Cycles and Seasons
Seven Ways
the color of living
Solomon In All His Glory*
Compline
April Fools
On what day do clichés amaze us?
On the day before dandelion suns and twilit violets fall to the mower.
On the day when winter harvests of cold sift away on the south wind.
On the day that aging lovers reap pleasure as the afternoon rain strokes
and nuzzles their closed curtains.
May
It's all sky, goldfinches sewing the air
with quick looping stitches, a scarlet
tanager flashing through treetips or
rarely, an indigo bunting. The earth
falls away from your sunward stare,
and the mind flies.
Independence Day
Past the waving flag of chicory starred with Queen Anne’s lace,
beyond the red barn trimmed with white, lives a turtle that won’t
stay put in his pond. He wanders toward the road, the pine grove,
whatever direction leads away from safety and watery supplies.
Why? I ask, but he simply pisses when I pick him up, heavy in
his 12-inch house filled with the scaly furniture of determination
to find new worlds.
August
Pulvis et umbra sumus
[We are dust and shadow] Horace, Book IV, Ode vii, line 16
When tar sticks and fields scorch and every step puffs
dust, she departs from the usual paths to stay in the shade,
a new habit of aging. Shade is to sun as water is to thirst
but more—ask others who dared depart from the usual paths
past Charon to Hades where shades wailed and berated them
ceaselessly. She feels shades of the past as half glow half gloom
when the shade of her mother slides beside her, father sadly separate,
spectral collie herding a parade of the dead. As she clings to shade,
shade clings to her, and she fades a day’s worth. Blessed is the shadow
of memory, cursed is the shadow of memory. She reaches for shadows
and shivering, casts her own.
Rout
Thistles erupt, purple as the sound of cicadas.
Prairie grass on one side, corn on the other
rear overhead, and the road between is dust
one day, mud the next. A rust-colored
butterfly flakes from the air, crab apples
rot while bindweed and mosquitoes rule.
Beware of poison ivy and snakes not yet
asleep despite the rain that broke the back
of heat. We are not beaten, claims summer
royally, but still she flees, the dogs of fall
at her heels. Her last days have been
tyrannical and yet, her death will leave
us longing for a queen.
Birthday Benison
Some long for heaven but I favor the back porch
in October with a pine skyline and wooly clouds
dodging border collie breezes, bugs buzzing me,
birds gobbling bugs, all of us richly pollenized
or sneezing. In November these stairs slick over
like ski slopes, but October’s terraced, grapeful,
thirty-one vintage days decanted into glasses of
Amarone perched precariously on a rocking chair,
back and forth without a drop spilled unless you
count the splash of hardy roses still defying frost.
Month of vermillion leaves and opal light, month
that gave me the world, intoxicating October.
Sip it, savor it—honeyed heaven can wait.
Lakeside Haiku Cycle
Dawn draws a dragon
across the lake mists. Mountains
breathe sun-reddened fire.
The hot rays stop time.
The still lake waits for the first
touch of intruders.
From water spiders
radiate gray rings of lake,
like lies to oneself.
Trains at certain speed
and distance sound like pine trees
mulling winds' wisdom.
Doe-tailed sunlight flicks
through the glades of afternoon.
A hungry night nears.
This evening's earth
is blue, glazed snow set in a
ring of smokestone sky.
We inch into the
snail shell of midnight, moonpearled,
to the dark's coiled core.
Haiku at Sea
North
Wind ships sail by, snow
billowing, but leave frozen
waters unrippled.
South
Waves swirl away from
the ship sides on white, tapered
toes to dance, rest, rise.
East
Neverendingness.
Then a fin slices the flesh
Of bloodless waters.
West
Gulls tear at salmon
clouds swimming against silver
currents of sunset.
Tree
The hemlock that sheltered the house was as tall as it was old
200 feet, 200 years, always longing for the sky. It darkened
the house, though, so one day the new owners cut it down,
which took four hours, not long for a giant to fall.
Latecomers to the neighborhood saw a light-filled
house, but some old-timers experienced empty
space, something sacred sawn across,
the loss of nature; others
saw a mossy ghost
finally entwined
with its sky,
and felt the
nature of
loss.
Seven Ways
He
raised
his branchy
hand, umber skin
and needlegreen eyes
camouflaged in a forest of arms
weaving like wind, and asked with a voice
no louder than breezes, How do you make
friends with a pine tree? Be still, she said,
get sticky with pitch, prick your fingers with cone,
catch fire, break open, root in rich ground,
and bend
toward
light.
the color of living
blue reveals the veins loosening their hold on an old
man’s hand and the cord slithering after a newborn
blue denies low spirits with high sky and hides
our slippage between hues of a lucent morning
and shadowed evening blue moves from soldier’s
uniform to smoke rising over bombed ruins blue
dreams forward muses after but when we ship
away white light guides us toward transparency
Solomon in All His Glory*
(Matthew 6:28-29)
She opens the door to a closet crammed with clothes
(it’s hard to discard occasions though they’re old),
considers that she’s no lily, but toils and spins
(aware of closing petals and season’s end),
and tries to grow past fear of losing breath,
and hopes for fields of grace to nourish death,
for more than rain to quench her earthy thirst.
She’ll turn away and take a book down first
(the words that Jesus said arrayed in red)
and leave her life on hangers, and go to bed.
Compline
Angel of mercy, angel of death, wrapped in black
velvet, with silvery breath, comes winging in silence like
snowfall at night. And why do we fear her so soft and so
sure as she cradles a soul that can hardly endure? Our
pain is the loss to invisible realms of all that we
hold, with each life goes a world that no other will know.
Comfort, come with her, bring sorrow to close, join all realms
together for rest and repose.
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