We ride into the future on the wings of
Present harbingers
Skyways, shifts of light, the ambience
Of a moment caught outside
One found in days of just escaping
I think we’d all best breathe in
Miracles, whenever, wherever and
I can smell the rain and
Loam breaths
Near-rise in miasma as I glance
Around, beyond
Beyond, and back to then and now.
Breathing in the outside
And listening to the thunder.
Got a message from the pre-heat-dome sky
Just now, as I alit for a moment
Pausing to feel
Not meaning to be trite
But doing what all old farmers do,
And turn my head, sniff the sky, search it too,
I was on the front porch, east to the lake.
The west wind came right up, blowing my greys
And as I came in to fix a bit of dinner,
The light from the west called me back to the
Door out into my gardens,
The soon-solstice sky that I saw and felt
Already coloring lush this vesper
Lovely, harbinger of solstice.
I arrive in the twilight
Watching night coming on
Things shape now into a
Newly-unknown reality.
Not a light on the patio
Save the lowered gleam of
My phone
Gunnar on the edges,
Going out onto patrol
As twilight gives way
Fireflies
Meanwhile,
Spare, barely noticed—
The hummingbirds have gone to bed
Bullfrogs quiet and sonorous—
A drop of rain
A drop of rain
A drop of rain
Gentle
On this bounty
I won’t ever tip us out
Of our little sailing moonshadow
Seems the rocky seas do
Rock us
Gently now.
After the eclipse,
When my hair turned white
(and I’ll be writing about that later),
Now comes here Israel Iran
Biden Harris Austin, and
The tight circle of
Situation
This, and have at what/who/where
This is,
has been coming for decades,
Forever and ever amen,
Ancient
Mideast war that somehow
Has to happen now
Or the new world war will have
Finally come soon
Collision
Eclipse
Mids
Easts
Clouds, canopy and air,
Earth moves,
Quake and water,
These are the lights, they point to
real days beyond the flood
Drones
Missiles’ bombs
Fossils
To fossil fools
Revolution of
The Anthropocene
Arrives,
Rogue actors ascend
Though in our alert of senses
We know not who they are,
Nor yet how we respond.
Last night I dreamed
I lost my cellphone and my passport
And then, oh
I found after some
Ultimately futile
Contemplating
About what to do
That alas,
I’d also lost my driver’s license
And the billfold in which I carried it
And 800 dollars, and
But, and
Where, I woke to ask
Was I going?
In my dream,
After I knew I’d lost my passport
And my cell,
I was frantic:
Dad! Oh how can I even find you?
So I started
(In my dream)
To look through the cupboards
In my grandmother’s pantry
And just when I despaired,
I found I’d tucked my
Carryall,
My pocketbook—
The grey bag with lots of pockets—
Tucked it
Into the cupboard where
The china was,
That she wanted me to have
I found it
And so I woke to ask
Who am I?
Winter
Pondering if it is a truth, that I’m kind of isolated and getting to be an old woman up here, trying to make a difference, juggling integrity, weariness, love and all that bit. I sit looking out of my nighttime windows, and it’s the strangest outside I’ve seen in some time. The north is still snow-covered, though mud is everywhere the rest.
I realize I’m becoming used to green winter, though it does feel random still, and in my recall I think on snow pinwheels in May, early snow before Halloween one year, powdering an icy sprinkle. Seems a little frivolous, a frivolity I may need to think on a bit more.
It is 1-9-24
I wrote a poem a long time ago about green winter. I’ve been thinking about it for many moons. And ten years ago I sat to look into this kind of winter sky, wrapped as now into what just is, and later, in the shift in my interior wandering, I started to muse on my last quarter, and wrote about that too.
The arctic, though, in that poem I wrote maybe ten years ago, shivers now, still, and dissipates into another kind of moment, deepening into a whole again. There is breath and life in an arctic, and I breathe anew that breath. Part of me has to wonder if it’s about this last, a past, in the beautiful warp of time. Perhaps we take our leavings on a wild, wondrous cold slide navigating worlds, cosmos, and so forth, and so I ponder.
I didn’t take my hearing aids out tonight. I usually do. Oh wind-whipping beauty, oh the life pattering on my metal roof: rain? Sleet? Hail? Small messages from restive clouds, portending snow? I don’t know, and I could be afraid, and maybe I should. But I’m not, really. As I write, I think hmm. Derecho.
1-13-24
