Monthly Archives: December 2015

Last Night of the Year, 955 Years After Mei Yao-ch’en’s Death

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Last Night of the Year, 955 Years After Mei Yao-ch’en’s Death

 

I tie my hiking boots tight before I step outside to watch the year fall.
I am not afraid I will float away on Star River; my heart is 400 miles

upstream already. My family scattered. Just the cats and dogs here
to nibble water crackers with. Any year’s last hours are crumbs on a plate,

forgotten on the kitchen counter. For once I wish to be in a crowd
in a loud living room, my heartbeat adding to the temporary chatter.

Walk out with me, old friend. There will be snow in the year’s first hour
at the head of the trail, and I cannot finish this wine alone.

Solstice

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Solstice

Unseen rain four hours away on the black horizon.
While you focus on the empty branches above your head

the stars blur into overcast, a milky blue apology
the child within me will not accept.

The Cape Cod inlets flow through him
like the roots of these trees thread mountains.

He is a trick of the light, of beach grass and sand.
And now the days are too short, he will never get home.

Almost midnight, mild mid-December

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Almost midnight, mild mid-December

Tell the day to let go of the lake.
It is deeper than even the night

and its stars are alive.
Down here in the heart nothing

is burning, even tragedy houses
the vulnerable gestures of life.

Come dawn the night and the day will
once again renew their tepid rivalry.

Miles away the mountain awakes
and realizes he is a lake, too.

South and North (3)

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In August the dogs dodge the fall
of black walnuts in the back yard,

the baseball-heavy pods landing
even at night like the home team rallying.

*

The three inch palmetto bug cockroach
drops from the hairy stalks of palmetto

trees on the heads of couples leaving the bar.
Light like a lawsuit under an unironed linen shirt.

South and North (2)

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In the still summer swamp a cypress knee’s
a mountain. Behind the patient transparent lid

of danger there is not a single smooth straight
line on two hundred million years of hide.

*

On the hill I dump more March snow
behind my truck into a pile impenetrable as Everest

without a Sherpa. The uneven humps
of buried cars stretch ahead: back of a giant alligator,

danger lies silent on the surface of the road.

Difference Engine

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Difference Engine

The creek was buried forty years ago.
It runs unseen beneath the motel parking lot.

Here I am taking off my clothes
before I write this next couplet.

I don’t want what the day wore
to come between us. Like all

those tourists, who came to see
the thing that was moved

so they had a place to park
and undress, and sleep

without seeing a thing.

From the Mist

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From the Mist

The mist is the earth weeping for transparency.
You were there when the world was softened,

when a thought of condensed desire slurred you,
made slow motion replays of us all,

like a snowfall changing its mind or a road sign
rendering movement of all kinds but time travel impossible.

The empty sky can be conquered with a feeling
shaped like a color so simple it absorbs

nothing, How transparent is this tear?
It is the glistening sky praying to be earthbound,

to land on an unshod foot moments before
it is obscured by a step towards the wish.

The sky will have its wish and the earth will
have its wish and like the shape

of a new letter from a familiar alphabet
your body will walk my words in the mist.