 

To look east across a reminding sky 

Rarely telling east or west,

Such is the gift of ancient lakes

Reflecting mysteries,

Covenant of geology and sky 

That no one can ever really know, since 

No one sky here can hold the land’s light 

Of any day much less the past 

As the sky surrounds,

Pinks arrive, floating along stretches 

Of trees’ limbs and illusions, 

Rising on the fade of  

Horizon; southeast giving to

A coming dark 

Bird song, immense quiet, a 

Sudden slash of rain awakening dry land,

Watering a thirsty latency of

Scent, bursting loamy, 

Bursting fresh now into promise, 

This late spring.

Coda

For George 

April 11, 2022

In long years now suddenly past

Memories float before we understand 

That they are the realness of all that

We have left when he is gone 

On a terrible April day

We lost this beautiful human being 

And searching for consolation

I close my eyes this night

And sense him filling up into

Eternity, tethers loosening as 

He flies above these bonds of earth

And in his gentle ways

We are with him

He carries us, for

Such is love 

               *************

On this day there was no rain,

The air temperate

And not unusual in Maine

In the ordinary palate of that sky,

His last moments hoped serene and sunny, 

Portending spring, 

Up on the second level

Of the place he told us was going 

To be his last, his last big build

I imagine as he grasped his hammer

He knew the daffodils were 

Just beginning, altho no lupines yet

And that Androscoggin shimmered 

In the placid of the day 

And then 

Mandala, veiled and porous, 

Encircling a certain slant of light,

Whiff of sawdust,

Quirk of wind,

Paused his given nanosecond in 

This life’s time, and 

George was gone. 

This was his day.

And now he goes, as 

He goes now 

Into the gold of his new light.

 

Loam

In the precious dark comes

Early spring 

I know we have winter, iced miles 

To go

But

Connection

Survives the temporal and

I do not wish to

Explain

February 19

Winter Canvas

I navigate 

Answers, or at least 

perspective

Abound, in these crazed, snow-

Wrapped fields, 

Shards of memory buried in 

An unend of winter days, 

Long, stark horizons

Listen to yourself, 

she said to me, 

One of her 

Gifts and 

So I am.