Poems

|

A Friend Like You

A friend like you toBe there by my side when others areCriticizing me andDoubting me. You are there with meEvery step of the way. I’m glad to have aFriend like you. Even though you areGone, you’ll always be missed. And sometimes it getsHard without you here, butI remember the times we shared together and that’sJust…

|

The Keep

Is this a kind of progress? This slip-beadmorning through which the rains keepmissing only the scarcely illuminated treadof clover at the heels of swart pines. Sleepcounters me both ways. I fail to advancein my own precession by the darkcalendar needles. I will not advancebut by the strange calamities that workas on shallops on calmed water,…

|

Nonesuch

You come from unquietcountry into roomsthe marshes empty toat low tide. Region of seed kind. Its terracessecreted in rivers.The implicate systemyou live in or that which is all the while here unrendersitself, a civility of capture and let run.You are wondrousin a fundament of greens.Unknown but you are.

|

Houses Among Us

Houses among us.Houses making the fieldsgrow leathery at dusk.Who are the rivers. Who are the passagewaysoutbranching from the commonantique vestibule the sameas it is in heaven. A wall that is leaning afterward.A clawfoot tub that holdsitself like a boargiving birth in a basement. A house inside youbeat of tin.A house inside mestiff with clove.

|

Geomantic

Spruce of the darkOntarian orchards,spoor of the interior,I emerge into uncalculatedgrain shattering at the crown. As the sky answersagainst the watercourse,so I take my fewexceptions with God.Nothing so irredeemableas the robber cowbird,as the slump of the fisherunraveling its host. The great brains of the beechesdivest themselves so sparingly.I will outstay everythingfor the seasonal observance.Dried silicles,…

|

The Sky Is The Lost Orpheum

The shelter of it carved, cavedAcross the river, the park and the little Ferris wheelclosed downThe great oaks emptying, russet, gussetedthe hovering slant light leaking from the outer edgeof cloud bedleads and shawls pulled forthThy synchrony of the lost elements recoveredthe shivering water surfaces, planar unmeldings, remeldings,riverine alchemies, unlocketed selvesnow the reemergence, the sun pouring…

|

Ars Botanica

To bear you in mind.To be jammed in your saffrons.The abasement of these ditchesof your smolderings.Of your abasement. Follow this in:we go weatherward?is this tenable? The roothairs fusefor the openingsto shoot from.You leafon the potentate’s dome?You remnantin need of finishing?You giltand swift execution?

|

Wind Thumbs Through Woods

slant hand of beech leavesshag of oaks before waterWhen did you go missing from me?That passage between limb and slipped skingouged hickories, the ermine-bright birchthrough all that is traveling slopewardcircleting leaf through branch weavecorymbs of curled leaveslone cedar document risingThrough trees that far land moves descantthe old rusts and pastes undershinedDon’t you ever think this…

|

Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils

stripped batting of cloudglimpsed ligamentsdusk coming up underlithographic, nib-hatchingsinstruments clickthe fine-sprung locustreplicate dinge along hill-linestailings of umber, the rust smudgeThere is still that hemmed ocean of oaksthe various reds, the somehowsilver cast over the brown-goldthe under-brushed shadowsHow can there be more of their dispensinginto air?The night-openings of the treesThe thousand clefts intoTheir corridors shiver and…