Harvest Moon

I'd driven through traffic
was almost home

I'd come to the bay
hadn't noticed how quiet
the eerie light of dusk

The road curved northward
a great pine stood
looming on shore
there in its arms
dark shape of a crow
white circle of moon

Was it night already?
Where had September gone?

Just this morning
the sky such a brilliant shade of blue
clouds like kingdoms rose
the din of children living at the beach

Sails were billowing and when I swam
I swam for hours beneath the burning sun
the breeze was warm and steady
upon my browning chest
sunset forever
stars fell overhead

It's evening now
I put my sweater on
go out in the garden

I've known for months
the pumpkins wouldn't come
I look for signs of frost.
My fingers ache with cold.

Dirt

Days hollowed out like logs
from trees that once lived

Hollow winds blowing too long
striping away time and creation

All things get caught up in wind

Days have gone
so many gone
like dandelion seeds
fallen on sandy places

I should sit for a time
by the bank of that old pond I once found
deep in a now-forgotten forest
watching the water's surface
watching winds
across that still surface
broken in so many shards
shards of mirrors
wavelet upon wave

I should just listen
close my eyes and rest

I should go
far away from here
where the sun still glances
across tender stalks of grass
that bend and bend and bend
that cast their seeds and die and grow
cast their seeds and grow
flourishing in the rain
sleeping beneath snow

sending shoots skyward
in any weather

The sun is drifting southward everyday
night encroaches on the afternoon

I don't know what I'm after here
these words seem so weakly simple
like the grasses they go on and on

I'm not certain they bear seed
yet they flourish
as long as I'm their root

But is it me or something else
something needing voice
speaking itself into being
I only a furrow to be carved?

Yes I
the soil that must be turned
the soil life works
breaking the substance of me
dividing and subdividing
what I am
root coming from root coming from root
until I am just the sand
every nutrient extracted
until I am the dust
which wind and rain remove.

Dusk

oh the Sun

it's shining, it's burning
blistering away the day

the tree branches swaying
in the gales off the bay

flocks of swallows
dotting the yellow sky

as if Summer still had some sway

as if already
the light wasn't bleeding away

hulks of the maples
a growing shadow in the west

a streak of brilliant white
so luminescent

thrust at such a perilous angle
into the shoulders of the trees

a jet barely visible
nearly lost in the heights


its engine heating
compressing the air

using the atmosphere
against itself

to climb westward
so to appear

as if it's falling

into the ghost of the Sun

how wonderful to know
that light seeks after light

the peach edge
of a gray cloud

already eclipsing
that bright contrail

branches still buffeted
sway

the north winds
roaring hollow and bodiless

tearing, tearing
the world away from the day

Overtime

That's the thing. I should be developing GetHTML("CensusKey") but I'm sketching contour lines instead. I'm trying to get the edges right, an oval of a face, remembering a glance, trying to remember the corners of a smile. I'm not being analytical at all. The code keeps crashing, I keep running down rabbit trails, the outline of her hair, that knee length skirt, the band-aid on her toe. Why do I keep cutting and pasting the same variable, as if it's iterative? Its getting dark outside, the rain's incessant, so much code to write, so much.

This can't be true

She was born on the Autumnal Equinox. They remembered this was so even if, perhaps, there was some meager chance she wasn't. She would come and go so often on that day when Day and Night stood arms crossed saying, "We're the same you and I. You go one way and I the other."

Says Day, "This is your time. I know it as much as you, but do not think that I am less than you."

Says Night, "This I know so well, having watched you live these past few months; and you, you're no more than me."

You go your way; I go mine. That is how it is. Can't we go together? There's no particular reason, even if there is a purpose.

Last year a milkweed seed drifted through the open windows of my car. I'd pulled off in some sun-bleached country field; was just awakening from a nap. So quietly it drifted by, so delicately floating on nothing but the air. As it passed I knew it carried me away somewhere, and there you were, your hair so soft and cool against my sunburned cheek.

Ten Thousand Birds of an Unspecified Species

ten thousand birds
darken the sky
fill it with riotous noise
night has darkened day
clouds appear in the west
consume the stars
they still shine
the windows are open
i stand on the porch
watch them fly
fly out the door
rise to the sky
i am pinned to this Earth
mouth agape
watching them
watching them 
skyward fly

Return

Once there was a day when the forests were pure when the sun shone from an ever blue sky. Some days I still find it. Many years ago, a hundred million years ago it seemed, a white moon without blemish shone. Do not be afraid to return, to linger. Pause. Do not be afraid to seek it out.  For many days you will not find it no matter how hard you try, but please for me, for you, for all of us, do try. Don't surrender.  There are many ways we must surrender and when we do we know we must, but don't listen to this, my telling you what to do. The winds are pure, the sky is blue, the sun shall ever shine. That place in the forest waits for you, keeps waiting for you.

hope of summer, spent

acrid smelling shotgun shell
spinning through the air
smoke
and taste of smoke

regret

an empty plastic casing

pleasure so temporary
pulling the trigger

young boy
pointing the barrel
inches away from tiny white chest
a chickadee
the rest of his life
tasting the spatter of bird shit
mingled with gun smoke

young man
taking an eight point
nearly two hundred pounds

vertebrae shattering
turning
to face the sound
echoing off distant hills
still running 
on its side in the swamp

gray

gray clouds

a cold cold rain

Flight

Tonight as I kept repeating the melody stuck in my head, pounding it into the worn keys of a tired old piano, I went back to the time when I traveled for days by bus across the wastelands of central Tanzania. I was fleeing myself, putting kilometers between me and the places that had become too painful for me to stay any longer, where I was living out the lies I was telling myself. I was distancing myself from the whores and the old bartenders I surrounded myself with, who played along for profit, complicit for their own pitiful reasons, who would have rolled me over had I died to pick my pockets for the few useless Shillingi I lived off. I was escaping those of my own devices which I believed had already killed me, and had yet to come to gestation. I occupied my mind those days with fears of various forms of infectious disease that depended on such activities for their procreation. I had already known that I was going to run. I had the bus ticket and my bags in my room ready at the Y. It was on that last night of my envisioned destruction when the bartender had already stiffed me, and I let him just to see how far he would actually go, when J____ had finally given up her manipulations and suggested that I take the sixteen year old who was new. S____ had already thrown the beer bottle outside against the wall, and her friend speaking of love, trying to negotiate a settlement had given up too. She had in her hand a paperback of Gulliver’s Travels, which was fitting, for it seemed by that time they all had already tied various threads of their own contriving across my torso and limbs, and were clinging to them in attempts to pin me to some firm unmoving ground. The deal was made. I was to pay their ways into Jimmy Conners, and they would swing by the Y to drop me off so I could come later. All of us had come to separate independent realizations about how this would provide various opportunities of escape for any of us. Maybe no one understood but me that all of them would be enacted without exception so that early the next morning, head heavy and stomach rotting with too much beer I was sitting in the midst of villagers on a bus, sunlight searing through my eye sockets into the back of my skull, leaving in the dust that desperate city to waken without me.

when the Sun is out shining go turn your face to its light this is what I tell myself the sun will shine when it does and when it doesn’t maybe rain let it come when the moon is out shining wake stand beneath it whatever the hour of night let it tell you things that you’ve forgotten let its light paint familiar landscape strange summer fades there’ll be others or this may be the last no matter take the time wander a field find an unknown wilderness alone when vegetables in your garden ripen pick them the green beans die from rust let them go wake to leaden clouds of fall the day’s sudden coolness let cold brush against your lips winds redden your checks stars still shine progress in their mechanical way i suppose other things are like this too i showed up at the wrong funeral confronted by loss of someone i didn’t know i have to live within myself who else has the patience? each year my litany grows longer so many more reasons i will let things be if i am different so what i haven’t the words get beneath my skin September winds blow strong the quality of this day battled out in the sky above i’ve spent a whole succession of months chasing the light of the Sun there is never a day i seek the shadow of clouds

Words

I am not sure anymore if my writing is only a footpath through the forest where I've traveled, or if it's a way revealing itself into the depths of an as-of-yet-undiscovered wilderness. Maybe it's both or neither, just water flowing where it will, where this present landscape affords it passage. Perhaps it is only pooling in some concavity where the myriad forms of pond life thrive.