Leaf Smoke, Sun Streak

Day 30, The Last

Not until this moment,
the sky impossibly coral streaked
& filled in by downy cloud,
did I accept the end of  another year.

Some of what goes up does not come back the same:
the leaf that fell now rises as smoke,
its rustle now crackles,
its color now roasts,
& its rust smells of cherry, oak, & smoky peat.

soon, I know, the cold rains will come,
the leaves' revenge, the end of fire,
the long sleep of seed & soil,
until the green fuse lit:
pop of bloom, crack of ice, hum of bird return.

but now, this evening that holds the cold away at a flames length,
a sky beholden not to art,
there is no sense in holding on to the past,
just being here now, just seeing & smelling
the end of another season is enough to settle this month's doubts.

Seasonal Invective Confession

Day 29

Everybody knows that September is the month for dying 

& October for being born. It's already November, 

already another number past the biblical midpoint, 

another pile of pages past the midterm, 

& again the worry of a wasted life 

still hammock free & temporarily hawkless.

What do birds know about disillusion anyhow,

that they show up to ghost a disenchanted morning?

What do they know of misplaced dreams, 

ill-timed despair, or the hunger of another plan?

They know the migratory urge, the seasonal pangs,

the Attic need to roost, nest, dally, & fly.

This is November. I know this feeling welling:

not regret exactly, but reproach, a weariness

of purpose that never works out as planned.

Is it that November is the polar twin of May:

the return of illusion with the migrating birds?

If only it was as simple as lift, flap, & glide.

Then again what do birds know about deadlines,

about stacks of unloved paper-hearted words,

about rushed poems that cannot find their ends?

Out of Cover

Day 28

The life outside this window
is larger than any metaphor's
circumference: fox on a hay-bale
or family of early cardinals,
decked in matching hats with
downy coats in stunning scarlet,
or perfect golden brown
& tints of every subtle pink.

What goes doesn't always stay gone,
what returns doesn't always make up,
but most of all, what hides someday
runs out of cover.

There's no need of metaphor then.

A Brief History of this House

Just yesterday, I searched
the homemade slat shelves
in what used to be my father's
basement workshop to find
the necessary parts to fix
my mother's television signal.
Like always, his collection
of mismatched sundries,
an addiction to keep (passed on),
provided what we needed.
That the picture is now clear
is point, though prodigal,
of much wanted filial pride.

And in this room,where I began
most of eighteen years of nights
and where last night the five of us
slept mostly soundly, snuggly,
half a life later (and twice to go?)
I notice, without slightest regret,
the juvenile S of ceiling stars
no longer glow, their infinity broken,
miraculously years ago to bring on these new years.

Finally, this morning, a threshold
opened in long gone memory,
thirty years disappear:
I see this house as it was,
this day through the long years,
revisited in the doorway's suspended jump of a nine month old,
the furniture diving of a three year old,
the brave explorations of wise old six.

This is as close to time travel as I care to get.

Watchers, US-69 South

The gnarled trees, mostly
cottonwood, rosebud,
& sycamore are lousy
with watchers: red-tailed,
red-shouldered, or
broad-winged raptors.

At the Miami County line
they start to turn dark-winged,
their light autumn bellies
shining in the midday glow.

These are not the same
frequent fliers of my daily drive:
these sentinels stay their posts
suggesting: we know you,
we've seen you before.
It's been too long.

This way

Days 21-22

Photo taken on US-59, 11/18/11
Edited with Photogene2 and Phoster Applications

Is it Time?

Day 18

the difference

between

too early      &

too late

cuts a line

across a face,

cracks brains,

initiates regret:

a voice unheard

in the wilderness

begs for forgiveness

too early      or

too late

no one hears

out of time

the distance

between

too early     &

too late

is impossible

to predict

& too important

not to.

Illuminated

Day 17

Starting out into the cold:

wallet, keys, phone, moon,

who cares what becomes

of the soundless dark?

Something like holiness avoids:

hides behind a maple tree,

hugs the stubblefield,

hangs like dying moss:

        a falling leaf.

Landscape opens into noise:

birdsong, wind-play, leaves,

where all this light comes from,

no one is around to say.

Something like a prayer slips away:

a newly antlered deer deciding:

stay, go, stay, go, go, go

& then it’s lost somewhere:

   a hawk gone on the wing.

Somewhere a pond begins to ice:

the edges ripple less & less,

the heron stops visiting,

fattened cows are led away.

The sun, rising earlier & earlier

illuminates a landscape that grows:

farther & farther & farther,

everything in a new light,

everything in its right place:

everything is full of change.

Your Name Within Mine

Day 16

Walt Whitman, 1856 Manuscript, Leaf 9

    

           

  


   for L.D.C.P.

All through your tiniest year,

I hummed Rachmaninov,

Rice, Beatles, & Stones

dancing circles around tables

all hours of the night to calm

the baby nerves of your gentle soul.

I read you Whitman, or rather

I read Whitman while you slept

in my lap or nearby as everything is

in our small home.

The piece of paper I was earning

still sits in its oversized envelope

in the basement,

while my real work

of that incredible year,

a small green notebook

sewn with orange thread,

sits on your bedroom shelf

a year’s worth of poems,

your first birthday present,

waiting the long years to be read.

Now, you study letters,

sounds, & words.

You make pictures,

build up stories,

draw gorgeous lies,

& practice your blue-eyed smile.

We cherish your sensitive heart

& hope you privilege your infinite mind.

Today may be the reminder

of the six years of your being,

in which hundreds of poems

have been sketched, dreamt & breathed,

but it is your daily life that

is the best of them all:

the continuous reminder

that your birth was an answer

to all that we’d lost.

Whatever

November Poem a Day: Day 15

Every poem is a love poem for something.

Some state it explicitly, others hide

sentiment with complaint or affection

with metaphor, suggesting objectivity

but bleeding introspection.

Let me say this clearly:

 I make poems because something wells up.

Even when it’s out of anger

or resentment , or estrangement, or revenge,

the hard words still ache of some kind of love.

Danger

November Poem a Day: Day 14

Today's prompt is to write a deadly or dangerous poem. I've got nothing. Here's a photo instead.

Civil

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 13

Like rising too soon from needful sleep,
simple kindness isn't always effortless.

There is enough anger to turn a thousand turbines,
it flares & hisses, boils & seethes. I breathe. I count.

Kindness smiles, winks, & tells stories. It gives.
Resentment takes & take; anger grits its teeth.

Both kindness & its opposite are wild within us,
don't let them convince you otherwise.

Still, let us prize civility. May I not use kindness to cover
the lie nor mask the truth, but if it eases the day, let it.

Make no mistake, your coldheartedness may offend,
but I will choose a fool's benevolence.

Long live the sturdy oak; let the wild vine grow.
It may not be easy, but it beats being rotten within.

Excessive Humility, Excessive Pride

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 12

"What am I now that I was then?”             
 [Delmore Schwartz]

It is impossible to gather the wisdom of childhood.
It is supplanted by knowledge & worry & growth,
but the wonder in it is irreplaceable, inimitable,
& all we seek through the following years is its insight.

The traces remain & are visible in offspring’s offerings:

looks, cries, features, & fears trigger memories

the way wind shakes trees sending the leaves into

familiar scatterings to be made into piles for deliverance.

Listen, sons, hold on to it as long as you can,

fight the urge to grow up to the plans we’ll inevitably make,

learn how to laugh like you do now when the world suggests resignation,

hold on to the wonder in the tiniest things when everything urges bigger, biggest, best.

You are not only the future, of which I am proud,

You are the perfect now, the acme of potential that humbles me with every smile.

Ghazal in Wartime, 11/11/11

November Poem a Day 2011, Day 11

Two minutes is such a short amount of time
To last so long, to be filled with so much death.

By now we know, and needn't be told:
Nothing is really ever free, especially death.

On Veterans' Day in a time of war,
What can we say that doesn't silently scream: death?

Though the tap of the drums, changes source,
Is it any less daunting when it tattoos out d-e-a-t-h?

What was it the war poets said?
That honor is love or that there really is no death?

How lucky we are, William, to know about death,
To expect so much more & yet so much less out of life.

Merton

November Poem a Day 2011: Day 10

             Locked in that strength we stay and stay

                 and cannot go away

                For you have given us our liberty.

Father Thomas Merton, "Freedom as Experience"

You, too, believed it lucky to die, didn’t you?

Sure enough in your zen-like cell, the earth,

as secure in your shrinking as a barn on fire,

snug as a hairshirt on sackcloth Saturday,

believing in the liberty of dead man’s row,

the sleep of monks at the bridegroom’s call.

Tell me, Brother Thomas, did the city do what the farm could not?

Was it liberation or desperation,

please don’t simply call it vocation,

that drove you to order,

divinely happy in the presence of so much disaster?

So content with what others simply cannot.

When you attempted to illuminate words with fire,

(or was it shadow the light with bird & wind)

did you have us in mind or was it simply meditation

gone down the mercantile way?  In any case,

I found myself once as if in the flames & your little book

cooled the fire, the singe marks have since disappeared.

One last thought before going separate ways,

like the farmer & his luck, remembering to lose

is nearly always worth it for the empty gain:

Did what you gave up ever knock on the midnight door?

Come haunting the slightest sleep, a lovely woman’s face?

A lone lily too early for Easter, yet too late for the sweetest snow?

These questions are worse than empty prayers, aren’t they

Father Thomas? Or is that exactly what they are?

The knock-knocking on a vacant door, or worse,

a letter sent without the requisite wait, or worse than that,

without the familiarity of shared self-regret.

Forgive me, Father, it’s just that I’m not ready to give up yet.

Hide or Seek

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 9

There are so many ways of playing:

each of the last two mornings

a mystery bird of prey in enormous

grey pinions has appeared on the

northern side of US-59 at the westerly

bend five miles north of the Kaw & Lawrence.

Once on the wing lifting its flight-feathers

up into the shedding tree line & out of sight

before I had even begun counting.

This morning she perched upon a half cut

& nearly petrified cottonwood staring

into my driver’s side window as if I were

just what she had risked the sun up for.

Tomorrow I’ll be ready to find her.

I’ll offer no sporting call but pull my little

silver car over to the side of road & walk

the hundred yards to her spot & wait

for her to give herself away.

                                           Like tonight

as two little boys learned slowly that

patience & stillness leads to that line

between excitement & fright that proves

that being temporarily lost is worth the

anxiety if only for that instant of recognition,

the elation of locking eyes from across a room,
in hiding, under a blanket or table or bed.

You hide this time, I’ll count.  Ok, pal,

you be the owl this time.  

                                           1, 2, 3,…

I’ll see you in the morning, bird,

I’ve been practicing.

8 November 2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 8

It is not abnormal for snow to fall

at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday in early

November.  Though normally I

might miss it, being asleep or

in front of a glowing screen or

the crumpled pages of a book,

but tonight I walk across a

glinting street to a car covered

in a thin sheen of the softest dust,

the very icon of ephemera.

It is not exactly ironic that I

had been thinking hours earlier

that the heat that causes ice to 

melt a glass of middling scotch

actually dissipates as it does its job,

which is the same process  that causes

my beard, now covered with snow,

to gradually haul in the particles of

atmosphere deigning to light upon it.

As there is also nothing abnormal about death,

 persistence, or  the recapitulation of lost love 

we call believing in ghosts. It doesn't take much 

to inspire memory to create a vision. To see 

what was and isn't all at once, a rainbow, 

 a halo, or the snowy angel dancing in the 

star-like drift of flakes in headlight shine.

There is no paranormal, only perspective,

 faith, & the sleight of mind that fools

when need & imagination coincide 

with the atmospheric tricks of pressure change, 

cold front, & the tilting spin of mother Earth.

What Won't Wait?

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 7


Everything learns to wait:

The soil waits long weeks,

sometimes months even in

this capricious climate for

the salubrious soak & then

there is the waiting for the

torrent to stop stealing the

once bone dry soil now aslide.

We can plan for or against it,

but eventually the drought

must come & eventually

it must end. What is between

is what every animal knows:

who learns to wait learns

the secret of patience,

of fortitude, of survival.

I wonder about the family of

raccoons that lives near us,

perhaps some spend this rainy

Fall evening under our back stoop,

the little ones have grown now

I’m sure, perhaps moved out

& on their own, waiting for

late Winter to allow them

their first chance at making new.

Tonight, whatever solitary hole

each hides in must feel  miles

away from home as the soil

soaks up every ounce of cold,

 cold rain covering the known,

familiar scent of rubbage,

& recommending something

as awkward as night-sleep.

Even the three year old boy

who wrestles every second

out of life stumbles eventually

to bed, eyes wide open if only

for a last few minutes before

sleep finally overwhelms his

tired body, well-used, bruised,

in dire need of  slumber. It must

be the quiet racket of rain against

the windows, the slow beat upon

the roof & the hum of a distant

television that does the trick,

ends the wait & draws his great

big blue eyes finally to close.

Hugo, Roethke, & Wright

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 6


"Hardly a ghost left to talk with." Richard Hugo
 "What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" Theodore Roethke
 "I have wasted my life." James Wright

The silence is impossible,
always a rush of noise:
a train, leaf-rustle, thump
of heart, or house whisper.
Nothing stops the procession:
so much memory to alleviate
some choose liquid, pen, or pills.


Then there is the giving in:
dancing with the heavy bear,
is it time or is it spirit?
What was it the Greek said
about the river, always?
Never doubt the soaring chicken-
hawk nor the blessed ground.


For me its pictures, a line of
tinted bottles, foreground,
a haze that might be ghost-
flesh dancing just behind.
What is the strange reflection
in the glass? It could not be me,
not without a hand to chin, a tug.


Is it a waste to lay the day,
to look, to wake, to see?
Isn't it madness to doubt
your own devastation, all
the while courting the edge?
What the blood begs is not
silence, is it? Merely fluctuation.


When the three drunk ghosts visit,
never together, they speak, each
in a lonely room. One of cancer
stealing the cells, seven at a time.
Another swears sobriety: I'm dancing.
I've been dancing all this time.
The last one just sings: Kapowsin,


Kapowsin, sunfish, perch, & trout.
They are nothing if not gentlemen
ready for one last night at the fights
that will never come. Of course,
ghosts don't really wear flesh,
nor scuttle their way into pictures,
& best: they have no need of shaking hands.

Don't Fix It

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 5

The ocean is the waves,
No matter which direction.
So I'll leave gravity to that.

The moon is the shine,
Even on its dark side.
So I'll leave time & season to that.

The wind is what moves,
& the sounds they make.
So I'll leave storm to that.

Nothing was broken today,
There is nothing a poem can fix.
I'll leave tomorrow for that.

Maple on Fire

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 4

"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Dylan Thomas, "The Force that though the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

Each year, when the maples catch fire,
I am tempted to stop the car & spend
the day staring, warming my eyes,
gathering the strength to survive
another November's lapse & loss.
There is a subtle rise in the blood,
a tiny blush, a push to slow down,
to crave rest & to look for what's
not all lost: an old charm still hiding,
a souvenir of youth that first came alive
one Autumn watching a maple catch fire.

Sort of Like New

"Twins" 11/3/2011

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 3 

Holocene: adjective, Geology: of, relating to, or denoting the present epoch

The Holocene epoch has lasted from about 10,000 years ago to the present day. It covers the period since the ice retreated after the last glaciation and is sometimes regarded as just another interglacial period.

[from the late 19th century: coined in French from HOLO 'whole' + kainos 'new']

Oxford Dictionaries Online

Sometimes old is sort of like new:
hand me down boots,  LPs,
unscratched, the humming sound
of an old song almost forgotten,
a new song conjuring a time
when every one was older
than you & everything full
of the gravity of discovery.

Then there are books whose pages
untouched in years are still crisp,
corners unbent, spine strong.
then something slides into view:
a handwritten note, or the stub
of a plane ticket, the feather of a bird
long done soaring, whatever it is
it has nested there waiting to be found:
beyond old or new.

Finally there are the trees, often ignored,
occasionally climbed, more often cursed
for the clean-up, & each winter iced,
a clue that we are merely between ice-ages,
like the sign on our road that reminds us
that these hills were once & will be glaciers.

I've never been one to get hung up on age:
old was often new to me & as I've aged
it's mattered less & less. Watching small
turn large, praying daily for health, happiness,
& growth, knowing that day stacks on to day,
that winter follows fall, and spring never comes
too soon.

What is time to a tree, to a wall of ice cutting
through a valley or charting a river's course?
What is time to me? What am I to a child
who is everything to me?






[Note: I wrote the poem while listening to the Bon Iver  album Bon Iver. I did not watch the video until afterwards. A very serendipitous find.]

Getting it Right

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 2

The saddest are those not right in their lives

who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self –
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

William Stafford, “The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune” (1977)

I couldn’t have written this last night,
not that what I learned today makes the difference,
it’s just that timing is always a part of getting it right.

This morning there was nothing wrong with waking,

even the clouds covering familiar friends did not detract

from the lucky feeling of being awake as the west was breaking.

On the side of the road, a small fox crouched under harsh headlight,

though moving too fast I swear I could see his dark eyes dilating,

when he decided running wasn’t worth the risk, I knew what I would write it.

It’s not that everything was right today, or any day,

but nothing overwhelmed the sense that the direction was clear:

sometimes wisdom is staying quiet, sometimes it’s having something to say.

St. Charles, The Machinist

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 1: I am attempting the November poem-a-day challenge again this year. 
Please feel free to comment or ignore. These will not be great poems.


All Saints' Day, 2011

“Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.” (William Carlos Williams Introduction to The Wedge, 1944)

tool and die maker, 

writer of tolerances,
martyr of a silent cause,
surrounded by endless noise,
saint in side-shields & glasses,
sideburns of shifting lengths,
shirtsleeves, buttonhole stretch.

our patron in polyester, leather,
plastic, steel, zinc, chromium,
aluminum, thyroid, tumor, trachea,
larynx, cartilage, tissue & blood.

what shall we do with the icons:
slide rule, tape measure, earplugs,
pocketprotector, pocketknife, caliper,
micrometer, lathe, mill, collet & drill?

******

I remember walking in the building,
the hum of hard work,
men in plastic hats, work gloves, tools
names on doors,
names on shirts,
names of men,
names of ghosts.

Machine sounds from below
grinding, spinning, ripping,
the pounding of metal on metal,
the thin reverb of clinking sheets,
the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid & sweat,
a coppery film on the tongue,
& the smile of a job well done.

It’s easy to see this as a type of prayer:
the precision of measurement,
hallowed be thy name
the dynamics of cast, form & mold,
thy will be done
the purity of pattern, blueprint & ASME code
on Earth as it is…

*****

Let the tabled figures stand in place of miracle,
the assembled goods, long forgotten, demand canonization.

May the patron of makers, of machinists, of poets,
pray for us, our products, & our words.